The fit you brought with you
A position that gave you no trouble for a decade at home can start causing problems within a couple of years of moving here. The bike is usually the only thing that hasn't changed.
The conversation tends to open the same way. Someone has been out here two or three years, is riding more than they ever managed at home, and something has started to hurt. A knee. A neck. A hand that goes numb halfway down a descent. Then the line that makes it sound like a mystery: nothing's changed, it's the same bike I rode in England for ten years.
That last part is true, and it's the problem. The bike is the only thing that hasn't changed.
The riding isn't the riding you had
If you came from the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium or northern Germany, your old week was probably short rides, flat or rolling ground, and a turbo from November to March. Four to six hours if you were keen, less if the weather won.
Here people ride all year, and ten to fifteen hours a week stops being ambitious and starts being normal. A good part of that is on terrain that doesn't exist where you came from.
Position problems are mostly dose problems. Tissue tolerates a given load for a given time, and past that it stops tolerating it. Double or triple the hours and a position that sat comfortably inside your tolerance is now sitting right on the edge of it, without anything about the position having moved.
Then there's what the terrain asks for. Flat riding wants one thing repeatedly: a steady seated effort, hands on the hoods, hip angle more or less constant for three hours. The Coll de Rates wants twenty minutes of lower cadence and higher pedal force with your pelvis rotated forward and your hip closed further than it ever needed to close at home. Then you turn round and descend it, which puts you on the drops with your hands loaded and your shoulders holding you off the bars for longer at a stretch than most flat-country riders have ever held that position.
A position can be indifferent at both of those things and never once mention it on a Tuesday evening loop round Norfolk or North Holland.
And then there's you
This is the part nobody enjoys, and it's usually the larger factor of the two.
Whatever age you are, you're not quite the rider the fit was built around. Hip and lumbar mobility move over a span of years, and they move in both directions: a desk job or a few months off the bike takes range away, an old injury changes how one side loads, a winter of consistent strength work hands some back. None of it announces itself, because ordinary life never asks for the last fifteen degrees of anything.
The position isn't wrong because it drifted. It's wrong because it was built around a rider whose range was a little different from the one now sitting on the bike.
So the position isn't wrong because it drifted. It's wrong because it was built around a rider whose range was a little different from the one now sitting on the bike. Ten or fifteen degrees of hip flexion you don't currently have still has to come from somewhere once you're down on the hoods, and it gets borrowed: from the lumbar spine, from the pelvis rocking side to side, from the shoulders creeping forward over the front wheel.
The bike stayed exactly where it was. You didn't.
Why the old fit doesn't transfer
When someone tells me they've already had a fit, it usually means one done four to eight years ago, in another country, on a bike they may no longer own, for a riding week that no longer exists.
It was probably a good fit. It was a good fit for that rider, doing that riding, on that bike.
A fit isn't a permanent setting you get issued once. It's an answer to a question about a particular body meeting a particular set of demands, and if you've moved here, both halves of that question have changed since the answer was written.
When it's worth doing something
Not annually. A good position should hold for years, and riders who get refitted every season are usually being sold something.
The trigger is a change in the demands, and moving countries is one of the largest changes in demand a rider ever puts themselves through. Beyond that, the things worth acting on tend to be specific:
- a symptom that repeats on one kind of riding — numb hands on long descents, a knee that only complains on sustained climbs, saddle discomfort that arrives at hour three and never before
- something you can't hold any more that you used to hold comfortably, particularly in the drops
- new shoes, a new saddle or a new bike, especially if you bought them to suit the riding here
- a gap of several years since anyone last looked at you on the bike properly
Vague dissatisfaction is harder to work with, but it still counts. "It's fine, I've just never really got on with it" is a sentence I hear a lot, and it's usually describing something real that the rider has stopped noticing consciously.
From September I'm running fits in Calpe as well as the studio near Valencia, two days a month to start with, at Biking Luca. Everything from the studio travels down, so it's a full session, not a stripped-back travelling one.
- dates, prices and booking on the bike fitting in Calpe page
- the residency, and why I set it up, in Taking the fit studio to Calpe
- the reasoning behind how I work is in The Mechanism Method