Bike Fitting - How to ride Fast & Comfortable - Part 1

All too often, I see cyclists riding bikes that don't fit them well, or not as well as they could.  These people are often hindered from progressing as cyclists by pain.  I don't know how many times I've seen someone complain of pain on one online bike forum or another, and someone quotes the age-old mantra of HTFU (Harden the {expletive} Up, i.e. endure the pain, get used to it.)

Look, pain is a signal that something is being damaged.  Some temporary damage is going to happen under certain cycling conditions.  Climbing a long hill is going to make your legs hurt, but they will respond by getting stronger (IF you rest and feed them right, which is the topic of another article.)

Some damage takes a long time to heal, and may never heal properly (especially if you follow HTFU.)

Ironically, the best and most comfortable bike fit is often the fastest for a long ride.  Comfort = the body moving smoothly with no wasted effort = efficiency.  Efficiency of the body helps both speed and endurance.

How can this be achieved?  Fitting.  People who would never expect to look good in the first shirt off a rack that has the right sleeve length somehow expect to feel good on the first bike they can stand over.
 
OK enough of why you should have your bike fit.  How do you get it done?

A few basic measurements are critical, and many of them are counter-intuitive until you think about the mechanics of riding.

Here is how I approach bike fitting, with some explanations of  the why and wherefore.  It is presented in the order in which I approach a fitting.  This is Part 1 of who knows how many, and starts with the foundation.

Saddle

Note, not a "Seat."  The saddle is the primary point of control of the bike, NOT the handlebars.

To the extent that you put weight on the saddle (and it should be limited) that weight needs to be borne on your Ischia.  Your ischia are the two bones at the bottom of your pelvis that are there to bear your weight when you're sitting.  Orangutans have brighly colored, hairless, callouses over theirs.  You don't, so where your ischia are is less obvious.  Here is a way to find them:

1. Sit on a hard surface with your knees above your hips, leaning forward.  Give it a few seconds, and their position will become obvious.  Slip your hands under your tush and feel for the spots.
2. Now comes the hard (and possibly embarrassing) part.  Get up, with your fingertips still on your ischia, bend over, and have a friend measure the distance between your fingers.  This will be a critical measurement in picking a saddle.  No saddle narrower than this measurement is worthy of consideration.  It will hurt you, badly, on a long ride.

Because of your ischia, padding extremes are bad. Your ischia will sink into a soft and cushy saddle, and the delicate tissues between your ischia will end up getting skrunched or pinched. This is bad. It can lead to numbness and/or pain in places that it is not good to be numb or have pain.  A rock hard saddle will concentrate the pressure on your ischia, and damage the muscles in the region that you're trying to use to move the bike.  I find about 1/4" to 1/3" of firm padding is about right.

Saddle position

This is critical to comfort and efficiency.  Except on a "relaxed" "comfort" or "semi-recumbent" bike you should not be able to stand flat-footed on the ground with the saddle underneath you  This is far too low for riding efficiency.  Expect to have to move your hips forward off the saddle to stop the bike or dismount. The Saddle should be high enough that you can just put your heel on the pedal with your leg straight (this is a rule of thumb, to be refined later in the fitting process.)

You are not done with saddle measurements yet, you need to take care of your hands, arms and shoulders, too.

Hunh?  You adjust the saddle to help your hands, arms and shoulders?  Yup.  Absol-freaking-lutely!  (Told you some of this would be counter-intuitive at first.)  If your hands, arms and shoulders ache after a long ride, you need to move your saddle back.  If your butt aches, you need to consider moving your saddle forward.  I'll prove it to you:

• Stand with your back against a wall, with your heels against the wall as well.
• Bend forward, but don't move your feet.

When you start out, your weight will be pretty much on your heels.  As you bend forward, your weight will move forward, till you're balancing on the balls of your feet.  Keep going, and eventually, you'll fall forward, catching yourself with your hands, wrists, arms and shoulders before your face hits the floor.

Now do the same experiment, except this time move your feet out in front of you so that your heels are "digging in".  Your posterior is pressed pretty hard against the wall, isn't it?

• If the horizontal distance between your feet and your tush is too small, you bear your weight on your hands and arms, instead of your feet.
• If the horizontal distance between your feet and your tush is too great, you bear your weight on your tush, instead of on your feet.

