The Riding at F.I.S.T. Bike Fit Camps

August 22, 2022

We are generally credited with founding dynamic bike fit. Stack and Reach were invented here on Slowtwitch and our F.I.S.T. Bike Fit Workshops showcased the first use of dynamic fit bikes, which we designed and built. What followed – GURU and Retül notably – were enhancements in tooling and different expressions of dynamic fit.

We have a workshop coming up, our last of the year, September 19th thru the 23rd, and registration is here. But I have some things to say about fit; and some pics to show that I don’t normally show, that illustrate what it’s really like around here.

In my opinion, bike fit has changed a bit over the past few years, during and since the pandemic. It is my observation that in the aggregate (certain of these brands might disagree) the major flagship brands – Cannondale, Trek, Specialized, Shimano – were very lean-forward on bike fit but have cooled on the idea, or aren't as ardent as they were. That’s certainly the case in “ecumenical” bike fit, which is to say, a bike fit session the output of which consists of the most appropriate bikes for a customer regardless of whether the shop or the fitter sold those bikes.

You might even say that bike fit is under siege, both by the retreat of some of the major brands in their advocacy and execution of fit, and by the manufacture of bikes that are hard to adjust to a rider’s desired coordinates. But this does not deter me – there are bright spots. For example, if bike adjustments have gotten harder on road bikes they’ve gotten easier on tri bikes. Tri is the category where fit, and the honoring of fit, has flourished.

This is in some part because certain of the designers of these parts – David Bowden of Profile Design stands out – understand the discipline of bike fit and David supercharges his products designs with fit options. Likewise those who make tri bikes, such as Trek, Cervelo, Quintana Roo, Canyon. Their bikes all have an appropriately wide range of height and length, and granular adjustment increments between them, either because they design their own front ends that way, or they rely on Vision and/or Profile Design to do this for them.

That’s the sum total of my brags and gripes. To the matter at hand. We’ve tried to explain what happens around here inside our workshops. We’ve not done too much to describe what we do in between our workshop sessions. The images above and below illustrate some of this. Mostly, the riding. We ride every day or almost every day during a F.I.S.T. Workshop, but this isn’t mandatory.

We have a fleet of gravel bikes here for folks who want to borrow bikes while they attend the workshop. We have a size run and then some, mostly OPEN Wides with SRAM mullet configs: Force or Rival eTap AXS from the crank forward, Eagle or Eagle GX from the crank back. The wheels we put on these are 27.5” HED Emporias, with 53mm Schwalbe G-One Bites the most common tires. Whiskey seat posts. Zipp stems and Quickview faceplates. All my favorite stuff.

Why the overkill on the tires? Because it’s not overkill here. It’s just kill. Our riding, as I hope you can see, is quite varied here. The Compound is in the cleft between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Mojave high desert. If we go down from where we are (4,100’ above sea level) there’s a lot of sandy terrain and we need tire width. If we go up it’s mountainous, we’re in the trees, there are steep pitches, creek crossings, and we still need the wider tires. As we like to say around here, everybody has to decide what gravel means to him or her.

Why not just ride MTB then? Two reasons. First, we just like the road bar motif, with a gravel twist (flare, short reach, very shallow drop). Second, a lot of our loops are half gravel half pavement.

Monty (ex pro triathlete Mark Montgomery) owns the B&B next to The Compound and he’s the cook most of the time.

Some of our riding takes us near the Devil’s Punchbowl, below, a several square mile rock formation very popular with endurance folk and hikers.

The road in the pic below is at 7,400’ in elevation, and the roads here go to just about 8,000’.

The image below is part of some of the loops we do. From the Compound if you end up where this pick is taken, you earned your way there. Our typical rides are no-drop – meaning, actual no-drop – but during the week riders self-select into groups for harder rides.

A “harder ride” might mean 25 miles, half gravel have paved, the high point at 7,000’ above sea level.

But we do a lot more than ride, of course. The point is bike fit and we instruct on gravel, road and tri, the three endeavors we enjoy most in life.

We have a lot of returners, who came for the teaching but return for… more teaching?… more riding? We have a very special deal for F.I.S.T. grads who return, and we have a lot of fitters who come back to brush up and learn what's new since they were here. But it's possible the riding has something to do with it.