Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Lyle and I are a Little Different

I've always wobbled in the saddle.  Always.  I've been riding a bike for 25 years and I've always been told that I need to lower my saddle or do this or do that to correct my wobble.

Well I have tried.  Many times.  To no avail.  I studied the issue quite a bit a couple of years ago.  You can read about my ponderings in my 2006 posts: Saddle Height and at Saddle Height/Q-Rings.

A friend graciously reopened that conversation for me the other day.  This time I thought about it some more and decided to check LLD - leg length discrepancy.  I carefully measured my trochanter heights - the height from the floor to the tip of the little bony protrusion on your hip bone.  It's the most lateral protrusion of the greater trochanter in this image:


One trochanter is 35” from the floor. The other is 34.25” from the floor. Hmmmm.  It seems that in LLD speak that's about a mile.

I did some Google work and found lots of people rushing to their doctors and trashing all thier shoes because they had a leg length discrepancy of ¼” or ½”.

I seem to have a ¾” LLD goin’ on.

I’m leaning towards the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it approach; but we’ll see.  I'd like to fix the wobble; and I think the LLD is the likely cause.  But I suspect there's a good chance I'd screw something else up if I started adding shims, et cetera.  And all that would be a pain in the arse, even if only figuratively.

And I haven't had any pain or discomfort, just an occasional snickering teammate.  I can live with that.  Lyle and I don't want to be like the rest of you anyway.

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