Now do it again, but this time, as you bend forward, shuffle your feet forward a little bit so that as you bend forward to a reasonably comfortable position, your weight stays on the balls of your feet.  You're putting a lot of pressure on the balls of your feet and your butt is barely touching the wall, but you don't fall forward, do you?  Picture all the pressure on the balls of your feet as force pushing the pedal down, and you get the idea.  If you measure that distance, you'll have a first-guess approximation of a good fore-aft position for the saddle relative to the "forward" pdal.

Again this is a starting point.  Do some riding and make adjustments a little bit at a time.  Butt hurts?  Move saddle forward.  Hands hurt? Move saddle back.   

EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE: If your saddle is well back, but your arms and hands hurt and you're having to push yourself back onto the saddle? The saddle may be too far back, or the handlebars are forcing you to lean forward more than you should be.  Move the saddle forward OR consider moving the handlebars closer in or up.

The Modern-Day Molech Machine

We have a piece of equipment in the gym I work out at called a "Jacob's Ladder"  It's like a treadmill, except it is a continuous chain of ladder rungs that you climb.  It is exhausting, and you can pack in a serious cardio workout in a very few minutes.  On a good day, it turns me into a dishrag in 10 minutes.

This morning, it made me think about similar ladders in life, where the climb is constant, and will go on as long as you endure it, or tolerate it.  Because of a conversation I had with my daughter, I began to think about the pursuit of "beauty" as a Jacob's Ladder.

OK, bear with me here.  It's pretty well established that we (in our public media, advertising, etc., etc., ad nauseum) are teaching our girls and women a hideously distorted idea of beauty.  For that matter, we're teaching it to our boys and men, too.

It is equally well established that we are teaching our young people to continuously pin their self-worth to achieving a distorted, humanly impossible, unhealthy, physical standard.  (I refuse to call it an "ideal", because it is far from ideal.)

I think we need to take a step back and understand the "Why?"  Who benefits from this?

Think about this for a second.  Who benefits the most from a generation of people trained to pursue a goal of physical appearance that cannot be attained?  Who stands to gain the most from our young people expending themselves trying to rise higher on an eternal ladder of beauty, where every step just brings another higher step into view?

The fashion industry, the makeup industry, every business that makes its almighty dollars from keeping that ladder running.

And.

They.

Don't.

Care.

• They don't care that they are killing relationships, because none of us is ever going to achieve that goal, but we're coming to expect it in ourselves and others.
• They don't care that they are killing imagination by stamping out dreams. 
• They don't care that they are killing children who have given up hope of ever climbing "high enough."
• They don't care that they are killing the classmates of the children who have given in to the despair.
• They don't care that real beauty is extinguished, when "plastic beauty" is the goal.

Here's another view of the problem: If you think about it, a plastic surgeon is a Photoshop expert who works in living human flesh.  I don't intend to demean the profession, because there are some plastic surgeons who have dedicated their careers to curing actual deformity, healing, and improving life.  However, we've all seen the hideous and ridiculous excesses of plastic surgery that is increasingly becoming the norm in Hollywood.

Is this the future we all have to look forward to?  I hope not, for such is the theme of more than one dystopic Science-Fiction novel.

So how do we prevent that future?

Now I have a crazy idea here, if we want to stop off the flow of distorted beauty and body image that is becoming the "norm" in our culture, we need to do one thing:

Cut off the flow of money that feeds the machine.

• Teach our children to spot the BS, ignore it, and not buy in with either their minds, or their money.
• Teach our children to understand true beauty, and buy into that with their hearts and minds and dollars.
• Grab ourselves, as adults, by the scruff of our collective necks and refuse to purchase or consume any product that is sold via a distorted body image or view of beauty.

Whatever it is.  Magazines! Websites! Cars! Furniture! Clothes! Makeup! Perfume! Laundry detergent! Food, wine, beer!  Period.  Don't buy it.  Buy and use alternatives that are advertised based on reality, real beauty, real function, real quality, and let the manufacturer know why.

If we don't model the decision for our kids and young adults, they won't believe it.  Words are a start, passion is good, but they aren't enough.

Slay the dragon by starving it to death.  Stop feeding ourselves and our children to the machine.  Can we?  I, for one, will try.

