Oct 22, 2019
A conversation with bike industry veteran Rick Sutton and former Olympian Colby Pearce about fit for gravel cyclists and The Wave Handlebar.
The Wave Website
The Wave Instagram
Colby Pearce Website
Colby Pearce Instagram
Automated Transcription (please excuse the typos).
Rick, Colby, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you, Rick. I always like to start off guys by learning a little bit more about your background as a cyclist. Just contextualizing how you came to riding on gravel. And then I'm super excited to get into the wave handlebar and discussing sort of the innovation you're bringing to a part of the market that doesn't really see a lot of innovation.
Okay. This is Rick. Craig and I go back, Oh gosh, quite a few years, maybe double digits. We bumped into each other riding in the San Francisco peninsula. How did I get into gravel writing? What's my background? Well it, it, it hearkens way back to the fact that I advanced to become a professional motocross, sir. And as I got slower at that, I determined that I better become more physically fit. As I was aging. Somebody suggested I buy a bicycle and before you knew it, I was riding and racing mountain bikes as well as motocross bikes in the, in the mid to late eighties. That transition into my career transition from a marketing background into an event promoter, I cofounded the sea Otter classic. Brianne, the Northern national series may have run the very first mountain bike and Duro called Rocktober Fest in 1997 and served on the UCI mountain bike commission and assorted other things over the years. And always rode my road bike with 20 threes on it up in Skeggs point and charisma Canyon and Alpine road and whatnot, and destroyed a few road bikes riding off road. And when gravel bikes came along, while, ah, I was, I was happy as one could imagine to have more tire volume and relaxed geometry.
Okay. You were a rider waiting for a product.
Yeah, I certainly was.
So then, you know, how did the, the wave handlebar come about and take a step back for the listener who may not have even heard of the wave yet. Talk about what were the sort of pressures that the company was feeling that they thought there was an opportunity to innovate in the handlebar space?
Well, all credit goes to Don chef, the inventor. You know, I was brought on in the last three years to refine the product and, and created a business around the product. But let's, let's take a moment to cheer Don chef. And he was an elite runner and he is also in the medical industry and he started riding bikes as most elite runners do due to injury. And he just felt that a flat top bar was and uncomfortable especially in climbing situations. And you know, it sounds too simple or too good to be true, but he just began to ride uphill primarily with his wrists and hands at the angles that you now see with our production wave for in essence, resting lightly on the top of a flat bar for floating in air. And he says, wow, this is a more comfortable place to be.
This goes back about 10 years. And the first iterations were very heavy aluminum that were fabricated and an automotive machine shop. And that there's been lots of, that's happened over the years. I got involved in 2016 and we launched with a very, very well thought out carbon handlebar in April of this year. Can you help us visualize a little bit about how it sweeps and battens and some of the other features that I read about? I, I certainly can. And I think when, when Colby brings some comments and he'll, he'll talk about the science behind it. I'll just talk about what it looks like. So think about how drop bars have traditionally been designed. And a lot of this is due to the fact that there was an, until recently, recently being the a hundred or more year history of cycling until recently we had a Quill STEM that did not have a detachable base plate.
So everything was a common diameter and it was a very simplistic drop bar design because it had to be able to worm its way through a coil stand that did not have a faceplate on it. What we've done with the advent of a faceplate is some other manufacturers have done with aerodynamic shapes. We as, as you visualize a handlebar and you start in the center of the handlebar at the STEM Mount and then you go ahead and fix in space the handle bar drop all of the dimensions where it floats in space on a traditional top bar. We keep that more or less in the same place as well because people like Colby and other fitters have put the writer in a position that optimizes the location of the drops in the location of the great codes and brake levers relative to the center point of the STEM.
Now, well between the drops in the STEM, we actually rise slightly up and forward for the first 10% of that distance. And the reason we go forward is because then it takes a gentle bend downward and rearward towards to the drops and to meet with a very nice transitional curve into the drops. And again, Colby, you'll talk about the science of why, but what this does, and for your listeners, if they just told their hands out in front of them as if they're holding onto a the top of a, of a flat top bar and then just rotate your thumbs up slightly at about 15 to 20 degrees, you'll naturally feel your elbows falling against your side, the stress, the tension you feel in your shoulders, your hands subsides immediately. So in essence, all we've done is take what was a stick that got you to your drops and actually taking for the first time. We're the only company that's taken full advantage of the available space between the STEM and the drops to optimize ergonomics.
That's a really great description, Rick and I, as you were doing that, I was positioning my hand and my thumb and the way you described and it's really noticeable how the elbow drops and how it feels slightly more comfortable probably in a way as cyclists, given the bars that we've been on historically we never even thought was possible, which is fascinating. So Colby, I definitely want to get you into the conversation. And your background as a cyclist is very rich and your accolades are long. So I appreciate your perspective on this. You spent your career racing on the track and the road. I'm curious for our listeners, how did you define, how did you discover gravel and when did it start to become part of your repertoire?
