Achilles tendons - thoughts?

[OakLeaf]

Here's what I'd do:

(1) If your fitter didn't give you a paper with all the measurements on it, take those now, so you have a reference point. If your seatpost and saddle rails have indicators on them, that makes it easy; otherwise measure the amount of seatpost exposed from seat tube to clamp, and the distance from the edge of your seatpost clamp to the zero mark on the rail - those are two of the easiest places to measure, and while they won't be any use to you if you get a different saddle, they'll let you get back to where things were with this one.

(2) Give the fitter a call and tell him what's going on.

(3) When you're riding, regardless of whether you tweak the fit or not, concentrate. Heels down, heels down, heels down, think about driving through your tibias all the way to your heels. If you like the boot-scraping visualization that a lot of people use, think about scraping the back part of your arches, getting all that horsepucky out of where it lodges immediately forward of the heel of the boot - not scraping the balls of your feet. It took me at least a whole season to learn not to ankle.

(4) Whenever you're sitting and can slip your shoes off, roll your feet out with a spiky ball or ridged roller, concentrating on the area just forward of your heels, but getting the whole length of the plantar fascia.

(5) At least once a day, roll out your calves with a (non-spiky) Stick or rolling pin, and/or when you're sitting, you can cross your legs and dig at trigger points in each calf with the opposite knee.

(6) If it's really bad, you might try a night splint. But IME, those are expensive, uncomfortable, and only a Band-Aid solution. You want to address what's causing you to point your toes when you sleep, if you are doing that. (Which come to think of it, make sure you don't tuck your top sheet under the mattress ... that alone can force you to point your toes when you sleep.) But it's a good quick way to let everything rest and heal.


HTH. But I would definitely contact the fitter and get his input. It sounds kind of likely to me that raising the saddle might be causing you to point your toes ... but is that because you really can't reach the pedals, or because you're not accustomed to opening your knee joints as much as you ought to? Only someone who can see you on the bike will be able to answer that. Be sure to at least discuss crankarm length with the fitter too, if you didn't do that before. It's not an inexpensive swap unless you can find a used crankset in the size you need, but having 165s makes all the difference in the world to me.

I do think you're right that it was probably too big of a change all at once. Six millimeters in a single direction is a lot (see, doesn't that sound like more than a quarter of an inch? ), and if he moved your saddle both up and back, then you've increased the distance from your hip joint to your pedal by even more than that. Going halfway back and working the change in stages is a good idea (or even more than halfway - sometimes 2 mm at a time is as much as I'll do). But I would still get the fitter's input.