I'm going to take the long way around. Perhaps now would be a good time to queue up Alice's Restaurant. If you don't know what I'm talking about, do yourself a favor and search and bookmark the song "Alice's Restaurant" and play it this Thanksgiving. But in the end, I hope you'll have a good idea of what you should expect and demand from a remote fit, and why, and why your peers are doing this now instead of waiting for next year.
So... I used to do this thing, get this feeling where I pretended to be a world class track coach. I wasn't actually *doing* it, rather it was just happening to me, a stray thought entering my head, or really my *eye*. Seeing *good form*, particularly good running form, out in the wild. Wondering if a particular stranger was or had the potential to be good at a certain activity. At the time I was more into coaching and cycling than bike fitting, aware of training and teaching and coaching techniques and trying to make it from Cat 3 to Cat 2, and thus was also aware of the different energy systems required in sport and my own lack of power to weight ratio when the selections happened on the little hills of PacNW Tacoma area hills in my Cat 3 races. I knew sport could be cruel sometimes. I was always the small kid in sports growing up. I got left behind in competitive volleyball for lack of force and anaerobic ability.
Anyway, five years ago or more I'd take my kid to gymnastics and then sit in the parent waiting area up on the second level and look down on all the various groups and classes and teaching and coaching and training going on. It was the kind of gym where you had preschoolers sitting in a circle playing games to serious gymnasts practicing hard and physically demanding skills and gearing up for big competitions. This was a real gym. They were competing, not just practicing two nights a week as an activity. Like in cycling, there was a selection happening down below... it was subtle, but it was there. It was invisible in the moment and took years to happen, but you could see it because all the age ranges, from preschool to "adult", were arrayed out there on the gym floor like fossils in rock strata going from single cell amoeba to troglodytes to creatures with arms and legs. You could see the layer where the species got left behind. They were only little kids but I could *relate*. To me it felt like a particularly cruel selection, as so much of it was out of their control and related to biology and genetics more than skill or hard work. At some point, and usually before physical and emotional maturity, there was a selection, a *cut*, where your power to weight ratio had to exceed your body's natural tendency to grow, both from age and height, *and* from puberty, and if it didn't, if you weren't lucky, you were off the back and subject to all of the negative aspects of a body conscious sport and all of the potential pitfalls that go along with that aspect of it but with none of the positives of being able to do the hard moves and keeping up with their peers in an activity they loved.
You watch and see this from the second level of a gym for years and you start to wonder... what other sports would have this person been good at if not for gymnastics? Gymnastics is a sport that you a have to start at a very young age, with selections happening all along the way. Power to weight. But in our sport, endurance sports, we often see people joining late and uncovering some hidden or unknown ability and being very successful. Endurance sports was much fairer to the hard worker. What if these kids had been runners? So I did this thing, or this thing happened, where for three years as the kids did their warm-up laps around the mat, I could just *tell* who would have been a good runner if they had just been exposed to running instead of gymnastics. You could just *see*. Kids at a young age haven't been sitting at desks for years, haven't been reading magazines or being told how to run, they just run. And some of them looked no different than the beautiful 1500m or 5k runners you see on the track... perfect stride, upright body, hip angle at toe-off, etc. Pure.
And so, maybe, on the second floor of a gymnastics gym, my fitter's eye was born. Fast forward to bike fitting. I fit myself. I devoured the Slowtwitch FIST method, and wore out my angle measuring goniometer and had software that can measure angles on videos and pictures. When I started fitting for real, I used these methods religiously. But a funny thing happened... no matter what I did or the feedback the athlete gave the angles always came out the same. Eventually I could just *see* them. Later, eventually, I would know in the first 5 minutes how the fit session would play out and what feedback the client would give and what pathway the fit would progress down and lo and behold, after 2 hours of dynamic changes on the fit bike this usually came to pass. It's not a gift or a trick, it's just *orthodoxy*. Most people ride most bikes in mostly the same way. It's how we do what we do, fitters and athletes in the real world
Everybody is the same kind of different.
I'm not sure if all fitters have a fitter's eye, but I assume the good ones do. Most of the ones I've talked to do. They just see, they just know. And as we try to figure out what to do with ourselves as athletes during these times, with time to train but no races to train for, trying to shed extra life stress through exercise, one might begin to settle on the idea that now is the time to lay down a good foundation, to get a good base, and to optimize that which can be optimized before things start back up again. After all the spring cleaning is done and the home improvement projects finished, eventually you're going to want to get your bike fit looked at. This is because, like the gymnastics, there's a selection going on in triathlon, and it's happening on the bike. It's power, comfort, and aerodynamics. Now, here's where Alice comes in. You're going to want to get that addressed during this "offseason", and at some point in your shopping around for a fitter you're going to see marketing pictures of a fitter's clients but with angles and lines drawn on the picture, like so:
"using all kinds of equipment. Plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and 27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner, and that's not to mention the aerial photography."
