Richie at Breakaway Bikes just re-fit me as a trade for a repair I did for him earlier this year. According to his measurements, which seem just as accurate as any I've ever endured, I had myself all screwed up.Compared to 'normal' fitting philosophy, I had my seat about an inch too low and my stem was 1-2 cm too long for the new seat height. According to him, I looked like a gigantic child on a bicycle. I had lowered my seat that extra inch 2 years ago after emailing back and forth with Steve Hogg, a bike fitting contributor to Cyclingnews.com. He was an early proponent of the mid-foot cleat position, and I followed some of his fitting protocols when setting myself up on my Cannondale. My main goal with such a low position was to protect my knee, which seemed to have worked for a while. As Max, the other fitter at Breakaway said,"You really have no idea what caused you to heal, it might have simply shifted the strain elsewhere in your body, which eventually resulted in your current problems. By simply accomodating whatever problem you have physically with a bike fit, you're basically guaranteeing that your body will never get better, you're just putting a band-aid on it."
After much consultation and cajoling, Richey finally got me to raise my seat the 'required' inch and sent me out the door with a new philosophy on bike fit, some new insoles and a shorter stem.
Fortunately, when I designed my new bike I gave it just enough head tube height and seat tube length to accomodate my new fit. Close one though, as I'm about 1 spacer away from needing a new fork.I'm not sure what I think about the new shape I find my body in, but it does seem to actuate my knee and hip muscles in a better/more open way. We'll see if it is enough to make some improvements on my stupid knee. Thus far, I'm not convinced that the new fit can help me, particularly since my knee and hip have started hurting off the bike as well as on it, but hell, at this point it can hardly hurt.
In other news, I really like many aspects of the new bike. It definitely has the best acceleration of any of my bikes to date. I think that the different downtube layup plus my improved layup technique is responsible. I got a lot of the torsional aspect of the joints licked a bit more easily with the addition of some spread-tow carbon fabric, which basically cuts a lot of the annoying aspects of guessing how many layers of unidirectional carbon I've got to use going in each direction. I also think that my new 'daruma tube' technique may help a bit up front. I'll post some pics of that shortly. It's basically an innovation spawned by the untimely cracking of my last really suitable section of bamboo.
