Good Morning, folk!

I bought a bike (Trek 7200) that doesn't fit a few year ago (store didn't fit me correctly). I never got around to getting into the sport as I had absolutely no leverage with the bike. I hated that thing.

Wanting to start cycling no matter what, I've been using the bike for the past 2 weeks and have improved my stamina so that I'm doing 1 hour rides now!

But still the bike doesn't fit.

So I went back to the original bike shop (name withheld to protect their rep), and this time I got a seasoned employee to help me out.

Turns out a Trek 2.1 in size 58 fits me well. But when I told my bicycling friends about this, they freaked and said the bike was too big for me. I'm 5 feet 9 inches, but all legs (short torso).

Here's the Trek geometry:


for the 58 size, the seat tube height is 55.3 cm, and the top tube length (C) is 57.2 cm. The bike felt fine from a seat height perspective, although the top tube felt a little long. The salesman as able to fix that with a shorter handlebar stem, though.

Yet still, by bicycling friends are screaming at me not to get it. "It's too big! You're gonna hurt your back!"

A few questions / comments:

- seems to me that Trek is sorta cheating on their bike sizing. That 58 is really a 56 with a long top tube. Is this right?

- in that case, 56cm bikes from other manufactures may fit better?

Sorry about the long post, but I'm very new at this.