Tacx Fortius Trainer Owners

[masking_agent]

Hi All,

I'm seriously thinking of switching over from my Kurt Kinetic to a Tacx Virtual Reality System in months to come. I personally think I will use this quite heavily throughout the year, and not only in the off season, as I'm a time crunched cyclist , and have been using my KK quite often due to weather and schedule. I have a few questions for you owners.

How does it adjust tension for going up a steep mountain pass ?

How does braking work going down a steep mountain pass ?

Stability wise ? Are you able to get out of the saddle comfortably without the feeling of tipping over ?

How long are the mountain stages ? Lets say I only have 1 hour including a work out, would I be able to ride up part of a course, then re-start
at the same place the next day ?

Is there any way to fine tune specific interval work outs ?

Can you use the Fortius Trainer as a stand alone ? I want to use the trainer similar to my KK, and do other Cycling training dvd's ? (cts, spinervals etc. )

Thanks to all..

 

[elapid]

Hi All,

I'm seriously thinking of switching over from my Kurt Kinetic to a Tacx Virtual Reality System in months to come. I personally think I will use this quite heavily throughout the year, and not only in the off season, as I'm a time crunched cyclist , and have been using my KK quite often due to weather and schedule. I have a few questions for you owners.

How does it adjust tension for going up a steep mountain pass ?

How does braking work going down a steep mountain pass ?

Stability wise ? Are you able to get out of the saddle comfortably without the feeling of tipping over ?

How long are the mountain stages ? Lets say I only have 1 hour including a work out, would I be able to ride up part of a course, then re-start
at the same place the next day ?

Is there any way to fine tune specific interval work outs ?

Can you use the Fortius Trainer as a stand alone ? I want to use the trainer similar to my KK, and do other Cycling training dvd's ? (cts, spinervals etc. )

Thanks to all..

Cannot help you with the Tacx Fortius, but I recently purchased the Elite Real Axiom. The Elite Real Axiom shares many similarities with the Tacx. I cannot answer your first two questions. With the Elite Real Axiom, the stability is not an issue and the trainer also has these nifty feet which allows you to rock from side to side as though you are climbing. The mountain stages are as long as you want them to be because the scenery moves at your pace. It also obviously depends on the length of the stage because some are short whereas others are longer. However, you can stop and continue from the point you stopped at a later time. You can fine tune workouts and you can use the trainer as a stand alone trainer while watching other DVDs. I am pretty sure that the Tacx will be quite similar to the Elite. You can also try the Tacx forum.

 

[Bala Verde]

I have a tacx satori, just a basic trainer. Stability has not been an issue, never felt it would tip over when getting out of the saddle and standing for periods of time. I looked at the VR trainer, and their bases look even sturdier. The satori, and it's not a VR system, came with a dvd of AGR, which might be illustrative of what it offers. The video followed the roads of the race, and from a menu you could select several 'chapters'. These chapters are divided by work out time, so you can run the course ~30m from the end, or ~45m or ~60m etc. During the video, it will show a symbol so you can manually "shift" and increase/decrease resistance, based on the route. I guess the VR system will do that automatically for you.

 

[Martin318is]

okay - so it looks like I get the short straw as the first actual Fortius owner to answer the question...

So...
There are 3 main ways that you can use the Fortius: Virtual Environment, Real Video, and Catalyst.

Virtual Environments:
Think of this as a giant map with roads all over the place. (May be easiest to think of it as riding on an island) There are flat sections, hills, and intersections etc. You can use the software to design any combination of roads that you want and then ride it - or you can use the steerer to allow you to ride 'free-roaming' and just turn up and down whatever roads you like. You can programme it to include robot riders which may or may not be past versions of yourself on the same circuit. You can also use this to copy in other people's rides and race against them and more recently, you can also go full multiplayer and race anyone in the world at any time - live. There is also a virtual environment that is set on a velodrome.


Real Video:
This is the cool feature as far as I am concerned. They have produced a large number (and climbing) of videos of major races and climbs etc. You can elect to do the entire video start to finish, run one of their pre-set segments, or even cooler, build your own video from the main video by splicing together segments. (Just think, you could do Alpe d'huez and then when you get to the top, just go straight into another one and another one....). If you don't want to sit on the bike rolling down into a valley you can just chop the valley out of the video and go from climb to flat to climb, for instance.

I have in my collection: Milan San Remo, Majorca, Alpe d'huez, Galibier, Ventoux, Flanders, and several others that I cant think of right now.

Catalyst:
Think of catalyst as being like a traditional ergo training environment. You can set up a view with live data on screen showing all parameters such as HR, power, Cadence, Gradient, etc. You can use this for interval training, etc in pretty much any way that you want to.

How it works:
For Virtual riding and Real videos, the motor brake works based upon the course you are on. The device knows your weight inc bike (because you have told it) and the brake adjusts resistance based upon the gradient you are on. This works very well up to gradients of 15% plus. When the gradient is negative, the brake back right off and when you are really flat out descending, the brake actually pushes the wheel. I find the resistance from the unit very smoothe and progressive. The unit is quite quiet for what it does, too.


To answer some of the questions directly:
The device is very stable and you can sprint on it.
You can make your real life video based sessions run for several hours if you want (or 15mins)
It can do any interval workout you want (you dont programme it for that, it just reports what you are doing)
Standalone mode is a bit sucky. It can work but I wouldnt really recommend it unless you are truly desperate.

The negatives: Its a complicated device with a number of cables running between the bike, it and the PC. This means it is best if it is permanently set up somewhere. For me the biggest negative though is that in an attempt to create a safety device, Tacx have set it so that cadence must be above zero in any 5 second period. This means you cannot do an effort and pause pedalling to towel off etc. If you do that, the brake suddenly fully engages to stop the wheel. The idea was an okay one, they were thinking you may have passed out or left it unattended (which would be very dangerous with kids in the house for instance) but the implementation sucks. For starters, they use a WIRED candence sensor. So even if you have the best and quickest set up method, you still need to faff around setting up the cadence monitor every time you put your bike on the unit.

However: I have created a workaround that fixes this. I will not publish it online though so if you really want to know what it is, PM me.

Overall, I would happily recommend the device. When I lived in London, this thing was the only riding I did for a full year. Even after that long on it, I still enjoy doing sessions on it sometimes when the weather sucks.

 

[masking_agent]

martin318 - thanks so much for your post. It really explains a lot. My biggest issue now I guess will be the footprint of it. I currently enjoy the ease of my Kinetic with no wires. Its a big investment but I think worth it, as I find myself spending more time riding indoors than outside even in the warmer months, because the weather sux.

 

[Martin318is]

some things I forgot to say:

The structure of the actual trainer is very strong and rigid and takes up less space than a kinetic.

One of the COOLEST things about the whole trainer is the opportunity to CHEAT!

You can set a ratio for the gradients of any climbs/descents in a video. What does that mean? Well, wouldn't you love to be able to ride all the way up the Ventoux and see the scenery etc while doing say half the gradient? You can set it to anything from 50% as steep to over 100% (yes you can make climbs worse than they actually are too).

All this means that you can also lie about your weight and set yourself up as say Pantani's size on half the gradient of Alpe d'Huez - and see what time you can put out.