Agree. My 63cm sport touring bike is easy in the drops, lesser so the 59cm bike.

I have one bike (Mondia) that has a compact 'cockpit' - read shorter TT+stem mostly - that has my arms & hands feeling cramped, so the most comfortable position (as set up presently) is to drop your forearms and hands. I never thought it would work for me, but this bike always rides 'sprinty', like it wants to accelerate. All in the set-up. And not my century bike.

I also notice a difference in the drops, especially with a headwind. The think that keeps me from staying there for more than ten minutes at at time is that I find I am always looking over the tops of my prescription sunglasses. So, I don't have the sunglass effect and I don't have a clear view. In order to look through them instead of over them I have to raise my head and neck and that hurts after a bit. I've tried lots of brands and styles but still can't find anything that really works for this problem.

Likely, but not necessarily! ;-) I started riding road bikes when I was 13. I've always had a flexible back and I like to ride in the drops. My bars are set well below my saddles on my bikes. I don't know if I'm still flexible, at age 68, because I've ridden a lot in the drops, or if I still ride a lot in the drops because I'm flexible.

Such terrific winds on the beach..switched to Salsa Woodchippers on the Minn 3.0 and they are excellent. The one addition that made a difference? A Ritchey 80mm adjustable stem. I raised the bars up about 1" and now the drops are fully useable for those miles like by stretches into 10-15 "breezes". About 9 hand positions available and that really relieves hand pressure issues. I had the LBS triple wrap the bar tops, double wrap the drops.

http://bikeforums.net/attachment.php...hmentid=511604

I've been kind of anti drop bars the past five years of commuting. Now I'm thinking of putting some back on one of my bikes to see how it goes. There are benefits beyond the occasional back issues.

Ditto. I think it's an indication of (more or less) proper bike fit. On one of my bikes, my positioning/bend of the bars/whatever isn't right and my wrists start screaming. I swapped the original 'ergo' bars to 'compact' bars, but that didn't help.

Well, I want to swap in deeper drop bars on one of my other bikes, so I'm going to take the slightly different bend bars off that bike and try them. If still no luck, I give up - something in the fit obviously isn't right, and that bike will become my 'ride the hoods and see the sights' machine.

I can relate! Not sailing these days, but I have done my nautical miles, both offshore (usually on smaller keelboats, both racing and cruising and my real love, racing dinghies). I don't have a massive upper body. (I wish!) Been up a couple of masts. (And wore a scar on my inner thigh for decades when I went up post race, hosted by gorillas and did one of their 4' pulls with my skin caught between the mast and the wooden seat.) Always likes having that one woman on as our sixth racing SF Bay. Meant I wouldn't be one to go forward to untangle lines, etc. (And she was a cat. I could not feel her weight when she went up there and I spent most of my time on that boat on the accelerator pedal. (Jib and spinnaker sheets.)

Back to the topic of handlebar drops: Where to place the handlebars to get the drops to where they are all day comfortable is fit item #2 (after locating the seat). I do have the two advantages of having once raced and getting it that I was never supposed to weigh more than a number most would call too light when I was a freshman in college. (6' 1/2" before I started shrinking and 160# max. When folks say I look good - time to lose weight. My health has declined dramatically every time I have passed that mark. The blessing is that the first 5 pounds are easy to lose.

Ben

Wife and I cruise a Dufour 40. She drives, leaving me with about 800 sq. feet of sail to manage. These days, my competitive life consists of a Bermuda race each summer and maybe a local thing or two. I come from keelboats, mainly OD; didn't grow up on dinghies, unfortunately. Anyway, at 5'9" and 153 lbs., I'm smaller than most of the men I sail with and some of the women. My doc, who's really a nurse practitioner, says I'm "one norovirus away from the hospital," but she's as scrawny as I am.

Since posting to this thread last week I've flopped and reversed the upright bars on my comfy hybrid to get the grip position closer to saddle height. Then I chickened out and raised it an inch or so to just above saddle height.

Still felt like I was hunched over for a time trial, although in reality I'm sitting mostly upright and only slightly leaned forward. Rode 5 miles the first day, 19 yesterday, and can feel some discomfort in the neck (due to a permanently damaged C2), but overall it felt better. Stronger pedaling on climbs and into the wind. I'll try it awhile. But I doubt I'll ever be able to ride drops below saddle height again.

It takes a while. Dont overdo it on the seat angle, as you know. Keep at it, you will grow accustomed. You wont benefit on hills much unless you have a bad headwind.

Riding here in Kansaw is seasonal endeavor for me. I swim more in winter and run and work out with weights and balance the four activities. In past days I could stay in the drops all the time and never thought of it. Now, in the beginning of the season it is hard to stay in but by the end of the season not so much. I could raise my bars so that my drops are as high as my tops used to be but I refuse to cheat.

We are the same weight. I'm (well was) 6' 1/2". Racing SF Bay in my late 20s, I was fit and hard. (And TG, the 28' keelboat I ground winches on had excellent 2-speed winches and I had a world class tailer and often a foredeck hand who ran the new sheet back on tacks. We were a really good team and could out-tack the big boys when they visited our fleet. We once worked our way back from a distant 9th place to a couple of feet from a win on one leg from Treasure Island to the SF Yacht Club. Our big break? One of the year's biggest flood tides. We went further into the docks and tacked sooner on hitting the big wind than anybody else. Meant alternating tacks in very light shifty air and in the full city-front wind tunnel SF is famous for, just a few boat lengths apart. That race was hard!

My love sailing is on performance boats. Now I was sailing before the new wild boats, the 49ers and Aussie 18s and the like. Grew up with a Firefly, that 12' British upwind rocket. In Seattle, I raced a Tasar. Both these boats I loved to singlehand. Boats I love but am not big or strong enough for are Finns, 505s and Stars. The keelboat I put a lot of time on that I love is the Moore 24. Sadly, I never got the "ride", the 20 mph surfing spinnaker broad reach. I've sailed them in those conditions, but never got to go in the right direction! Got to sit on the committee boat my first year around those boats and see the leading edge of the keel on every well sailed boat as they broad reached past us in the famous Santa Cruz, CA wind they were built for.

Sadly, not sailing now. Portland just doesn't do it for me sailing-wise. But the rest of the fit is the best I have ever had, so I made my choice. Life's good.

A little nostalgia - just google Moore 24. Read up on it on Wikipedia, then went to the Moore website. Saw the boat Mercedes, then read that Adios had finished 2nd in a race. I spent a year working for Moore Brothers as a laminator. (Those boats are built beautifully with fiberglass quality that was unheard of, for strength, stiffness, low weight and craftsmanship in the days before epoxy, CF and pre-preg. We took real pride making the best fiberglass boats anywhere. I left there 1980. I asked my fellow laminators to be patient for my last full boat. (We did a boat every two weeks.) That boat got named Mercedes and probably had my best work in it. The hull I was working my last day got named Adios. 36 years later, they are still sailing. And, yes, Moore 24s are classics. As good as those 505s and Stars. Great, great sailing boats.

Ben