An on going series of bike fitting on a mountain bike. This series has started from myself being fit by one of the owners of Cool Breeze Cyclery, Bruce Guild.  Bruce is a well known fitting expert in the South East.  Having done thousands of road, tri and TT fits, together we are branching out into the mountain bike fitting realm.  Pushing the limits of the knowledge and products of Serotta International Cycling Institute and many years of fitting people to their bikes.  I will be attending the advanced training classes of SICI this fall, plus incorporating Dart Fish video analysis we plan on continuing to learn and push mountain bike fitting forward.

After I put my bike in the trainer and leveled out the bike the first step was getting on, clicking my shoes into the pedals and simply pedaling so Bruce could see the fit on my bike current bike setup.  Almost immediately he noticed that I was rolling my ankles and knees into to the bike.  There are several reasons for this as we pealed back the onion of my pedaling technique and bone structure.

Issue #1 - The canting of my foot is huge.  This means if my foot is measured the tilt of the foot in the interior is very high, my arch is high, and the natural lay down of my foot is so the insides of my feet need to be higher than the outside or I roll my ankle in to compensate. This we fixed by wedging my cleat with a few shims.   Long term I plan on making a more permanent wedge out of a solid piece of metal or strong plastic.

Issue #2 - Q-factor (the distance measured between your pedals) is way too high on my mountain bikes. My hips are very narrow so my feet are not nearly close enough to be directly under my feet.  This makes my knees roll in toward the top tube to compensate.  Unfortunately with the need for wide tire clearance your cranks will always have to be further apart on a mountain bike than road bike.  This has lead me to research many different pedals and axle lengths to try and bring my feet closer to the crank arms.  I have about an 1.5 inches between the inside of my foot and crank to play with, if I can find a mountain pedal system that really brings them in. The only thing I have found is the Crank Brothers but they still aren’t short enough.

Issue #3 - A hip injury from last spring has lead me to over compensate with one leg so I pedal with my heal up.  Hopefully stretching and stablizer strengthening will help drop this heal.

The onion will be continued to be pealed and various things tested in fixing my fitting issues.  We also will start playing (once I can sit on the bike for more than 3 hours with no pain) with various handling issues with stem length, handlebar sweep/length and saddle set back.