I go dog-walking at the crack of dawn every morning with a couple of 80-year-old men, old desert rats who are my closest neighbors. I told one of them a pretty good story day before yesterday, and he quipped as we were parting ways, "That was a great one. If I forget it tell it to me again tomorrow."

This is one of old age's problems. Memory. I don't know whether it's that the brain has a reduced capacity to retain memories or whether, like a computer's hard drive, the brain just gets so packed full that there's no more room for new memories without jettisoning some old ones.

I'm not that old, but I've piled a lot of data into my 45-year-old noggin over the years, and while a good bit of it is of dubious value, it's taking up capacity that might be given over to more worthwhile information like, for example, any memory of what I've previously written in these Slowtwitch pages. I'm going to write on a topic that is very possibly covered elsewhere here, and frankly it would be quicker to just write it than to research its possible existence elsewhere.

I also feel justified in writing this retread—if that's what it is—because it's apparent to me that many of you don't remember what I wrote any better than I do, based on the topics that keep popping up on our forum. One of these is the issue of base bars and seat angle, and the linkage between the two.

This issue comes up every year when I write about our Kona Survey. I usually throw in an off-hand remark about the percentage of riders who choose a steep or shallow seat angle, and the juxtaposition of this value against the percentage of those riding drop versus pursuit bars. I believe this year I wrote something along the lines of, "Let's hope the slack-angled riders and the drop-bar riders are the same riders."

Why do I write this? Why does this matter? Because there are traditional reasons why handlebars are made the way they're made, and they work very well due to a century's worth of trial and error.

But first, some nomenclature. When I write "base bar" I'm talking about that handlebar onto which our aero clip-ons bolt. The clip-ons are going to bolt onto one of two types of base bars: a "drop" or "road race" bar (these terms are synonymous); or they'll bolt onto a "pursuit" bar, which might also be called a bullhorn or cowhorn bar.

It ought to be intuitive which sorts of seat angles are made for which sorts of base bars. If you've purchased a Giant, or Felt, or Trek, or Cannondale, or any standard road race bike (not tri bike), and assuming you haven't altered the seat angle greatly by affixing a special seat post on the bike that facilitates moving the saddle way forward, you're riding a slack-angled bike. By "slack" or "shallow" angle I'm referring to your seat angle. You'll notice of course that your seat tube is angled backward relative to the ground. If it stood perfectly perpendicular it would be at a 90-degree angle relative to the ground. But it's angled back, and so the angle is reduced, i.e., the angle is less than 90-degrees. If it's only reduced to 80-degrees, or perhaps even 77-degrees, it's considered a steep-angled bike. If it's reduced to 74- or 72-degrees it's considered a shallow-angled bike. Road race bikes like, for example, the Trek OCLV that the Postal Team rides in the road stages of the grand tours, will have seat angles of about 73-degrees, and pretty-much all riders will ride the mass-start road stages on bikes that are within one degree of this, one way or the other.

These bikes will also be outfitted with road race bars. If you own a bike like this—and all the bikes in the grand tours, and in every other bike race, and in centuries, are practically all made like this—you ought to ride the bike with road bars. Just slap on your clip-ons and go (though I would recommend a shorter clip-on than what would be usual on a full tri bike).

If you have a steep-angled tri bike, however, you've got a few things going on other than simply steepening the seat angle. In fact one majore reason for making the seat angle steeper is so that you can adopt a more aerodynamic position, and by definition this means achieving a lower position in the front of the bike. You'll be riding with a flatter back. Your clip-ons will be several centimters closer to the ground. You'll also find that your preferred bike position will be one in which your base bar is much closer to you than would be the case on your road bike.

To give you an example, I ride a road race bike that has a 59cm or 60cm top tube, that is, my top tube is 60cm long. My tri bike, on the other hand, only has a 55.5cm top tube. Since I ride each bike with the same length of stem, its axiomatic that my "cockpit distance" has shrunk by almost 5cm. Furthermore, my head tube has also shrunk, and this puts me closer to the ground in front. My road race bike has a 17cm long head tube, and my tri bike's head tube is only 12cm. This means my tri bike's base bar, as it passes through the stem, is positioned several centimeters closer to my person than is the handlebar on my road bike, and it's also positioned several centimeters lower to the ground.

Through all those decades of trial and error that I spoke of earlier, the "road" handlebar has evolved to the point where the hand positions are quite comfortable and effective. You've got the "tops" for seated climbing, and the "hoods" for just cruising along, or for out-of-the-saddle climbing, and the "drops" for sprinting or going hard and fast with less wind resistance. These bar shapes have evolved in concert with frame geometry. Frame makers and handlebar makers have made products that work in concert with each other, and they've been doing so since before the first world war.

But oh, wait just one minute. All of a sudden, in the last ten or fifteen years, we've got this new-fangled idea, the "tri bike." This bike came along as an "answer" or a "result" of the "aero handlebar," which only came onto the scene 15 years ago. Now, if one puts a road race bar onto a steep-seat-angled, short-cockpitted tri bike, the hand positions aren't where they're supposed to be anymore. In fact, they can be downright dangerous. The "drops" position is now so low and "close in" to the rider's torso as to be useless. In fact, certain athletes in the early '90s, Mike Pigg for one, used to simply use road race bars with the drops cut entirely off below the hoods! His reasoning? The drops position was unusable, so why have it there? Of course this meant that braking could only by executed with the hands on the hoods position, certainly not advisable for emergencies, or for twisty descents.

What has evolved as a very suitable alternative bar is the "flat" pursuit bar. By "flat" I mean that the pursuit bar has little or no drop in elevation as it leaves the stem. Pursuit bars used to have an elevation drop, but this was in the old pre-aero-bar days, when the pursuit bar position was the aero position. Now it's the position you're only in for climbing out of the saddle, or for braking and cornering.

What should the pursuit bar position be analogous to on a road bike? I think it depends on your event. If you're ONLY using your time trial bike for flattish courses, or for the track, or for short distances, then perhaps a pursuit bar with a little bit of drop is called for. In this case your pursuit position ought to be more akin to where your road bars drops WOULD be if you had a road race bike. In other words, when you're out of the saddle sprinting, you're only touching the bike at the bottom bracket and at the pursuit bars (the saddle's position is irrelevant because you're not sitting on it), and you'll position your pursuit bars in the same place in point in space—relative to the bottom bracket—that your road bar drops inhabit on your road bike. If you do this your tri bike will feel like your road bike drops (more or less) when you're on your pursuit bars.

On the other hand, for most triathletes, your pursuit position will probably be more comfortable and utilitarian if it approximates your road bike's "hoods" position. In this case, when you're out of the saddle climbing on your tri bike your pursuit position will feel like your hoods, which is where you probably like to climb on your road bike. In fact, no less than Lance Armstrong gave instructions to Steve Hed this past year, when the two were corresponding on aero bar design, to make the aero bars such that when Lance was out of the saddle in the pursuit position, that it would exactly match his hoods position.

Of course there are other issues. For one thing, if you place your tri bike's pursuit bar hand positions in the same point in space as your road bike's hoods position (relative to the bottom bracket) will your knees hit the backs of the tri bike's armrests when you're out of the saddle? While this is a valid concern, I do know that I've written about it elsewhere, and it's off the subject.

This is why a certain frame geometry will match a certain handlebar type, and mixing and matching base bar designs with incompatible frame geometries isn't a good idea. Did you understand all this? If not, don't fret. I will no-doubt soon forget that I wrote this, and will re-present the argument on Slowtwitch in the not-to-distant future