Quote Originally Posted by uforgot View Post
Lisa,
I went to the Rivendell site and read their theories about bike fit. Very interesting and I noted that your seat sits even or slightly lower than your handlebars. Correct? I always thought mine were too low, it sits above the bars so I'm going to look into raising them. How did they initially fit you? Did they do measurements? Seems that they don't think that top tube length is all that, so I'm just curious. Thanks for the pics, terrific!
Hi Claudia,
They first go by standover height (all their top tubes are straight horizontal, no "girl/boy" toptube bikes, and no women-specific frames.). According to Rivendell, you should get the largest frame that you can stand over, so you measure your pubic bone height. That put me on the 54cm Rambouillet. INcidentally, the Rambs of 52cm and smaller get 650B size wheels to avoid toe clip overlap. My 54 frame is the smallest Ramb size they typically put 700c wheels on. I probably would have fit the 52cm Ramb just fine too, but would have then had 650 wheels.
The only issue I had with fit on my bike was that after riding it a couple of months I felt the 9cm stem reach was just too long a reach for me, so we replaced the stem with a very short 5cm one. I am very comfortable with my bike fit now, despite the bad rap that short stems always seem to get.
Yes, the saddle-at-same-height-as-bars thing is something Riv emphasizes, because they don't believe people will be very comfortable or will enjoy riding around on a daily basis in an extreme Tour de France racing position. I guess plenty of folks like it and that's fine with me. But DH and I just like to ride through the countryside together having a good time, 2-5 hour rides, maybe a little light touring. We're not racing, we're riding just for pleasure and fitness. We also like to run errands on our bikes whenever we can instead of using our cars. We don't want heavy cruiser bikes or even hybrid upright bikes, however, because we hope to put in a lot of miles and we encounter a LOT of hills around here no matter what direction we head in.