Well I had my, my greatest successes were on the track really. But I've been racing mountain bikes and, and cross since the beginning. I'm, I'm pretty much just signed up as a full bike dorks since the age of 15. Started mowing lawns to buy bikes and went to my first cross race, I don't know, maybe a year later. And did my first mountain bike race on a bike with really narrow bars and no fork. Cause I thought I was gonna crush everybody on the climbs. And, and then of course I fell off on every descent. So that was a good learning curve. But you know, gravel just like I live in Boulder, Colorado, so on the front range here, just like in most places in the U S and in the world, the roads have gotten more crowded so people started sort of migrating to more off road riding and we're blessed with a really good network of gravel roads here.
So over the last, I would say probably 20 years, I started riding progressively and more dirt on my road bike and then you know, in and out of racing cyclocross over those years riding my cross bike in the winter cause it's just such a good winter tool here because you can ride, you know, the position's a little more conservative relative to my road bike position. And of course your, your speed is lower. So on days where it's borderline rideable in terms of temperature, when you've got less air speed then you can stay warmer for a little longer. So it offers those advantages. And then also riding around on roads. Sometimes we have icy roads here in the front range and many times the sun will come out and blast the, the asphalt and things melt pretty quickly. But we'll have a week or two here and there where it's, it's pretty icy.
And then when you've, when you've got 33 or 35 millimeter wide tires, you've got a safety margin. So it's a good shoulder season or in between your bike to ride. So gravel, you know, in the winter and in the spring has been very useful for us. It's gotta let a utility here, but then in the summer it affords the chance to climb. And you know, for those of you who've never been to the front range, like literally we, we look East and we've got, you can see to Kansas as pancake flat, you turn around and you're at the foot of the Rockies. So I can climb 3000 feet right out of my back door. So we go, I just go get lost in the Rockies and I end up on Jeep roads and dirt roads and lights, single track or sometimes not so light single track. And all those adventures are just perfect for a gravel bike because then I, you know, if I have to ride a Canyon for 20 miles on the payment, it's not, I'm not lugging around a full suspension, cross country bike.
And then it just makes the technical aspects of the Explorer scout mode a lot more challenging and fun. So that's kinda my, my playground. Yeah, that makes sense. From my time in Boulder, I could see how a gravel bike would be perfect for there. I always remember appreciating the flat, the fact that you could go East and it could be flat on those days when, you know you didn't have the legs to climb. And then obviously if you head up into the mountains and the canyons, you've got climbing for days. Yup. That's, that's it. So after you hung up your, your professional racing hat, you transitioned still in the sport to be coming a coach and a fitter, which I think is really relevant to this conversation. Can you talk about your work these days? Yeah. So I'm a I'm a category one USCC coach which they're, it's parallel to their racing systems.
So that's the highest level you can have. And I've been coaching since about 2005 formally. And then I trained with Steve hog in Sydney, Australia as a bike fitter. I was down there for almost a month. I just lived in Sydney and trained with him and that was a really eye opening and educational experience. Steve's a brilliant out of the box thinker. He, he used constantly looking for new ways to solve problems in new ways to think about things. So he's, he's very unconventional by a lot of fitter standards and I think that's what makes him brilliant and, and a, a really amazing problem solver. And his program was, was pass, fail, like there are fitters who have gone to train with him. And after a week or so, Steve said, look, I don't think this is working out. So I was, you know, honored and also humbled to train with him and make it through his program.
And that's been great. So now I, I work as a full time coach and a full time fitter. And I've also got a side project where I'm making track frames that's called 50.1 racing. And between all that and my studies with Paul Chek, I'm also on the Czech Academy currently, which is two more years of basically school to learn about Paul check's methods. He's a strength and conditioning and holistic lifestyle coach for those people who aren't familiar with him. I've got a pretty full plate. But I, I just always want to keep learning and growing my own envelope of knowledge or my own level of understanding so that I can pass that onto my clients in different forums. So. Awesome. Awesome. When it, when it comes to sort of the emergence of gravel over the last, say five years, where the industry has really caught up with what a lot of writers have been doing are ready, have you seen approaching Ryder fit differently than you did prior to this sort of new wave of equipment and new style of riding emerging?
I wouldn't say that the base philosophy has changed, which is always simply that from my perspective, at any rate, which this is not how all fitters approach things, but my, my sort of baseline philosophy is that you have to match. On the one hand you have the physiology of the rider. And on the other hand you have the demands of the event the rider is training for or conditioning for and gravel and cyclocross. There's obviously a lot of overlap, not 100% but crosses the sport that I've race myself and fit riders in for a number of years now. And, and so we, I've got the, that baseline understanding of how to fit a brighter for a sec cross event, of course, gravel now, especially with the expansion of much longer gravel duration, gravel races, you know, stuff like well you've got tweener events kind of like Belgium waffle ride, and then you've of course, you've got Kansas, kind of the, the big go to event.
