My friend and colleague, Julie Young, sent me an email asking some deep, thoughtful questions about fitting riders properly on their mountain bikes. The central theme was around steeper seat tube angles on many modern mountain bikes and how that it is challenging and sometimes impossible to get a rider’s saddle offset far enough back behind the bottom bracket on a mountain bike to match their road position.
This question has a lot of nuance and detail. I asked Julie if she would come back onto the pod to do a sort of Q&A style episode, inspired by her thoughtful question. Then, after laboring over these questions even further, I realized that I needed to bring in mountain bike geek-extraordinaire, Travis Brown, also a previous podcast guest (Travis Brown: Mountain Biking Olympian and Hall of Famer.) It is time to unpack bike geometry and rider weight distribution in great detail.