Bike fit in your forties

A bike fit is an hour or two with somebody who knows what they're doing, and what they do is adjust the bike to your body instead of leaving you to adjust your body to the bike. They go through the saddle height, the reach, the cleat position, and the angle of things you didn't know had angles, and at the end of it the bike fits you instead of you fitting the bike.

I had mine the third week of August 2023, in the middle of a season that had a 112-mile ride and the Marathon Readiness Series in it, and it should have happened a year earlier. Why did I wait? I've looked for a good answer and I don't have one, so the honest version is that I kept riding and kept telling myself it was fine. I'm going to say the year-earlier part a couple more times before this note is over, because that's the point of it.

The reason it matters more now is that a body in its forties or fifties has opinions. A back that put up with a bad position at thirty doesn't put up with it anymore, and a knee that's tracking slightly wrong on every pedal stroke will let you know about it somewhere around mile forty of a long ride, and then it'll keep letting you know for the rest of the week. For me the fit was about being able to ride long without paying for it on the run, or in the next week's training, or in a rib that was already unhappy, which mine was, and speed never really came into it.

I'm not going to list saddle millimeters, because I don't think that's what anybody needs from me. What I can say is that the long rides after the fit were different rides. I was shifting around on the saddle less, and the hand numbness I'd been treating as normal mostly went away, which told me it was never normal and I'd just been telling myself it was. I had a position I could hold for hours, and when the ride is 100 miles, holding it for hours is the entire job of a position.

The order I'd do it in now is the fit first and then the bike, as a fit on an old bike beats no fit on a new one. Jay's tri bike showed up in July, and the honest version of that story is that both of us should have paid for a fit before either of us paid for a frame, and we should have done it a year earlier, which is the second time I've said that. If I could do one bike thing over, it would be this one, the person who adjusts the bike to me, and I'd do it a year earlier, and that's the third time, so I'll stop.