Does anyone use TrainerRoad.com? Thoughts?

I'm not able to afford a real life coach and came across this the other day.
I have an ANT+ Stick on the way so I can try it out. Even if I don't use it I have other ideas for the ANT+ Stick.

I use it. It used to be free but they just went out of beta so it's no longer free. It's really well made and it make indoor rides a lot less boring. They just integrated sufferfest videos in the workouts, I will try that tonight for the first time.

It's free until Saturday. Beta users (people who sign up before Saturday can get locked in at a $7/mo price instead of the regular $10/mo).
My ANT+ Stick is waiting for me at home. Can't wait to try it out.

Last time I looked at it (early early beta), you couldn't create your own workouts. Is that still the case?

Looks cool but not being able export the data is a show stopper. Once they can save data that's accurate enough for export it might be worth $10 a month in the winter.

thanks!

I'm not worried about exporting data. I use garmin connect and put data in DailyMile for all of my rides. One of the things I like about TrainerRoad is that I don't have to do anything. It runs, collects data, and ends all on its own. I've used it twice and haven't had any issues. The software seems pretty solid at this point.

I'm really interested in the ability to have a visual display of my stats on a screen as well as a representation of how far I am from my target heart rates for a given workout. I'm not seeing this as a replacement for GC or any other ride/mileage tracking tool.

Really wish there was a 'winter subscription' option since I don't think I'll use it much once I can get outside again.

You can cancel your membership anytime. It's a month to month thing.

I understand that. But I'm assuming I'd lose all of my data/settings if I cancel in March and sign back up in November.

If you suspend your account, we'll keep your account data. When you resume, you'd just start up a new subscription at the current rate and new rides and data will be added to your existing career.
Nate and I co-founded TrainerRoad.com to be a simple, straightforward way to train on a bike so I'm glad to hear it is working that way for you.
We don't support adding your own workouts yet. You can suggest workouts here, though, until we add that. Lots of people use the free rides or just have their coach pick from one of the 130+ workouts to do right now.
For the time being we recommend recording on a separate device like a Garmin if you want to upload it to other sites or services but we plan to have a way to get ride data out of TrainerRoad soon. It will probably be in .tcx format first.
I'll be happy to answer any other questions.
Reid

Is it useful if you don't use ANT + devices? I use a Cateye wireless cadence and speed. No Garmin on me.

Your speed and cadence won't be detected with a non-ANT speed and cadence sensor. You could still use it for heart rate based workouts, assuming you have an ANT heart rate strap.
Check out our VirtualPower page, though. It's the reason you might consider dropping $40 on an ANT+ sensor like the Wahoo Speed/Cadence sensor. If you have a trainer we support TrainerRoad converts speed to power in real time allowing you to do power based workouts indoors. A head unit like the Garmin Edge isn't required since the TrainerRoad app displays your data while your riding and saves it in the cloud when you are done.

I use really old rollers - Mclain. They're like - 30 years old. I just put a headwind fan on them.
I saw the Wahoo unit and ANT+ stick at Amazon from the links on yoru site. Not sure I need to drop the coin on more hardware at this point.

I have been using it and think it is great. I'm surprised it took this long for a thread to be created about it.

If your trainer isn't on their list and you can get a hold of a PowerTap for a while they can calculate its power curve for you and add it to the list of supported trainers. I borrowed a friend's PowerTap and sent Nate and Reid the data for my trainer and rollers to add the Virtual Power formulas which they added pretty quickly. I also ran a few tests while I still had the PowerTap and compared it to the Virtual Power and it was within a couple of watts of the PowerTap data. Even if it wasn't "accurate" it would still be consistent to show improvement from session to session which is the real purpose. If you want to do comparisons all the rides on the website can be viewed and you can see how much other people are riding, what their power outputs were, and can even see all the rides done for a particular workout.

They have a ton of workouts to choose from and the Sufferfest video integration is very smooth (although Local Hero won't work for some reason and they haven't added all the other ones yet). If you stop pedaling the video stops - start pedaling and it starts - so the video is always in sync with the workout.

If you aren't using Sufferfest videos there is a horizontal mode that is "always on top" so you can watch Netflix, Hulu, or any video you have on your computer and still easily see your data. I use my laptop with an HDMI out to my "big" TV which works great.

They seem to be working pretty hard at adding features and talking about some interesting ideas like having multiple users on the same screen either locally or through the internet. They are also pretty responsive to questions and comments even though this is a nights and weekends project.

