Taking the fit studio to Calpe
A monthly residency at Biking Luca, and why camp roads find problems that home roads never get round to.
From September I'll be running bike fits in Calpe, at Biking Luca, alongside the studio near Valencia. The first block is Thursday 10 and Friday 11 September, three fits a day. It starts as two days a month and moves to two days a fortnight if the demand is there.
The practical reason is simple. A lot of the riders I see have driven a long way to reach the studio, and plenty of them were on the Costa Blanca when the problem started. Being there two days a month closes some of that distance.
The other reason is what Calpe does to a position.
Camp roads ask harder questions
Most riders' home terrain is forgiving in ways they've stopped noticing. Climbs last eight minutes, descents last three, and the ride ends before anything has to be held for very long. A position can be mediocre and still feel fine, because nothing in the week is long enough to expose it.
Then the same rider lands in Calpe, doubles their weekly hours, and spends forty minutes going up something and twenty minutes coming back down it. Suddenly the position is being asked to hold a shape rather than pass through one.
A position can be mediocre and still feel fine, because nothing in the week is long enough to expose it.
That's when the compensations show up. Hands and shoulders start carrying load they were never carrying on a two-hour ride. The pelvis starts hunting for support on long seated climbs, usually to one side more than the other. Feet that were comfortable in April get hot and numb in the heat. And the leg-length difference or foot structure that had been absorbed without complaint for years finally runs out of tolerance.
None of these are new problems; they were all there in January. The camp just removed the margin that was hiding them.
Why that makes it a good place to fit
When someone comes to the studio in February describing a problem from a trip six weeks earlier, I'm working from a memory of a sensation. The rider has already adapted around it, changed something, or half-forgotten which climb it happened on. Useful, but second-hand.
In Calpe the problem is current. The rider is still in the block that caused it, on the roads that caused it, and can go and test the change the following morning on the same climb. If we're wrong about something, we find out in a day rather than a season.
There's also a group of riders here who are dealing with a self-inflicted version of the same thing: new shoes for the trip, a different saddle, an aero cockpit fitted the week before flying out. Positions bought in a hurry, then loaded harder than anything the rider does at home. That combination produces a lot of the cases I end up seeing.
What comes down from the studio
Everything. Motion capture, pressure mapping, the assessment tools and the measurement kit all travel, so these are full sessions. The formats, prices and process are unchanged, and you get the same written record afterwards.
One thing stays in Valencia: custom insoles. Moulding and finishing a pair properly takes more time than a residency day has, so if the fit points that way, we plan it separately.
Six appointments per block isn't many, and I'd rather they went to the right riders than the quickest ones. If you're on a camp and something is genuinely limiting how you ride, that's the case I want in the diary.
Booking
- dates, prices and booking on the bike fitting in Calpe page
- studio sessions near Valencia are on the bike fitting page
- the reasoning behind all of it is in The Mechanism Method
If the September dates fill before you get to them, email me and I'll put you on the list for October.