When it gets cold outside, we are often forced to ride our bikes in the basement on a trainer. Linda and I both have our bike hooked up to a CycleOps Magneto trainer.  It can be very boring, but we can at least watch TV while riding our bike. The thing I like least about riding on the trainer is that I generally don’t get as much of a workout when I’m just mindlessly spinning the pedals and watching TV. In fact, I rarely even break a sweat.

Enter The Sufferfest.

These are a series of biking videos that can be watched while riding hard on the trainer. The workouts are generally a series of high-intensity interval training type workouts. The best way to describe it is “doing P90X on the bike”.  Because these workouts are usually a bit exhausting, I have only intermittently utilized the videos over the past 3 years.

Sufferlandria is the mythical country from which each Sufferfest rider pretends they are citizens. For the 3rd straight year, the “Tour of Sufferlandria” (“The Greatest Grand Tour of a Mythical Nation in the Whole Wide World”) was offered. This is a 9-day event utilizing almost all of the cycling videos available. It raises money for the Davis Phinney Foundation. Davis Phinney is a former pro cyclist who now has Parkinson’s disease; his foundation raises money for research and helping those with Parkinson’s disease.