breakout ride today
 

Well after a few months of being back in the saddle I had what I consider to be my breakout ride tonight. Let me set the stage ... I'm relatively fit. I used to ride hard ten years ago (even raced a little), but stopped during grad school. I weighed 165 when I started seriously training two months ago. Today I weigh 157. My legs have gotten stronger, my diet has improved and I even got a new bike. With two kids, a stay at home wife and a house, the best I could do was come up with $500 for a bike and I bought one mail-order with a combination of Tiagra and 105. When I got the bike I installed my older look pedals, replaced the saddle and seatpost and swapped for a smaller stem during fitting. As of 1 week ago, I lacked form entirely. I couldn't push gears despite "feeling" fit and strong. Moreover, I felt like I was missing an important gear on the flats. Specifically, 42-19 resulted in spinning too fast while 42-17 was just too much. I was a bit discouraged and seriously questioned my progress toward this September's BIG ride I have planned (Highlander cycling tour ).

Then last week I made some changes.

The crappy wheels that came with my bike had been trued once already and they weren't geting better. Time for new one's. I found some used Open Pro's with 105 hubs on ebay for $100 shipped and put those on. Because the wheels were so inexpensive, I also picked up a new cassette that gave me a better selection of gears where it counts (see figure below). And finally, ... perhaps most importantly ... I bucked my fitting recommendation and LOWERED my seat almost 1 inch.

In a word ... BINGO.

I oozed power during today's ride. I had no problem holding 20mph on the flats and felt very comfortable on the three short (yet steep) climbs on today's route. In fact, I touched 180bpm only briefly (usually I'll max out in the high 180's on this route), lowered my average bpm for the ride by almost 10, and upped the average speed by 1.5 mph.

I'm betting is was the seat all along. Lowering the saddle so dramatically appeared to give me more leverage and clearly moved me closer to the bars. Most importantly, it appeared to make it much easier to generate power on the up-stroke. The new gearing was clearly a huge benefit too as I could hold a faster pace on the flats at just the right tempo using the new 42-18. As a side benefit, because the new cassette is so very step-wise (the only non-stepwise jumps are 19 to 21 and 21 to 23), I can more easily anticipate the new level of resistence when I change gears. This turned out to be a bigger benefit than I thought. Finally, while the new wheels are nice and I worry less about failure, I'm not convinced they offer much of an advantage weight-wise as I'm running relatively heavy Armadillos.

The bike is still a bit of a pig and probably weighs in at 22-23 pounds, but I'm not losing sleep over it. I'm currently taking more pleasure in watching my performance improve.

Just thought I'd share.

-mark

As a guy with 2 kids, a mortgage and a stay-at-home wife, I can relate. I can also relate to the idea of lowering your seat. When I got back into riding almost 6 months ago, my seat was set at 79.5 CM's (top of saddle to crank bolt) by a pro fitter. I was comfortable there and improving, so I didn't think about it. 2 things happened though. A buddy mentioned on a ride that he thought I had too much hip sway and that I might consider lowering my saddle to "quiet them down". Also, a couple of the online fit programs both indicated that I should be at 76.2. So, I started lowering.

I immediately got slightly faster and had more power plus I felt even more comfortable. AND, I was finally able to master rollers.

So, more power to you Mark. The lesson here is never to be so satisfied that you aren't questionning whether you can be better. Thanks for reminding us of that.

Now get back to your wife, it's Mother's Day.

55/Rad

I agree completely. For those that constantly fiddle with their setup I would caution that you use a quantifiable way of measuring the effect pre and post change. Given the subtlety with which little changes can effect pedaling efficiency, it can be difficult to catch a change that has a net negative effect on form.

Thanks 55/Rad.

-mark