Tag: bike fit

March Madness

The weather finally took a turn for the better and I found myself riding 16 days in a row, mostly outdoors. I used the rides as a last attempt to get the CrossCheck set up to my liking. For eight months (since last July) I rode it only 108 miles, because my neck and upper back simply couldn’t tolerate it. I took measurements of The Mule, my trusty, fits-like-a-glove, steed, and tweaked the saddle position on the CrossCheck so that all the dimensions exactly matched The Mule. Or so I thought. I put the bikes side-by-side and noticed the handlebars on The Mule were rotated slightly backward but the bars on the CrossCheck were level. I rotated the CrossCheck’s bars. This seemed to help but the new position made it a bit awkward to squeeze the brake levers. I ordered a new stem in the hopes of fixing this issue. If it doesn’t work, I’ll surrender and donate the bike.

I shouldn’t complain after dealing with brutal winter weather, and riding indoors, for most of February. It was so warm the last couple of days that I could wear shorts and a t-shirt. Not having long pants and upper body layers makes a world of difference. Ahh. For a couple of days the thermometer broke 80 degrees F, setting back-to-back high temperature records. It was humid, too. So much so that Mrs. Rootchopper turned on the air conditioning at home. When I walked past the AC unit on my way into the house, I heard an unfamiliar SNAP! It turns out the cool air coming out of the vents in the house was recycled from the cooler days before the heat bump, the AC unit was not working. So, Mrs. R. called the AC repairman to check things out today. Then this happened…

Temperatures dropped 50 degrees since yesterday and we had an hour-long snowfall.

For some strange reason the repairman called to reschedule.

With the weather gone bung and dead legs, I spent most of my day in the basement shredding old tax documents. I have been meaning to do this for a long time. Lawyer Mike at Friday Coffee Club last week reminded me that any tax document older than seven years serves no purpose. My tax files went back, believe it or not, to 1979! I overheated my shredder multiple times.

The shredfest was one of the items on my To Do list for March. I have gotten into the habit of putting a monthly to do list on my phone. It helps if the items on the list are easy to do. For example, in February my do the income taxes task was broken down into download software, data entry, review return line by line, file return, calculate estimated taxes for 2026. I completed 15 of 16 tasks in February. March has 18 tasks. I’ve completed eight so far. I’ve started three others. I also add tasks as the need arises. (I generally don’t include recurring things on the list like Friday Coffee Club, lift weights, go for a bike ride.)

Baseball is back. I am enjoying the World Baseball Classic, a tournament of players from 16 countries. It’s what the All Star Game should be but isn’t. Opening day is about six weeks away.

I have not been reading about the Washington Nationals this spring because the Washington Post fired its sports reporters (and photographers and most of its other reporters). I loved shopping at small bookstores but many of my favorites closed because of competition from Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com. So why not wreck another one of my favorite things, Mr. Bezos? So far this spring there have been zero articles about the Nationals and only one spring training box score. Basically, the Post is a little more than a conduit for the wire services. Sorry, Jeff, we’re cancelling our subscription.

I’ll finish with a note of thanks to reader and former Friday Coffee Clubber John Fisher. John moved to California and recently has been cleaning out his box of unused bike stuff. He found an old Light and Motion integrated headlight and taillight. He sent it to me out of the blue. What a super nice thing to do, John. As for the rest of you readers, you can surprise me with cold hard cash. On the advice of Lucy van Pelt, I take tens and twenties.

Retirement Practice

It’s cold and dreary outside. Not a good day for a bike ride. Or a hike. Or much of anything outdoors. I am trying to find things to do. It occurs to me, I had better get used to this. Soon I will be retired. For the first time in my life I face the interesting challenge of having to come up with my daily schedule on my own. This is likely to be doubly difficult since the overwhelming majority of people I know will still be working. Anyway, somebody else has been calling the shots for most of the last 55 years. Now it’s my turn. It’s actually a fairly daunting prospect. I wouldn’t mind learning an instrument, taking a language course (Spanish, ASL), taking  a bike repair course. All are things that I could have done in the last few empty nest years and haven’t. The reason is that, other than hiking and biking, I am a sloth. Yeah, well….

Today’s schedule will include comparing my bikes with a tape measure. Sounds exciting, no? Bicycling is no fun when your bike doesn’t fit properly. Right now I have two that fit that description.

