The Price of Gold by Marty Nothstein

Author:Marty Nothstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale
Published: 2012-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Though my home life is warm, the winter of 1995 is one of the cruelest in Lehigh Valley history for training. Months pass and the temperature rarely rises above freezing, even during the warmest part of the day. Snow comes down in droves.

My training routes remain wet, icy, and littered with salt even after the plows come through and pile the snow in towering banks along the curb. I’m trapped, training indoors for almost 100 consecutive days.

Of course, I could escape. I could go to San Diego, or Texas, or any assortment of warm locales where I could train under a bright sun instead of fluorescent lights. But I don’t. I take pride in toughing out the miserable eastern Pennsylvania winters. The Lehigh Valley is my home. I want to remain with my family. I refused to risk missing the birth of my first child. My forebears overcame freezing sleet and howling northern winds to succeed, and so will I.

Thanks to Andrzej, I’m able to simulate my punishing track workouts inside. Upon joining the national team as the sprint coach, Andrzej commissioned the national team’s go-to frame builder, Koichi Yamaguchi, to construct a machine we simply call, the Ergo. The name is short for Ergometer and the machine is a custom-made stationary bike dreamed up and designed by Andrzej.

Both Andrzej and Gil possess the minds of mechanical mad scientists. They’re constantly trying to build a better mousetrap. They tinker with my race bike’s hubs and bottom bracket until the bearings spin without an iota of resistance. But the Ergo is likely Andrzej’s greatest creation.

To the unacquainted, the Ergo looks like a torture device. A 3-foot-wide base of thick steel tubes keeps the bike from swaying during all-out sprint efforts. Instead of running to the rear wheel, the Ergo’s chain is attached to a flywheel at the front. To create resistance, Andrzej bolted wind-grabbing metal blades to the flywheel.

The Ergo’s resistance is adjustable by moving the blades closer to, or farther away from, the flywheel. During the first iterations of the Ergo, the force of my pedaling sometimes throws the chain off the gears on the flywheel. The chain hits the metal blades and flings them across the room like throwing knives. Everyone ducks for cover. But over time, Andrzej dialed in the Ergo, even adding a rudimentary power meter made by the German company SRM that measures the watts I produce while pedaling. During workouts on the Ergo, I frequently max out at more than 2,300 watts.

By the winter of ’95, I own three Ergos, all constructed by Yamaguchi to fit me exactly the same as my race bikes. One Ergo stays at the USA Cycling headquarters in Colorado Springs, one travels with me to major competitions, and one stays at my home in the Lehigh Valley. I spend hundreds of hours on the Ergo over the course of the 1995 winter, listening to heavy-metal music full blast and cranking out as many as a dozen full-tilt sprints during a training session.

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