Indoor Race

Well last night I had 1 hr to do on the ole Fortius. I opted to go for the iMagic VR racing instead of the Real Life Video because I just wanted to try it out. I had only done a few breif races on it, and they weren't against anybody. So, I did some research as to how to find opponents and found out there is like this whole parallel universe of European Tacx owners that have a virtual cycling league. Here, you can download actual race courses and "run files" (files of an individual's race), import them into Tacx, and voilla, you have opponents, and, some potential new courses.

Regardless, I raced the Atlantis course which is about 15 miles of rolling hills and countryside. ABout 75% of it is in the forest on Roubaix-like cobbles, and the rest is in this funny downtown virtual city by the seaside. It's very realistic in its graphics, and I have to say, pretty nifty. If you accelerate your cadence, the guy on the screen gets out of the saddle and hauls it. If you hit a big hill, he puts his hands on the top of the handlebars and crouches low to climb. He takes drinks, crashes, shakes his head when things get tough, and even when he crosses the finish line as if to say "Crap, I finished in 3rd place...that was friggin hard". It really passes the time. The ONLY thing is that people will totally fudge their ride stats, and coupled with the fact that the Tacx "Powermeter" is not very accurate, no matter how hard you ride, you will most likely get dropped. For example, last night I rode with an avg of 219, NP of 231W, but the Tacx meter only said my avg was 123W. Also, this guy I raced against "supposedly" did this course in 31minutes. After all the math is done, that would have to be an average power of around 280W!! I did a google search on this guys name, and he's some 50+ rec rider in Hamburg or some German place like that. Silly Germans!

Anyway, it's Valentine's Day today! We're going to do our damndest to get out and get into a shmancy resteraunt. Maybe Potager, maybe Sushi Den...who knows...but...love conquers all, including long lines at resteraunts on V-Day. Hooray!!!!