OK, at the risk of revealing my status as a tired old fart with neck/back issues, I am going to finally ask some (hopefully penetrating and illuminating) questions about conventional wisdom and bike fit that I've been dying to ask for a long time.

First of all, I want to put my assumptions up front:

1) All my training on road/tri bikes has to be done in city, from my front door (I am averse to loading a bike into a motorized vehicle to take it somewhere to train for both philosophical and practical reasons, and I prefer to live in an urban area for reasons unrelated to sport); I *will* cart my bike to races). Thus, there is traffic, cars, stoplights, buses, pedestrians, etc. during parts of my training rides. Usually my ride consists of riding through more traffic-dense regions to get the the less-congested regions where I'll be trying to get into a steady-state hammer.

Therefore, I need to be able to see in front of me. Actually, I need to during races, too, come to think of it.

2) It is not healthy to ride with significant amounts of cervical extension for long periods of time. Personally, I can't do it subsequent to an April 2000 bike vs. car where I rammed my face into a Mercedes, but my coach/trainer, who has done RAAM, and knows a lot of the old ultra-marathoners, makes the statement that a 'lot of us used aerobars in the 80s, then got sore necks and quit'.

Now, I think I get most of the biomechanical rationale for the fit philosophy espoused on this site, and evidently (with the FIST system) these fitting methods are being exported pretty widely.

BUT, I find that personally many of the dictates as to fit don't seem to work for me. After I first developed pain in the upperback/neck, I thought I was done riding upright bikes. But I found a physical therapist who specializes in bike fit. She found that all my bikes had too SHORT a cockpit, that I was riding with a 'hump' in my lower back (I have an exceptionally long torso/short legs compared to normal; 5' 10" tall with a 30" inseam) which forced greater cervical extension to compensate. Except for one - I bought a Colnago C40 from BicycleworldUSA in SoCal - the dealer did a custom fit with a longer top tube than normal - it's a 55cm bike with a 55cm top tube (or 55.5 cm depending on how you measure it; it's come to my attention there is no standard for measuring top tube lengths), and, because of the shallow head tube angle (71.7), it's considered appropriate to ride with a longish stem, in my case, 12.5 cm exactly. With the saddle in a relatively 'neutral' position on the rails, I get pain with either 120 or 130mm stems - 125 does the trick perfectly.

It took months of retraining to get me to be able to relearn how to position myself, and now I have a roadbike setup geometry that works for me - I successfully did double centuries and an ultra-marathon mountain pass one day event last year and was able to manage the neck issues.

But, based on reading this site, I STILL thought when I added aerobars, I needed to shorten up the cockpit, etc. When I wanted to add clipons to my working roadbike setup, I thought I'd add 'shorties' per the conventional wisdom.

It turns out this didn't work for me. The only way I can get maintain aero position with a flat back (and therefore no neck pain) for any length of time is to extend out - I need an upper arm angle slightly greater than 90 degrees to reinforce the stretching out. I turns out a medium pair of Syntace C2's added to my existing long top tube setup works.

Now, I note that Dan consistently talks about getting the bars LOW enough, and that is part of the whole fit process, and it seems like it's part of the whole equation with steep seat tube angles, and the idea that the rider is 'rotated forward' from roadbike standards so as to maintain the same hip angle when bars are lower. So, I can see that I am not that low (head tube on my road bike is average height).

So maybe my higher bars explain why I need the longer cockpit as opposed to conventional wisdom.

But if that's so, then I still don't understand how folks can see traffic without craning their necks. Sorry if this isdumb , but does everybody just train in rural areas (I know Dan does, so this explains this), or what? Or are y'all just younger and healthier than I am, and can tolerate craning your neck until you get to a part where you can assume the position and hammer? Do you not use the aero position until you get to an unpopulated area? If I did that, I wouldn't ever be in aero position.

When I look at the amount of bar drop that the pros use in the grand tour time-trials, I can see there's no way I could tolerate that position unless I was (just like them) on a course with no one else with me up to a minute up the road, so I could just put my head down.

But aren't most triathletes age-group amateurs, with day-jobs and living in cities with traffic in their training ride areas? If the FIST method of fitting is for folks like this, how is this supposed to work? Do we do all our training on our Computrainers or something?

Sorry if I'm being obtuse, but I really don't get it. I have evolved to a fit, over time, that allows me to ride without pain, still see traffic, get down fairly low, and deliver reasonable amounts of power. I'm sensitive to this fit to within a few millimeters, as in, if I vary anything at all, I start getting into painful trouble. And I'm utterly unable to reconcile what I've learned and developed with the stuff on this site, mostly for the reasons listed above.

So, am I just a fringe case, or am I missing something? Does the fit philosophy as esposed by FIST assume that the rider is healthy/youthful enough to tolerate a certain amount of unnatural/unhealthy positioning (let's face it, there's nothing natural about a good aero position), and a certain amount of cervical extension in order to achieve better performance?

Lastly, I note that there was an article a few months back that Dan did where he visited Nytro or someplace undercover to check out their fitting technique. There was a photo of him exiting the shop on his newly fitted test bike. It was interesting to me that he was low, but not *that* low, and he had an utterly straight and flat back in the picture, and he actually appeared to NOT be extending his neck very much; in the picture he appears to be able to see in front of him while maintaining a relatively neutral spinal column (apparently) by virtue of being tilted up JUST enough, and having a totally flat back. I also note that he appears, visually, to be more in the short torso camp (well, at least compared to me, anyway). Not to sure if there's a clue here to resolving the apparent conflicts between what's advocated on the site and my personal experiences, but....anyway.

Any and all words of wisdom appreciated.