Dan Casey

• About Dan Casey
• E-mail Dan

Years ago, fitting bicycle to rider involved little more than sliding the seat post into the proper position. Now you can pay big bucks for a custom analysis and adjustments measured by the millimeter.

West Best, co-owner of East Coasters Cycling & Fitness, measures the alignment of bicycle racer Ed Dickenson’s knee and foot during a computer-aided analysis of Dickenson’s bike fit and pedal stroke. The shop began offering the new service in December and so far has performed them for about 100 bicyclists. In the background is Ian Webb, who owns a bike shop in Shreveport, La., and has come to Roanoke to learn how to perform the service.

Ed Dickenson's lithe form stretches over the red and white racing bike inside East Coasters Cycling & Fitness in Roanoke County. As he pedals, the high school French teacher gazes at a circular graph on a video screen. On it appears a green-line drawing that looks like a pair of skewed eyeglasses that a child has drawn.

The spinning rear wheel is mounted into an electronic instrument called a CompuTrainer. A low-pitched whir sounds as the rear tire turns the indoor trainer's brain. The output is fed into a computer and appears as the graphic on the video screen.

The verdict is announced by Wesley Best, co-owner and manager of East Coasters Cycling & Fitness: 65 percent efficiency in the right pedal; 56 percent in the left. With that, Best's work has just begun.

Over the next couple of hours, he'll measure Dickenson with a precision that would make Alphonse Bertillon proud: femur length; foot width; knee flexion angle, hamstring flexibility.

At one point, Best uses a laser to check the alignment of Dickenson's knees with his feet while he's pedaling. At another, Best lays his subject on a massage table and twists and bends limbs as a chiropractor might.

Wes Best explains data on a video screen showing results of a CompuTrainer Spinscan analysis.

Meanwhile, East Coasters mechanic Frank Deal works over Dickenson's bike, measuring seat height, top bar length and many other dimensions by the millimeter.

The object is the perfect bike fit, so that Dickenson can maximize his riding potential.

Not your grandpa's bike fit

Welcome to 21st century bicycling.

Back in the late 1950s or '60s, when many baby boomers hopped on their first bike, fit involved two pretty simple concepts: whether you could straddle a bike comfortably while you stood and whether your feet reached the pedals while you rode.

Today, those aging boomers can easily pay thousands of dollars for ultralight bikes built from the same exotic materials used in jetliners. But their creaky bodies are far less forgiving. What's a few hundred bucks more to make sure they can get the most out their high-end bikes?

The CompuTrainer aims to fill that need by combining biomechanics, technology, and the cult that seeks performance improvement via precision measurement. East Coasters purchased the $1,500 machine last fall. Best decided to combine its analysis with his years of experience as a bike racing coach and highly trained "fitter" for custom-built bikes.

The result is the service he began offering in December. Since then, he estimates he's performed about 10 sessions, which can range in price from $75 to $350, depending on what a cyclist wants analyzed. The most expensive option takes most of a day.

It's something that's offered in only a few bike shops in Virginia right now, Best says. None of the other bike shops in the valley feature the service. But across the country, the number of bike shops that do is growing.

On this day, Best has two observers watching him put Dickenson through the paces. One is Ian Webb, the owner of a bike shop in Shreveport, La. The other is Lindsay Langford, a bike racer and nutritionist who's also from Shreveport.

Webb, who used to live in Roanoke and work at East Coasters, has recently hired Langford to perform custom fits and SpinScan analyses in his shop. They've flown up for the weekend for lessons from Best.

Sometimes daunting sport

Bicycling already is rife with daunting terms like "carbon-fiber stays," "clipless pedals" and prices that can seem daunting, too. But the CompuTrainer and the things you can do with it have spawned all kinds of new bike-geek lingo.

As Best moves Dickenson through the process, he tosses out terms like "average torque angle," "leg-length discrepancy" and "mal-alignment syndrome." This fixation for measuring performance is fairly new in cycling, he notes. In that sense, it is well behind some other sports. In golf, all of the elements of the perfect swing have been broken down and analyzed for decades.

Measured on the CompuTrainer, Best says, the average cyclist is 60-70 percent efficient overall. For a Tour de France racer, that level increases to about 85 percent.

Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Wes Best, owner of East Coasters Cycling & Fitness in Roanoke County, measures the angle of Ed Dickenson's lower leg through a pedal stroke.

Related

Photo Gallery

• Open the gallery

Dickenson, 42, is an experienced road and cyclocross racer who holds age-group championships in Virginia and North Carolina. He's not at all uncomfortable while riding, and he averages up to 200 miles per week. Near the end of the process, Best pronounces him nearly perfectly balanced, and rules his bike is a great fit.

But he believes even Dickenson can benefit from some slight changes. Best prescribes a couple of shims on the bottom of Dickenson's left shoe, because his left leg is about a half-centimeter shorter than his right. It could help Dickenson maximize his efficiency while riding, which could give him greater stamina in races.

The potential gains are often more dramatic with less advanced riders.

Best recalls one guy from the New River Valley who recently came into East Coasters.

"His main complaint was, 'I can't ride longer than three hours because it hurts so bad.' " said Best, who analyzed his pedal stroke, measured his limbs and bike, then made some changes.

"The following weekend he went out with the New River Bicycle Club and did a 512-hour ride and later sent me an e-mail and said he felt great."