#1. How I Became A Bike Fitter

The earliest memory I have of cycling impacting me on a deep level was in the early '80s. It was called Le Tour de France.

I was born in 1978, and back then there were only four channels on the TV. The Tour de France was on Channel 4, and it had this catchy theme tune that would end up stuck in your head for weeks as the tour and the riders made their way around France.

The highlight of the race was always when the mountains came, and along with it, the opportunity to watch real superheroes (not the fake Marvel kind) compete in the hardest sport in the world, on the most impossible gradients I had ever seen, set in the most beautiful scenery. It was the ultimate bike race.

I was obsessed with it—the biggest annual sporting event on the planet—and the highlight was watching a Scotsman, one of our own, Robert Millar, in a polka dot jersey conquering the impossible. Millar won the King of the Mountains and finished fourth overall in 1984. He was very much a childhood hero of mine.

I would badger my dad every year: “Can I get a road bike? Can I get a road bike?” His response was always the same: “You’ll just bang it up and down those curbs.” My dad had an old blue, steel Merckx stored in the shed, and I used to sneak in and stare at it, then climb on it, wishing I was big enough to ride it, with my feet dangling down. I would imagine what it must be like to ride the Tour de France on a proper racing bike.

But I did have a wee bike back then, with fat enough tyres to bang up and down the kerbs on, and which the local bike shop somehow managed to fit a five-speed rear derailleur to. And so that was that—it had gears on it, which made it a proper bike anyway.

When I played football, I was Kenny Dalglish. When I rode a bike, I was Robert Millar. I spent my time doing wheelies, building jumps, and just pedalling as hard as I could everywhere. Every ball I kicked, I was playing for Liverpool FC, and every pedal stroke, I imagined I was riding the Tour de France, riding high in the mountains with the riders of the Tour and Robert Millar.

I started riding very young. My first mountain bike was a 1988 yellow steel Peugeot Sahara with a steel rigid fork, which I rode around the local forests and pretty much anywhere that was ‘off-road’. Then, in about 1996, I bought a Specialized Rockhopper. Front suspension was a revelation, and it changed the sport. I probably rode that bike for about six years. I would ride it all day, packing a rucksack, grabbing a paper OS map, and heading off for the day until the sun went down. Then I had about three to four years off the bike, and it wasn’t until 2006 that I could afford to buy a road bike of my own—and so I did.

I bought a carbon PX. Terrible bike! Way too much flex, but it was carbon, so it must be good, right? I just wanted to ride this bike as fast as I could, but the problem with it was that it felt like too much power was going to waste, like I was inefficient. Things were also sore when I came back from a ride.

I would say I’m one of, if not the most curious people I know. I’m also persistent. With an inherent curiosity and a desire to get the most out of every pedal stroke, I sought out some books to see if I could find the magic formula that would promise the power and efficiency I was looking for. There must be some generic ‘rules’ for setting up a bike that I can follow—there must be!

The books provided me with formulas for setting seat height (LeMond, etc.), a method known as KOPS (Knee Over Pedal Spindle) to set saddle setback, and I even enlisted the help of a friend to achieve a knee angle of 25 degrees using a goniometer at one point—ouch! None of it worked. I had neck issues, feet issues, and I even wore a pair of bib shorts through on one side, until one day I stumbled upon an Australian bike fitter called Steve Hogg… and down the bike fitting rabbit hole I went!

Steve had been writing for magazines and was now writing a bike fitting blog. He had also produced a bike fitting DVD called Sitting Pretty, and so I began digesting his work. I think between discovering the blog and starting bike fitting, I probably read the entire website, including all the PDFs, at least ten times. That’s a lot of reading. There is a career’s worth of information on there, and I think it would probably take a month to read through the whole website from start to finish.

Dealing with the feet was always at the forefront of my mind, even as a kid. One time, I appeared at my dad’s garage, age 12 or 13, announcing the need for some kind of wooden wedge to be fabricated (right there and then)—or something, at least—that I could place between my foot and the pedal (I swear I’m not making this up!) to “even out the pressure on my foot.” Steve’s articles on foot correction made much more sense to me than anything I’d previously seen or read, and triggered a deeper interest still.

The more I read, the more questions I had. I learned so much through the forum and chatting to Steve. I gained knowledge and understanding through reading and experimenting with those ideas.

In the end, I reasoned that if I had to travel to the south of England to receive a proper bike fitting, then with what I now knew, there was scope to provide a similar service to the people of Scotland.

I assessed exactly what equipment and tools I needed to start fitting in Scotland. I built a plinth, bought a suitable trainer, bought some tools, insoles, wedges and shims, and got started.

Garry Kirk Bike Fitting was established in 2014.