Okay ...I'll come out of lurk mode (again, and rarely) on this one: I just spent the past spring & summer months on mountain bars (on the Hoo'); hardly got on the road bike at all. Wide bars, and not road drops ...but if off-topic, still I'd imagine the following as pertinent (these are straight bars with extensions, and considerably wider overall then most drop bars, I'd imagine ...note that this was typical road-type riding, and not off in the bush anywhere).
My left elbow started "bothering" me as this year wore on, a kind of soreness in the joint (or so I thought). It was a very gradual increase in pain, and I pretty much shrugged it off to getting old.
I didn't think much about it, really (I'm getting "of an age" and I thought it might be the beginnings of arthritis, or something equally droll) ....until about a month ago, when - while hefting down a boxed monitor (only about 40 lbs, from a not-too high stack ...something that I've never had a problem with doing previous) the pain instantly ratcheted up, and caused me to all but drop the bloody box.
Wake up call. To make this short, the doctor focused in - eventually - on the change in riding type, and the wider (mountain) bar, which he suggested had (in retrospect) been putting an unusual strain on my left elbow (dunno why it didn't bother the right one), which condition actually has some kind of fancy Latin-ish name ...and prescribed aspirin, r&r (no riding at all, sigh), and a "change" [back] to narrow bars.
The [formerly] fairly constant pain is lessening (it's only when I put an oblique strain on that elbow that I notice at all, now). And. I'll be riding *narrow* bars.
Everyone's body is designed to the same plan, but the devil's in the details ....and - in my case - even one elbow is somehow different then the other. But I too beg to differ, and there are certainly reasons other then aesthetic & historical for favoring narrow bars.
Your mileage may certainly differ.
And it may very well be that some people can tolerate better wider "angles of attack" then others ...I'm not one of them: I need to "angle in" so to speak, to avoid this problem in the future (I've been riding 39 Sakae's since the early 1970's btw: CR content).
It is also quite true that while on road bars, I probably spent as much or more time on the flats as on the drops (I don't race, obviously) ...which is an entirely different "environment" then you have with straight bars (where you're always on the ends, or the extensions ...both of them requiring me to angle outward with the Hoo's bars).
My more "traditional" riding pattern also consisted of spending a moderate amount of time upright, sans hands-on-bars ...which - now that I consider it - rather belies the whole "better steering" argument, don't you think? (It seems to me that steering is more a function of f&f geometry then of handlebar width, regardless ...after all, these aren't automobiles, and so one steers as much or more by leaning & body english as by twisting the bars, which is a sure way to dump. Though I can easily stand corrected here by the experts on the list.)
And - this is not meant to offend anyone - it is simply incorrect to suggest that a matter of individual fit (for that's the real issue, and NOT necessarily leverage force, aesthetics, etc.) can be summed up with "...wide bars good, narrow bars bad" (which may be true for some of you, but for some of us the reverse is [now] demonstrably "truer").
--- brandon davis ---
-- sacramento, ca --
> --- ORIGINAL MESSAGE ---
>
> Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 08:59:02 -0700
> From: Chuck Schmidt <chuckschmidt@earthlink.net>
> Reply-To: chuckschmidt@earthlink.net
> Subject: Re: [CR]bar width (was SR Royal)
>
> I have no problem doing long rides on 38cm or 42cm bars myself. But
> that's just me apparently. The suffering comment was made in jest.
> Chuck Schmidt
> SoPas, SoCal
>
> > --- ORIGINAL MESSAGE ---
> >"C. Andrews" wrote:
> >
> > Chuck proposed:
> >
> > "Tim, you can get use to 39cm. And besides, don't you remember the
> > saying on the New York fashion runways, "You have to suffer
> > for fashion, Darling!"
> > Can apply to bicycles too...
> >
> > Chuck Schmidt
> > SoPas, SoCal"
> >
> > Chuck, I could not disagree more with this statement. Well,
> > ok the first line...the rest, about suffering, I agree with,
> > as in, narrow bars make for suffering. Bars that are too
> > narrow (and 39 c-c bars are too narrow for almost everybody,
> > imho), offer no upside whatever, and make for some real
> > disadvantages. Every time I put another 42cm c-c bar on a
> > bike I breath a big sigh of relief. I have 44" shoulders,
> > and 39cm bars are like a weird form of torture for me.
> > Steering is lousy, leverage is lousy. Everything is lousy
> > about them.
> >
> > Why narrow bars on so many of the classic road bikes, even
> > the taller ones? I'm gonna take a wild guess at two
> > reasons, someone please fill me in otherwise: 1) narrow
> > bars make for more room in the peleton. An ancient
> > justification, hard to accept given the advantages of
> > leverage provided by wider bars, esp. climbing hills. 2)
> > for a lot of years, most (not all, but most) European pros
> > were tall, skinny guys, or just skinny, with modest shoulder
> > width, and they could tolerate those ridiculous narrow bars.
> >
> > Ok, fire away! Nobody's gonna change my mind though. I'm
> > with GP on this one: wide bars good, narrow bars bad.
> >
> > Charles "where's my 44" Andrews
> > SoCal