Alette: ‘TrueBike is a wonderful way to get trough the winter’
“I could now clearly see that my left leg transfers a little more power than my right.”
The 53-year-old Alette from Haarlem was the most experienced of the three Wielerflits reviewers. In her spare time and during vacations she often goes touring and a few years ago she hopped on a racing bike for the first time. Since then, she has been a Zwift user on her Tacx in the winter. She chose to put the TrueBike in the same spot in her room, so she could best compare the bike trainer to her normal set-up. She took her opportunity to train with the TrueBike seriously, as she wrote down her findings in a special booklet. During the interview, she reaches back to it a few times to share.
Her cycling goal for this winter was to get better at climbing so that she could keep up with her group of friends longer on the climbs in the Ardennes over Easter weekend. In total, Alette tested the TrueBike six times. “Because of the screen in front of the TrueBike, it is slightly bigger than my normal set-up. Other than that, it fits seamlessly in the same place in our house,” says the Haarlem native. “What I like best about the TrueBike is that you immediately have all the data at your disposal. Normally you only get that data afterwards. Now you could adjust your training in real-time, without having to conclude afterwards that things should be different.”
She cites a concrete example of this. “I could now clearly see that my left leg transfers a little more power than my right. You can balance that much more via the TrueBike. You can also adjust it completely to your outdoor bike, which means you can imitate a real feeling that you have while climbing on your own bike. I really liked that too,” she indicates.
The noise the TrueBike makes while cycling created a small practical problem. “There is always a laptop with a big screen in front of my setup. I play music on that,” she explains. “That can be done in all kinds of other ways, I know. But I had to turn the sound up, relative to my own setup.”
Alette made the most of her time, to make a good value judgement. “Everything I normally do on my own setup, I did now. A normal ride, a group ride, a training session and a race. That way I could compare it properly. My conclusion is that the TrueBike is a great way for recreational riders like me to get through the winter. I find it a real added value, so you don’t have to catch up in the spring. The many options in terms of gears were also really perfect. Of course, you have to get used to your own gear system in the beginning, but soon it works great.”
What Alette did miss on the cockpit was a holder for her phone, which she uses a lot while Zwifting. It is precisely the interactive aspect that she likes, which means that she is often chatting on the road or using her phone to choose a different turn.