Damnit, Kinetic

When I first started this nonsense sport, Teresa lent me an extra bike trainer she had so I’d be able to do indoor rides. It was a sad little thing that Jason wasn’t allowed to use because I was convinced he’d snap it in half. After a couple seasons of slumming it on the little trainer that could, I finally shelled out major coinage for a Kinetic fluid road bike trainer, the luxury sedans of trainers. It’s supposed to be one of the quietest trainers on the market, meaning I’d be able to ride and actually hear the movie I’m watching without having to blast the volume up so loud, my neighbors want to murder me.

The first one I bought had some B.S. problem where some hole wasn’t drilled properly, forcing Jason to hammer the screw in all janky-like. You’d think shelling out a few hundred bones for a pricey hunk of metal meant it would be engineered properly, but I guess that’s not the case. Despite the minor setback, I was pretty stoked to finally be rollin’ on a “grown up” trainer, and a whisper quiet one at that!

…or so I thought. About six months after using the trainer, one day I hopped on my bike for a spin and my Kinetic promptly sounded as if the Inception buzzy noise had personified, gotten stuck behind my wheel, and was being slowly and tortuously ground to death. I tried to ignore it at first, but this stupid noise got louder and louder to the point where I was blasting Teen Mom 2 at full volume in a futile effort to hear whiny girls and their baby daddy drama over the honking whir of my trainer (yes, I watch Teen Mom — it’s part of a Scared Straight program for my uterus so it doesn’t try any funny business).

Eventually I gave up and hauled the bright green abomination back to whence it came so I could swap it out (REI, you mofos have the best return policy ever). Thankfully, the apathetic customer service rep was fine with me exchanging the nearly year-old trainer, so I grabbed a brand spankin’ new one and brought it home. Jas offered to help me set up Kinetic 2: Electric Boogaloo, but when he unpacked it and began assembling it, he noticed something wrong.

Kinetic, you’ve screwed me again. The new trainer came with a screw that was, inexplicably, too short to fit through the one hole it was designed for. You’re kidding me! This shit is worse than Ikea — I expect some discrepancies when I’m buying hard-packed sawdust passing as furniture for a fraction of the cost, but when I’m plunking down hundreds of bucks for a hefty piece of machinery, I (foolishly) figure that all the pieces are manufactured properly.

Rather than have an entire department in REI hate my guts, I opted to go to Lowe’s and shell out 15 cents for a replacement screw. Afterwards, Jas was able to get my trainer working properly and I’m once again riding in relative quiet…that is, until it borks again (which, considering my luck, I fully expect it to do). Of course, Jason’s trainer has given him zero problems while I’m on my third one. Oh well, the best I can do is cross my fingers and hope that the Kinetic plays nice so I can ride and watch my crappy action movies and trashy TV in peace.