(again, listen to the song... it's a classic)
OK, here's the thing, my hypothesis: a good fitter doesn't need those tools. Like in the song, it's overkill. They don't need the angles or the 27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs. They already *see* them. Now, that is not to say that a fitter who uses the angles and lines doesn't know what they're doing. Market research probably shows that we triathletes want to see these angles. We like the lines, they comfort us. But we're not being good consumers. Two athletes with the same angles more or less can have two totally different fits. We're being *sold*, because that's what we buy. And so good fitters are forced to market themselves with the angles and lines and color eight-by-tens because they have to, not because they want to. Thankfully, there's another way to know a good fitter, same as always... their portfolio.
As you shop around for remote or online bike fitters, you're probably going to have quite a few options. Remember Alice's Restaurant. Remember what you're shopping for. You're shopping for a good outcome, a good fit. Most good fits are predicated and predicted by fitters with a portfolio of good fits, as seen on their websites or IG feeds or from client word of mouth. Slowtwitch has a good article on fit deliverables. It's the same for a remote fit as it is for an in person fit. Briefly: your fit coordinates, the saddle and cockpit configuration that works best for you, how to make your bike work with those coordinates or the bike and cockpit configuration that will, the video of your fit (obviously!), and how you compare to Orthodoxy and/or why you differ if you do.
In addition, I would suggest a good remote bike fit should go like this, and you have these expectations:
The angles and lines and the 27 eight-by-ten glossy photos are a nice but not necessary extra. Do all of this and you'll be way ahead of your peers come race season or 2021 or whenever we get things rolling again. There's another selection happening, similar to the one I saw at the gym from the second floor. It's a slow motion IQ test to see who can maintain the most consistent training during these crazy times, who can improve while everyone else goes backwards. Aerodynamics as we now know is huge, a season or two of growth in one day during a good fit or wind tunnel session. Comfort and power are huge as well. You should see those three, aero/power/comfort in your remote fit pictures, not the arrows and lines and circles.
E
Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting
“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”
So... I used to do this thing, get this feeling where I pretended to be a world class track coach. I wasn't actually *doing* it, rather it was just happening to me, a stray thought entering my head, or really my *eye*. Seeing *good form*, particularly good running form, out in the wild. Wondering if a particular stranger was or had the potential to be good at a certain activity. At the time I was more into coaching and cycling than bike fitting, aware of training and teaching and coaching techniques and trying to make it from Cat 3 to Cat 2, and thus was also aware of the different energy systems required in sport and my own lack of power to weight ratio when the selections happened on the little hills of PacNW Tacoma area hills in my Cat 3 races. I knew sport could be cruel sometimes. I was always the small kid in sports growing up. I got left behind in competitive volleyball for lack of force and anaerobic ability.
Anyway, five years ago or more I'd take my kid to gymnastics and then sit in the parent waiting area up on the second level and look down on all the various groups and classes and teaching and coaching and training going on. It was the kind of gym where you had preschoolers sitting in a circle playing games to serious gymnasts practicing hard and physically demanding skills and gearing up for big competitions. This was a real gym. They were competing, not just practicing two nights a week as an activity. Like in cycling, there was a selection happening down below... it was subtle, but it was there. It was invisible in the moment and took years to happen, but you could see it because all the age ranges, from preschool to "adult", were arrayed out there on the gym floor like fossils in rock strata going from single cell amoeba to troglodytes to creatures with arms and legs. You could see the layer where the species got left behind. They were only little kids but I could *relate*. To me it felt like a particularly cruel selection, as so much of it was out of their control and related to biology and genetics more than skill or hard work. At some point, and usually before physical and emotional maturity, there was a selection, a *cut*, where your power to weight ratio had to exceed your body's natural tendency to grow, both from age and height, *and* from puberty, and if it didn't, if you weren't lucky, you were off the back and subject to all of the negative aspects of a body conscious sport and all of the potential pitfalls that go along with that aspect of it but with none of the positives of being able to do the hard moves and keeping up with their peers in an activity they loved.
You watch and see this from the second level of a gym for years and you start to wonder... what other sports would have this person been good at if not for gymnastics? Gymnastics is a sport that you a have to start at a very young age, with selections happening all along the way. Power to weight. But in our sport, endurance sports, we often see people joining late and uncovering some hidden or unknown ability and being very successful. Endurance sports was much fairer to the hard worker. What if these kids had been runners? So I did this thing, or this thing happened, where for three years as the kids did their warm-up laps around the mat, I could just *tell* who would have been a good runner if they had just been exposed to running instead of gymnastics. You could just *see*. Kids at a young age haven't been sitting at desks for years, haven't been reading magazines or being told how to run, they just run. And some of them looked no different than the beautiful 1500m or 5k runners you see on the track... perfect stride, upright body, hip angle at toe-off, etc. Pure.
