Nathan, If you made the jump from 20 to 50 miles in one shot, a little soreness might not be too unexpected. I'd say keep the Noodles for now, ride some more, fine tune your position and get a little fitter before swapping bars. The Moustache is not likely to be the quick cure for you.
Careful saddle positioning may actually help. I'm sure Mark got it close, but close may not be perfect. Saddle height, tilt and fore-aft position are interdependent, and getting them all right can take a little while. Use a level, tape measure and plumb bob to track your changes, the adjustments can be too small to eyeball. Moving the nose up or down as little as 1/16" can be felt, saddle height adjustments of 1/8 likewise! The plumb bob is to check setback, the horizontal distance from the saddle nose to the center of the BB. The sweet spot will change a bit as the leather saddle ages, so you'll need to tinker some to get it right. The next step would be to see if your current stem should be shorter and/or taller. As I said above, I went to an 8 cm stem and swapped my Noodle bar for a bar with less forward reach and less drop on my Riv Road. The reduced reach to the brake hoods took a lot of load off of my arms and back. Unfortunately I don't know of any silver short- reach drops, so the Riv now has an ugly black painted bar (Ritchie Biomax - nice tops and ramps, don't much like the drop sction). Worse yet, the bar with the bend I'd really like to use (3T Ergosum) only comes with a 31.8 clamp, which would mean a black threadless stem and a threaded to threadless adapter post, and I don't think I'd want to do that to my Rivendell! Bill On May 2, 10:55 am, nathan <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for all of your wisdom! Let me provide some more info. > > I purchased a Romulus last month and soon after went over to RBW where > Mark kindly setup the bike's current bar and saddle heights. I've been > mostly enjoying the Noodle bar so far, but have been doing mostly 5-20 > mi rides. Yesterday was my first long ride (50 mi) with the bike, and > about halfway through I had a pretty intense soreness in lower my > back. This hampered my comfort for the rest of the ride; I had to stop > a few times to stretch and rest so that I could keep on going. The guy > I was riding with suggested I try out the Moustache bars, to get a > more upright position, so that I'm not leaning forward as much / > tensing my back as much. So, I'd like to at least experiment with new > bars and see if they make a difference on long rides. > > Here's a photo of our bikes on the ride yesterday: > <http://www.flickr.com/photos/natan/3492115283/>. You can see my bars are just > about level with the saddle, and both stem (Technomic Deluxe) and post > are right below max height (the bike is just a little small for me…). > I'm willing to try out a new stem too, it sounds like the Nitto > DirtDrop is the way to go if I move forward with the Moustache bar. > > -nathan --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