I have yet to dial in the fit on my Cross Check. I loved riding it when I first bought it but it wrecked my body when I got off the bike. Sad face. The Mule recently got new handlebars. I think in the process of working on it, the bike shop inadvertently changed my saddle height a tad. And the handlebars have a slightly different reach to them. So the fit, which was dialed in, is now a bit off. Fortunately, the set up on my Bike Friday, which was custom made to mimic The Mule of old, is unchanged. So it’t time to compare and tweak. Little changes make a huge difference. Pro tip: if someone tells you that your saddle is an inch too low, raise it in increments of no more than 1/4 of an inch. A one inch increase will almost certainly cause problems in your knees, back or neck. Also, as you move your saddle up, you’ll might actually find a sweet spot that you’d otherwise miss.

The rest of my day will be taken up with reading back issues of magazines that have accumulated on my nightstand as I read a stack of books received for Christmas. I also received season one of House of Cards so that’s probably worth a plowing through before baseball season starts. And there’s always the time sucking bald eagle cam.

Unfortunately none of these activities helps with my ever growing body size. (Seefood diets are not a good idea during the winter months.)  I read often about people who do a cleansing of their bodies. This usually involves eating nothing but fruit and veggies and other good things, sometimes combined with some sort of yogic practice. For me a cleansing comes when I do my first long ride of the spring. It’s usually a daylong ride.  I don’t ride it particularly fast. And I am not looking to ride massive hills. The benefit comes in the unrelenting effort over many hours. I am typically exhausted at the end, but  this day of self abuse resets my metabolism.  It has never failed me. I will probably do one of these rides in a week or two. Maybe out to Whites Ferry. Or do an out and back on a long rail trail.

I hear we have a second eaglet. Time for some mindless viewing….

 

Dialing It In

Whenever you ride a new bicycle, there is a period during which you make adjustments. You figure out which adjustments to make by reading the pain in your body. The simplest adjustment is seat height. If your seat is too low, the backs of your knees will hurt. If it is too high, the front of your knee (or more likely just below the knee) will hurt. I measured the distance between the crank axles and the saddle on The Mule and set the Corss Check’s saddle at the same height.

Other adjustments to the back end (so to speak) are the fore/aft position of the saddle and the tilt of the saddle. I use the identical tilt on my other bikes so I can use a level to ensure that the tilt on the Cross Check’s saddle is correct. I also know that my Brooks saddles are always shoved as far back as possible. This is partly because the rails on Brooks saddles narrow toward the front of the saddle making extreme rearward positioning pretty much impossible. (You can force the issue but the saddle rails almost surely will break. This happened to me when riding down a big hill in the Catskills. It was an interesting experience.)

The front end of the bike can be adjusted as well. You can raise or lower your handlebars and rotate them up or down. Finally, you can swap out the stem (the horizontal piece that connects the steering tube to the handlebars) for a longer or shorter one.

After 160 or so miles, my knees were happy. My buttocks were happy. My hands were happy. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that my neck and shoulders were decidedly not happy. And my lower back was aching 30 miles into every ride.

I measured the distance between my handlebar’s brake hoods (the tops of the brake levers where I usually rest my hands) and the saddle (using the center hole in my Brooks saddles which are identical on all three bikes). I compared the measurements on the Cross Check and The Mule. The Cross Check was a couple of centimeters longer than The Mule. So I tilted the handlebars up and to the rear, just a bit. The distance was still longer but I had cut it by two-thirds. Then I went for a ride.

This helped quite a lot. My lower back seemed happier. I was no longer reaching (and extending my back) to get to the brake hoods. My neck and shoulders were still not thrilled.

So I raised the handlebars a bit. This is really easy. You take the spacer on the top of the stem and move it beneath the stem.

I took this configuration for a 12 mile ride. No problems. So I think I have made some progress.

Past experience tells me that the adjustments are not over. It took me 7,000 miles of fiddling to dial in Little Nellie. Similarly, The Mule once had a lower rise stem. Time made my back less flexible so I put a higher rise stem on it.

So I suspect I may need to try a shorter stem. I did this on Little Nelle only to eventually return to a longer stem. Sometimes your body adapts, I suppose.

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