And so, maybe, on the second floor of a gymnastics gym, my fitter's eye was born. Fast forward to bike fitting. I fit myself. I devoured the Slowtwitch FIST method, and wore out my angle measuring goniometer and had software that can measure angles on videos and pictures. When I started fitting for real, I used these methods religiously. But a funny thing happened... no matter what I did or the feedback the athlete gave the angles always came out the same. Eventually I could just *see* them. Later, eventually, I would know in the first 5 minutes how the fit session would play out and what feedback the client would give and what pathway the fit would progress down and lo and behold, after 2 hours of dynamic changes on the fit bike this usually came to pass. It's not a gift or a trick, it's just *orthodoxy*. Most people ride most bikes in mostly the same way. It's how we do what we do, fitters and athletes in the real world
Everybody is the same kind of different.
I'm not sure if all fitters have a fitter's eye, but I assume the good ones do. Most of the ones I've talked to do. They just see, they just know. And as we try to figure out what to do with ourselves as athletes during these times, with time to train but no races to train for, trying to shed extra life stress through exercise, one might begin to settle on the idea that now is the time to lay down a good foundation, to get a good base, and to optimize that which can be optimized before things start back up again. After all the spring cleaning is done and the home improvement projects finished, eventually you're going to want to get your bike fit looked at. This is because, like the gymnastics, there's a selection going on in triathlon, and it's happening on the bike. It's power, comfort, and aerodynamics. Now, here's where Alice comes in. You're going to want to get that addressed during this "offseason", and at some point in your shopping around for a fitter you're going to see marketing pictures of a fitter's clients but with angles and lines drawn on the picture, like so:
"using all kinds of equipment. Plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smelling prints, and 27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us. Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner, and that's not to mention the aerial photography."
(again, listen to the song... it's a classic)
OK, here's the thing, my hypothesis: a good fitter doesn't need those tools. Like in the song, it's overkill. They don't need the angles or the 27 eight-by-ten color glossy photographs. They already *see* them. Now, that is not to say that a fitter who uses the angles and lines doesn't know what they're doing. Market research probably shows that we triathletes want to see these angles. We like the lines, they comfort us. But we're not being good consumers. Two athletes with the same angles more or less can have two totally different fits. We're being *sold*, because that's what we buy. And so good fitters are forced to market themselves with the angles and lines and color eight-by-tens because they have to, not because they want to. Thankfully, there's another way to know a good fitter, same as always... their portfolio.
As you shop around for remote or online bike fitters, you're probably going to have quite a few options. Remember Alice's Restaurant. Remember what you're shopping for. You're shopping for a good outcome, a good fit. Most good fits are predicated and predicted by fitters with a portfolio of good fits, as seen on their websites or IG feeds or from client word of mouth. Slowtwitch has a good article on fit deliverables. It's the same for a remote fit as it is for an in person fit. Briefly: your fit coordinates, the saddle and cockpit configuration that works best for you, how to make your bike work with those coordinates or the bike and cockpit configuration that will, the video of your fit (obviously!), and how you compare to Orthodoxy and/or why you differ if you do.
In addition, I would suggest a good remote bike fit should go like this, and you have these expectations:
- It's an iterative process. You start with a baseline video, and then go again, and continue the iterations until you get it right. Not too dissimilar to a in-person fit bike.
- You make incremental changes. You take the baseline video and recommend small changes that can be ridden and absorbed so that proper feedback can be given before taking the next video and making the next changes.
- It's dynamic. Not as dynamic as an in-person fit on a Retul bike, but not quite glacial either, dynamic still. It takes a little patience. Commit a few weeks to the process.
- There's logistics involved. For example, the saddle is probably *the* most important and critical item of a bike fit, be prepared to buy and return saddles. Be prepared to wrench your own bike.
- Photography matters. Your bike should be square to the lines of the room, with your trainer mat square with the lines of the room. Your camera should be square to your bike, centered on your body. Parallel.
- You should get the same outputs as listed above in the Slowtwitch article as you get from an in-person fit.
The angles and lines and the 27 eight-by-ten glossy photos are a nice but not necessary extra. Do all of this and you'll be way ahead of your peers come race season or 2021 or whenever we get things rolling again. There's another selection happening, similar to the one I saw at the gym from the second floor. It's a slow motion IQ test to see who can maintain the most consistent training during these crazy times, who can improve while everyone else goes backwards. Aerodynamics as we now know is huge, a season or two of growth in one day during a good fit or wind tunnel session. Comfort and power are huge as well. You should see those three, aero/power/comfort in your remote fit pictures, not the arrows and lines and circles.
E
Eric Reid AeroFit | Instagram Portfolio
Aerodynamic Retul Bike Fitting
“You are experiencing the criminal coverup of a foreign backed fascist hostile takeover of a mafia shakedown of an authoritarian religious slow motion coup. Persuade people to vote for Democracy.”