After my original fitting, I knew that I needed a new saddle, new shoes, and an adjustment of my front end, which that fitter was not comfortable dealing with. After a couple of months of searching for a saddle and shoes, I decided to go to the Cervélo experts at Enduro Sport to just deal with the whole thing from scratch.
Very interestingly, I was much less satisfied with the second fitting process, but much, much more satisfied with the result. I wasn't really measured at all, but the Enduro fitters instead had a kind of intuitive vision for what they wanted to achieve and just used their experience to eyeball everything into place. I just wanted to trust that this is their territory, and they'd do a great job.
We first picked a new saddle by trial-and-error. Essentially all the "traditionally shaped" saddles were very uncomfortable on me, slitted or not. I finally tried the comically-shaped ISM Adamo Racing II, which has two prongs protruding in the front, with quite a gap in between. Sheer comfort for all my parts! It was the only one that didn't have me squirming around to find the right spot. For anyone who knows Polish, I was sorry that the Serfas brand Curva saddle did not fit! I also settled on the Shimano TR52 men's carbon-soled shoes, which are nice and wide in the toe box.
My seat post got raised, my saddle got moved forward. It turns out that from that position, and with my elbows resting directly over the pads, the aero bars are actually perfectly sized for me. This was a point of contention, because the other fitter wanted me to keep my upper forearms on the pads, while the head fitter here, Chris Bastie, insisted that the elbows must be on the pads, so that the weight of the body is transferred down from the shoulders along the skeletal structure, not through the arm musculature, which will reduce fatigue. In the end, the stem did not have to be shortened in order for me to handle the shifters easily.
They did acknowledge that the wedges put into my cleats by the first fitter were good when I told them about my knees that rotate inward. However, it seems they wouldn't have known that otherwise, as they did not measure my foot angles the way he had done. They moved my shoes slightly forward on the pedal, as apparently pushing down with the metatarsal part of the foot can cause numbness, which I certainly was experiencing. They then adjusted the float of my cleats, which I hadn't heard of before and asked about. The floating cleat allows your foot and knee to find a natural position over the pedals, which will reduce the chance of knee injury. There should be an equal amount of float of the heel to either side of the cleat.
The last major adjustment was to lose one of the stem risers and instead make-up the height of the elbow pads with an aero bar riser, so that I would be angled more steeply down towards the shifters. Then they loosened the aero extensions and had me find the right angle so that I could totally relax my arms and hands. The goal with arm position is that one does not have to hang onto the extensions, but can keep the hands loose and relaxed.
All this took a very long time, so in the end, I had to leave the bike at the shop so that the mechanic could make some final adjustment. One was to re-angle the wing base bar to be completely horizontal to reduce drag. The other was to flip the shifters upside-down, which is apparently easier to use.
Haven't been on a real ride on the new set-up yet, but I took it for a spin around the block, and it does seem quite comfortable. Only time will tell if I made the right decision to get this thing re-fitted!
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