This unit was purchased in 2000, but only used two seasons.ĬompuTrainer is best in its class by a wide margin.
Whatever your starting point, you can improve significantly. It can increase your cycling power by 20 to 30% and your speed by 2 to 4 MPH. CompuTrainer provides the most interesting indoor bike experience yet created. I'll miss Chuck Wurster.It's time to train for Spring races and triathlons. I'm well acquainted with my own strident behaviors and moods and, for men like these, it's not that they've overcome these dark bedevilments they just don't have a word for them. We read about societies that have no word for an idea common to us (goodbye, please, worry, time). He, along with Steve Hed, pulled me toward grace and away from incivility and disquietude. He was, very simply, the most gracious human I've met in the bike business. I don't think he cared that much, except for the effect on his longtime employees.Ĭhuck was a nicer man than I am. I could tell in his voice that he'd been waning over the past year I don't know why but I suspect it was because the smart trainer world had finally caught up to him. His passion, eagerness, and energy suggested a decade younger. When I read of Chuck's passing I was surprised, because I had no idea he was 86. Not necessary I told him, but he insisted. The last time I remember speaking to him was his call, perhaps in April or May, offering me my choice or a Velotron or Computrainer in exchange for helping him broker the passage of Velotron, his company's last brand, to its new owner. But when Chuck was on the other end, that was different. I don't much like the telephone and I think I make a face whenever it rings.
As in, why are you here? What do you need? What can I do? But it was always just to say hi to him, because he was just such a dear man. I got the sense that he wondered why I always bypassed others to see him. Whether trade or consumer, Interbike or the Chicago Triathlon, I had a booth and Chuck did too. Chuck and I were sympatico in our preference for meeting you all at the events you patronized. Virtually all of today's modern fit bikes used Computrainers as their resistance units (and the fit bike industry still hasn't found a worthy replacement).Ĭhuck Wurster’s passing is more than just an industry loss to me. When I polled in 2013 a Computrainer studio was among the most requested features they'd like to see in their local bike shops.
In 2010 I asked Slowtwitchers what they'd buy for indoor training, cost no object, and over half said Computrainer. In 2007, about 1 in 5 Slowtwitchers used Computrainer for their indoor training, and the rest used dumb trainers because that was the only alternative. Although those riders were, in the beginning, not representations of real riders, there was a drafting effect, just as with Zwift. Those who find Zwift compelling today are motivated by the sort of interactivity Computrainer introduced almost 30 years ago, with rider avatars on a game-inspired course populated by other avatars. Chuck Wurster's Computrainer was a year-round training weapon. By the early '90s we realized that the smart trainer was the place for the high-intensity work, and seasonality was not an issue. Top athletes back then had key workouts to perform leading up to an Ironman, some outdoor-the 6- and 7-hour rides-and then there were the vital, irreplaceable Computrainer workouts. Some of us were quick to understand the value. A year before I debuted the wetsuit that transformed that category into something triathletes wanted Chuck debuted, in 1986, the first-or at least the first meaningful-smart trainer for cyclists. He was 86 years old.Ĭhuck had been the face of Computrainer since I first met him, in the late 1980s.