VR trainers are available but they haven’t become mainstream yet and are not cheap. This extract from a book shows a DIY system using a bike, a set of rollers, a fan and a cinematograph so ‘the pleasures of a tour can be had in a hall bedroom’.
Below is some of the text from the book – The Wheel and cycling trade review released in 1888
“I say, Mr. Medders, the advent of the bicycle and the consequent decline of the horse must have hurt you farmers consider-ably by cutting off the demand for one of your chief products. What product is that? Why, it must be of little use to raise oats now! Yes; thats so! The bicycle has done us on that; but when one door shuts another always opens. We raise the arnica plant now. IN THE BEGINNING. What a terrible instrument of torture those nine-inch brake-levers on the old ordinaries must have been. If you ever undertook coasting with one you would think they were a torture. What a relief it must have been to the old-timer when he reached the bottom of a hill and could let go his brake. Well, I should say it was; but what of it? Oh, nothing; I was just thinking that maybe that was the origin of the expression,the glad hand, thats all. IMPROVED INDOOR CYCLING.”
“With a home trainer, electric fan and cinematograph all the pleasures of a tour can be had in a hall bedroom.”
“COLD AS A SPEED-KILLER. Every winter-riding wheelman notices that no matter how good the roads may be, or however fit for the work he himself is, he cannot ride anything like the same distance he covered with ease during the summer.The cold air uses up so much of his vitality that he has not the strength to ride as far as in the summer with its warmth. In Dixons interesting book, The Migration of Birds, it is noted that nothing so interferes with the flights of birds of passage,or causes them so frequently to seek rest, asa strong cold wind behind them. That a favoring wind, even though it be a cold one,should prove exhausting sounds rather extraordinary, but the reason is plain. The wind blows up their feathers and so chills the flesh that the bird is forced to descend and recoup. Cycling has often been compared to flying,so the foregoing regarding the effects of cold upon real flyers”
You can read the entire book here
