Eurobike’s full of exciting and expensive things. One such thing was the Tacx Magnum, which at the salty price of £7,000 is surely the world’s most expensive indoor trainer. You could buy a car, etc and so on.

Anyway, we got Hilko Schravenhoff from Tacx to start us off on the Magnum. If you’ve ever been on rollers, it’s a bit like that. If you’ve ever been on rollers in jeans and crocs, riding a bike that’s two sizes too small, you’ll probably know exactly how we felt. Anyway, it’s a very clever system, and any worries you might have that it’s going to spit you off the end like so many treadmill fail videos are quickly allayed. If you go too far backwards, you just stop. The Magnum has a startup process whereby you roll forwards and backwards so the sensors can pickup your wheel, and then you just ride. If you go towards the front you speed up, and if you hang back you slow down. It’s all quite intuitive. You can even do it no-handed. Well, Hilko can. I can’t.

Because it’s a treadmill you can go running on it too, and as such it’s probably on the Christmas list of plenty of triathletes out there. With Zwift now supporting running as well as cycling, it’s pretty much the perfect hardware for that, so long as you have the space – and the pockets – for it. It supports all the major training apps, and Tacx have their own training environment too.

http://magnum.tacx.com/