I have never had it freeze during a workout and as long as my Garmin stick isn't too far away from me I don't have any dropped signals. Since everything is recorded on my Garmin anyway the lack of export isn't a problem for me and the Garmin provides a backup if anything ever did go wrong with the program.

$10.00 a month for what you get is an extraordinary deal in my mind compared to any other option out there. They will need to keep adding features to stay competative considering the progress GoldenCheetah is making on their realtime function and even Sporttracks now has a "Live" view and recording plugin.

Hi, Nate from TrainerRoad.com here.

We have a couple options for custom workouts.
1) We call them free rides, it's just a blank canvas without power targets for you to do what ever you want. It's not as cool as having a structured workout but if you're a VirtualPower user you might find some benifit.

2) You can suggest a workout in our suggestion forum. https://support.trainerroad.com/forum...gest-a-workout

3) You or your coach can contact us and we'll show you the format. It's a modified ERG format and it's not for the faint of heart. That's one of the reasons why we haven't released it yet.

I'm working on a .tcx export from the website this weekend! We're just a two man crew (you have our entire company in this thread now) with full time jobs, wives and babies so we do everything as fast as we can.

We also want to do auto-publish to TrainingPeaks and Garmin (if we can figure out the API) along with a few others. This weekend though I hope to get the .tcx export done.

-Nate

hey Nate,
Thanks to you and Reid both for jumping in this thread.

I'm a programmer myself - I would love to get the details on your file format, to plug in my own workouts. Now that I think back on it, when I was first looking at TrainerRoad back in July I tried adding a new workout based on an existing one, but I hit an issue with updating the internal DB to recognize the added workout. That's pretty vague, I know, and unfortunately I never followed up on that.

Anyway, I'll give it a shot again right now and report back.

Thanks for the reply! I definitely like the idea of being able to track intervals and since I am usually staring at the computer in the winter this would be perfect. Like most folks I have a Garmin 500 I get my data from but getting a USB -> Ant+ key doesn't seem to expensive. If you could create a TrainingPeaks interface, bonus! But since I have to manually upload my Garmin data anyway I am used to shuffling tcx files around.

I'd say stay focused on creating custom interval sessions, with the ability to play my music and export to TrainingPeaks. WINNING!

Alright, I was easily able to add a new workout to the db by just duplicating an existing one (I wonder what I did wrong last time...maybe there used to be some counter, outside of just tblworkoutfile?). I didn't try to customize the actual contents yet, so I'd still appreciate any pointers on that.

Given this flexibility, I'm almost definitely going to subscribe...THANK YOU

Sweet! Here's a link to kingsberry:https://www.trainerroad.com/media/24053/kingsbury.txt

Under course data you only need the first two columns (minutes and percent FTP). We changed the format a little bit.

For text you only need the first two columns too. The other columns are for color, fontsize, and horizontal/vertical position.

For the intervals the first one needs to be the entire workout.

At a minimum you only need the course data and the one "workout" interval.

For anyone who finds this I don't recommend anyone to try it, but if you want to create some workouts that would be cool!

One more thing to note. One reason why we've been holding off on this is we don't want to clutter our main ride feed witih "bad" workouts, not saying you would make one. But a lot of people make workouts too easy or impossible. We're going to do a "user" ride feed and allow voting, but that's still a ways away. So even if you make a workout we may not post it. Just a fair warning.

Since it's just a computer you can play your music or watch a movie while you ride. Trainingpeaks will not be too hard. Garmin connect doesn't have an API, but some people have reversed engineered it so we're going to give that a try too.

Awesome!

Hopefully we come up with a better solution so people don't have to manually edit their DB .

I mean, we will! It's just a matter of time. It's hard with a full time day job. But if we get enough sign ups, we'll be able to do this full time and really start cranking out the features.

i threw in for my subscription earlier today. keep up the good work!

looks great to me...i've got my ant stick and cadence sensor on the way and will sign up when they get here. Kodus to the developers for putting something together that is exactly what i have been wanting (without ponying up the $1500 for a computrainer). now i just have to save up for a set of e-motion rollers and my winter cave will be perfect!

I'm in if I can export/upload to Trainingpeaks?

Is that feature available yet?

Yes! You can download any workout as a .tcx file and upload it to TrainingPeaks, Garmin, Strava, ect.

We don't have auto-publish yet, but this works really well right now.

Here's a workout someone just did. The download button is in the upper right corner.
https://www.trainerroad.com/cycling/rides/15143