Yesterday, I took the morning off from work to get a bike fitting at 55Nine Performance. For a little over 2 hours, Eddie took skeletal measurements and bike measurements, adjusted things on my bike, looked at my posture and pedal stroke, and gave me a lot of advice on things I could do to improve my technique to get faster and experience less fatigue on body parts that shouldn't be working as hard as they were. My seatpost is higher, the cleats on my shoes are closer to my heel, there are new insoles in my shoes, my handlebar is closer to my seat (with a shorter stem), and I have a list of things to pay attention to when riding including heel position in the top of my pedal stroke, shoulder and elbow tension, and lower back muscles. Some people think that bike fitting is a silly and expensive thing to do, but this fit will help me get the perfect bike for my next bike (more on this later), and should make me faster and hurt less. Given the amount of riding that I do and how much equipment I have, it's almost a no-brainer to do. As soon as I got home I adjusted seatpost height and seat position on the 3 other bikes and adjusted the cleats my other 2 pairs of shoes, and later in the day, Roger and I went to Conyers so I could see how things felt and record some video. The difference was noticeable: less upper body fatigue and some different muscles getting used to push the pedals. Also, due to the shorter distance from seat to handlebars, I felt like I was able to corner a lot better and faster. Cool! My feet are going to take a little while to get used to the way weight is distributed on them now, but everything else felt very natural and I'm looking forward to do a run of all the loops at Blankets Creek and see how much faster it's made me. I also recorded video of both sides at Conyers and edited them down to be a bit more manageable than usual:
Conyers - The Easy Side from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.
Conyers - The Hard Side from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.