The Howard Experience

"We're going to see JH tomorrow" my husbands says. You know when you can refer to someone via initals... you're talking about someone who has iron branded an industry. You know, like LA. Here's your clue.. has to do with cycling.

JH would, of course, be John Howard. Last year I was lucky enough to buy a barely used QR tri bike off a friend who absoutely dispised the geometry. Last year I was also luck enough to have Efrat Veidman in town and show me the ropes about this whole cycling bit. She also introduced me to John Howard and convinced me to do a fitting with both my Trek road bike & radical QR TT bike. So, hence, I met JH in Jan of 2007. He did his magic, repositioned just about everything on my road bike (including a dramatic hike in seat height... almost 3 cm!), took one look at the QR and said... "oh, now this is a radical bike" and left it a little more conservative. I can't complain, the bike's done me well.

This year... I'll have a side of fries with my radical. We hooked up the QR and did all the fitting based on the QR this year. I've been feeling like a big slug, so I wasn't looking to smash my testing results from last year. I gave my first baseline test a solid effort (on the QR unchanged) and crushed my results from last year. Oh... I don't know if I can repeat that for my 2nd test post adjustments. Had I done too big an effort?? Crap, I was going to look like the idiot who sprints out of the start gates for a long effort and fizzles after 100 meters.

John first measured key angles and distances. The plumb line from my knee at 3 o'clock position was 5.5 cms fore of the ball of my foot. He hiked the seat up a wee bit and did his thing and went radical with my arm positioning. Not quite the Praying Landis radical, but quite a change. More aero. Better angles. Better access to my core. He re-measured the line from my knee...and voila, now I was only ~1 cm fore.... amazing to thing he didn't really change the position of my seat. By moving my bars up to a better position, it set me back in my seat and gave me a better leg position too.

We re-tested. My average wattage went up by 20 watts... a hot & spicy 379 watt average...

Swing Batta!

(pics from my fitting in Jan of 07 with John & Efrat)