Originally Posted by
oldbobcat
Where have you been?
I was on a forced hiatus from 2005 to 2019. It was a long time away from the bike due to a back injury and surgery that did not yield the desired outcome. In 2019, four years after my 2nd back surgery, I finally got back onto a bike. It was just an upright comfort bike, but I was riding again. By 2020 I had gained enough strength, flexibility, and range of motion to get back onto a road bike... and it's been full steam ahead ever since.
Originally Posted by
oldbobcat
Stack height sort of maxed out with the Specialized Roubaix of five years ago. Tarmac stacks were tall, too, for their intended use, as were Trek's H2 and H3 cockpits, and their Domane endurance bike. Nowadays, endurance stack height has come down a bit and some of the longer reaching bikes have been shortened. And some race geometries have come up a bit. 15 years ago I told our Trek rep that they needed to make an H1.5 Madone. I saw that they finally applied that to their entire Madone and Emonda ranges over the last year or so.
Until 2020 I didn't pay
much any attention to geometry or changing trends. But when I bought my Palta in late 2020 there were a number of endurance bikes
and gravel bikes with "road-friendly" geometries. Fast forward to late 2023 when I was forced to replace the Palta due to an accident... endurance geometries had become so relaxed I had to purchase a race bike to get "endurance" geometry.