Originally Posted by
agarose2000
I got a set of rollers about 6 weeks ago, and have been using them on and off. I also use a CycleOps Fluid2 trainer, but live in Socal so riding outdoors is the norm unless it's dark out. Haven't had any problems with the rollers - can get a good sweat on them, and rarely fell over, even on my first time on them. Have gone up to 90 mins on them.
I'm not sold on them. They're not bad, but I far prefer my trainer. I can go much, much harder and focus on power, which seems to be the most critical thing for riding/racing.
I heard a ton about the "technique" benefits from the rollers, and I'll agree that you need a lot more technique to hold a line on the rollers compared to road. But, it's not THAT hard, and as well, I seriously question if it's that important to have a roller-riding degree of balance anyway. To me, the degree of line-holding is irrelevant to real-world riding. Far more important in fast pacelines are fast reaction times and experience. The rapid swerves you need to pull out when someone in front of you goes down (has happened to me) have nothing to do with roller skills. I feel a bit like roller skills are like knowing to do wheelies - more difficult to real world riding, but largely irrelevant in terms of actual racing and road performance.
Someone convince me to keep riding these things.
First off, my perspective: I use my rollers during the winter to log base miles. This year I was doing 2 hour sessions at high zone two, two or three days a week between November through January. This helped my form a huge amount. I lost about 10 pounds of off-season weight and my endurance has been hugely raised while keeping my threshold power from decaying. By this time of the year, since mid-February and the start of racing, I've transitioned away from endurance rides on the rollers to doing threshold work on the trainer.
Now, about rollers in general. Paceline riding has very little to do (you hope) with reaction time, and very much to do with control. Rollers teach you how to control your bike. That way, when some little snot of a kid (sorry Hammer dude if you are reading, just using you as an example, no bad blood
) comes up under your elbow in the last 2km before the sprint and hooks your arm going past, you stay balanced and don't overreact. It enables you to confidently handle your bike within inches of others without relying on your reaction time. While it won't help you with the emergency swerve per se, it might help you ride a skinny line past a crash without causing one of your own.
Ultimately it's up to your preference. Anything that's hard to do (like generating power while keeping balanced on a line) is going to teach your body and refine your fine motor control better than doing the easy thing where you can squeeze your eyes shut and not worry about what your wheels are doing. But that said, I don't use the rollers for threshold work, though I know riders who are better than me that do.