In terms of the, the endurance gravel scene or ultra gravel scene, you can even call it almost that changes things slightly. But really the demands of those events are very similar. So not, not in terms of the date philosophy. In terms of some smaller innovations. We've had things obviously like the wave bar and we've had some made some smaller progress. Like for example, the new Shimano GRX Grupo came out and there have been small but noticeable improvements in their ergonomics of their levers in their lever positioning that have been advantageous. But yeah, not dramatically
Putting riders in a, if someone comes to you and said, Kansas, my jam, I'm looking for a 200 mile race. Are you putting riders, tell me about the sort of how you might adjust the position versus someone who's racing on the road. Shorter events.
Yeah, so, well, I mean, as a general statement across position's going to be slightly less aggressive. So that means a little bit less bar drop, potentially a little bit less cockpit reach close to the same saddle offset from the bottom bracket would be my take on it. And there are a bunch of reasons behind that that I'm happy to get into if you want, but it gets a bit technical. But that depends a little bit on how aggressive the writer's road position is because again, we're always balancing the physiology of the writer or the capabilities of the writer versus the demands of their events. So someone who's got good or excellent flexibility, someone who hinges well at the hip and can ride with an extended spine has good breathing mechanics, good core stability, you can put them in an aggressive road position most of the time.
Again, it depends a little bit on their physiology. That's not always the case because sometimes you have a writer who, for example, is very short and stocky not necessarily overweight, but just a stocky build with a barrel chest and that type of rider, you won't be able to get them as aggressive in their road position because when simply put, when you hinge them at the hip, they're gonna start hitting themselves in the chest with their own knees, especially if they've got big bulky thighs or muscly size. You can offset that by shorter crinkle length. But point being is that someone who has a very aggressive road position when we put them on a cross bike, we would, we would reduce their cockpit length normally and we would probably reduce their bars, sell the bar drop just a bit. That'd be a typical starting point. We would also normally, I would typically recommend that people consider sizing up one width in handlebar size. And there are several reasons for that that I'm happy to get into too. Which pertains specifically to the differences between handling on road and gravel. Is that something you would like to hear about?
Definitely liked to hear about that because that was my sort of gut reaction when I moved onto gravel was actually bumping out the, the width of the bar. And I think that came from my experience on the mountain bike where we just went wider and wider and it seemed to get better and better. I'm also, I'm in Marine County right now and our gravel scene here are not the sort of long flowy gravel roads. It's, it's you know, double track. It's up and down. There's a lot of fast descending off road, which definitely has created my bike in a way that would be way different than I would have if I was in Kansas for example.
Right, right. So thinking about the difference between road and mountain handling or or we'll say road and off-road, it's kinda the difference between MotoGP and motorcross. Right. And Rick can comment had been on this too, but the basics are that in motocross or in cyclocross or mountain biking, we all set up bikes handling wise for a front wheel bias, meaning we have far more weight on the front wheel. And the reason for that is pretty simple. If you're riding, let's say you're riding your cross or or hardtail 29 or down a Jeep road, that's pretty fast, so we're going 25 miles an hour. So if you lose your rear wheel, meaning the rear wheel traction breaks loose. If you're a good handler, most of the time that's not a problem. But if your front wheel breaks loose, there's a higher probability that you're going to have problems staying upright.
Now a really good handler can handle the both, but for the bell curve, the rear wheel breaking freeze, okay, the front wheel breaking free, not so happy. Now compare that to a road dissent where you're going 45 miles an hour Gianna's sweeping turn. If you're on your road bike at that speed, it doesn't matter if your rear wheel breaks fee or your front wheel breaks free. Either way, you're pretty much screwed. So there's a big difference in how we handle those bikes off road versus road, and some of that has to do with suspension forks, but not always in a cross bike or gravel situation. It's those rules still pretty much remain the same. The other big difference between road and off road handling is a very high percentage of your road cornering is done by leaning the bike. So very little turning of the bars.
Really you're initiating a corner, a corner by leaning and that's because most roads cornering is happening at a higher speed and medium or high speed. Even during a a downhill switch back, you're still carrying speed of 12 1418 miles an hour. So whereas on a mountain bike you have much lower speed corners. In a cyclocross race, you've got corners where you're perhaps doing, sorry, I'll switch our relevant units six kilometers an hour, eight kilometers an hour, so that means you're going to be doing more turning and a combination of turning and leaning and so whenever you want more turning ability, that wider bar gives you simply put a wider lever arm to Le to put more leverage over the front wheel and lean and turn the wheel with less effort. The other part about mountain bike handling in particular is most crashes are at least start or happen because the wheel pretty much flicks out of control from the rider's hands.