Here I am, the son of an advertising executive, advocating telling most of the industry to stuff it.  Sorry, Dad, but this is your granddaughter and her friends we're talking about here.  I know you'd understand.

Bicycle Maintainance 101

This started out as a personal "Spring Cleaning" checklist for getting the household bikes ready for riding season.  After messing around with bikes for as long as I have, it takes me about 30 minutes to "do" a bike end-to-end using this list, though if any of the checklist items turn up trouble, it takes longer.

Given the number of bikes I need to do to keep me and my household happily pedaling along, I can spend a good chunk of a Sunday afternoon with what is, for me, the pleasant task of getting things ready for the season.  Note, that if you have been keeping your bike "in good nick" (as the Brits would say) you may not have to do some of the more detailed things, or may spend only a moment or two on them.  Ideally, you did this stuff before putting the bike away for the winter, or have been doing it monthly if you ride in winter weather.

As time permits, I will stick in links to other articles that serve as a "how to" for the repair aspects.  If you have time to peruse the best resources of bike-mechanic lore on the interwebs, you will do well to start with one of these two:

• http://www.sheldonbrown.com/  One of the wise old heads of cycling, who started putting his knowledge into basic web pages back when html was a new thing.  I never met him in person, but conversed with him via e-mail and web forums, and was glad to be one of the many called "a friend of Sheldon's."  His kind demeanor and willingness to help even the annoyingly clueless won him many friends, even among those who disagreed with him about some detail or another.  Sadly, he first was struck with Multiple Sclerosis some years back, then passed away in 2008.  However friends and family keep the site up-to-date with the latest changes in technology.
• http://www.parktool.com/blog/repair-help  The official site of one of the big names in bicycle-specific tools, they produce some of the finest bike-specific tools available.  (The only exception is the equipment produced by Campagnolo for working on their own stuff, which is both exquisitely crafted and insanely expensive, but I digress...)  The link above is to their website for repair techniques.

What makes this evil possible?

The following was written originally immediately after the Sandy Hook shootings, but never published.  Re-reading them, I find that the words are worth publishing, regardless of whether there is a recent triggering event...

In a week like this one, many find themselves asking what makes the kind of evil witnessed this week possible.  Some blame the weapon (or the lack thereof), or mental illness, or the educational system, or any number of society's ills or failings.

I think the root cause for the slaughter of innocents lies much deeper, and has symptoms much more pervasive.

We have forgotten what it is to be human.  We have forgotten the joy, and importance, of simple human contact.  The greatest evil mankind faces may be simple loneliness.

Words, and people who abuse them...

Okay, everyone uses words. Some of us are better with them than others, but like any other tool, there are some uses that are just wrong. Some uses, while possible, damage the tool and the work, and pose a risk of harm (or at least ridicule) to the tool user.

Which, I suppose, is a fancy way of saying that some things people do with words just honk me off. With that idea clearly in mind, the following is a list of things that people just shouldn't do with words.

"Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit"

For the second time in my life, I have had to comfort some poor soul who believed that (s)he had committed the "unpardonable sin" (i.e. "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit" Matthew 21:31)  Both times I have had to deal with this, it was an accusation from some highly Charismatic Believer against some other (possibly less) Charismatic Believer when the second Believer had a question about some action or practice.

Okay, there is a short form of this, and a long form.  For those of you who are not interested in either logic or analyzing Scripture, let me save you some time: 
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a sin that cannot be committed by any Believer.  If you can't stomach that idea, kindly move along.  This isn't the Blog you're looking for.

Tuning Multiple SU Carbs

A long time ago I published this article on a web page, and it seems high time that I bring it into the 21st Century...

Tuning 101:
Getting your SU's set properly.
...or...
How to get your car running the way you want, without frustration.

Note: This page is under continual construction/improvement as I learn or think of new stuff...

The biggest hassle with getting an MG (or other British car) running properly is multiple SU carbs. Not that there's anything wrong with the carbs themselves, but there's this incredible temptation to "fiddle" with them, and the range of possible adjustment is large and varied enough that you can really get things out of whack in a hurry. This tends to result in owners going prematurely bald from tearing their hair out trying to get the car running properly.

I've been there, done that, and fortunately my scalp healed up nicely. However, in the interest of keeping other MG owners from having to wear baseball caps ALL the time to hide the missing patches, I humbly present a methodical process for making your MG run it's best.