That can be over a rock art and it can be over a big drop. It could be over a muddy stretch or maybe a wet root. And when the wheel turns too abruptly, too Fastly relative to your own inertia, that's when you to be blunt, go ass over tea kettle, right? So a simple way to offset that is to make change the length of two lever arms. One you make the STEM length shorter and to you make the bar with wider. And there is a relationship between those. So what I'm saying is if you make the bar with wider given to a relative to a baseline, frequently you want to make the STEM link shorter at the same time, some of that can be offset. Why is that? That's when we think about a traditional bar. Think about a traditional mountain bike bar being a T-shaped, meaning a zero zero degree sweep coming back, right?
Which there are bars that exist like that. But almost no one uses them. So as you take your hand, if you were to put your hands next to this STEM on the center of that bar and give, and then that gives you a a given reach from the saddle. Now if you move your hands all the way to the outside of that bar, pretend it's really wide, say 800 millimeters wide or 80 centimeters. If that bar is straight with zero sweep, you've increased your reach, not only because you've made your hands wider, but because the bar is getting farther away from you, I. E. it's not on the circumference of a circle. And the center of the circle would be the center point of the circle would be in the middle of your shoulder. So your diameter or your radius really is getting longer. So we offset that, that increase in reach by making a bar with sweep.
And really what we've discovered is on road bikes, road, traditional road bars have zero sweep. So even though you're not that far from this STEM, as your hands get further up from this STEM, there's no sweep there. And that's one of the problems with it. And that's why mountain bike bars have developed some sweep. Although I would argue even the trip, typical cross country bar that has eight or nine degrees of sweep is not enough. And to get to the point of the design of the wave bar and why bars should have some sweep as Rick was describing if you stand up and simply put your hands at your sides with we'll say neutral posture, right? So neutral posture would mean the shoulders are slightly externally rotated in the sockets, which means simply put, your shoulders are down and back now and your hands at your size right by your hip.
If you take your hand and put it out in front of you, raising the shoulder and the elbow, and now look at the position of your hand without changing anything. And you'll notice that the first knuckle or the pointer finger knuckle is higher in space than the fourth knuckle and that, and you'll also notice that the fifth knuckle is further away from your body. Then the fourth knuckle is both of those factors are what make a traditional bar that comes straight out from the STEM, kind of not ergonomic and we want the shoulders in there most powerful and stable position. We want a slight external rotation to the shoulders. That's what gives us a good ergonomic position, allows us to pull on the bars gently with the lats and also gives us the best chance for shoulder stability and the best breathing mechanics.
Interesting. And that was a really great overview and I think a lot of my listeners are gonna appreciate that coming from the road and just sort of understanding how these subtle changes make a big difference when you get into the technical stuff that we get into on our gravel bikes. So yeah, talking further about the handlebar, and I know it's a product that you've spent a lot of time on, sort of how does that translate all these things? Is it just addressing all those minor issues where you can derive benefit from this, a better breathing position and more optimal kind of position to handle unexpected jolts to your front end?
Yeah. It's also about even on a more basic level than that, it's about relaxation of the central nervous system. I mean, think about cycling as what is cycling, especially bike racing. Something like Kansas, Kansas, it's a massive load to the nervous system system in a sympathetic state, right? It's a giant sympathetic stressor. It's just, it's a bike race. It's really long and it's really hard. So there's a lot of, a lot of people have looked at the science behind how that impacts the body and all the different levels. And fundamentally that's a giant load on the nervous system. So we want to, we want to set up the bike in a way that's gonna minimize the unnecessary load on the nervous system. And this is something Paul Chek talks about extensively in his strength and conditioning classes. And specifically when you're doing strength training in the gym, think about an a pull down or a pull up, either one.
And you can have three types of grip, three orientations of grip in these types of exercises you want. You can have a prone grip. This is the same grip, we would use more grabbing the tops on a bike. A prone grip means that when you go to the pull up bar, your Palm is facing away from the body, right? A reverse grip would be you flip your hands around one 80 so that your palms are facing towards the body, right? And your pinkies are facing towards the midline. Your Psalms are out and a neutral grip. The third option would be as though you are grabbing the bike with Barrons, so the thumb is facing away from the body and the and the pinkies oriented towards your elbow. That makes sense. So 90 degrees to the first two, and there aren't many gyms that have a pull up bar system like that, but you can find them.
And Paul's teachings are that the most challenging grip neurologically is the prone grip. That's the one that challenges the nervous system the most. The second most challenging is the reverse grip and the third is the neutral grip. So what are we doing when we ride a bike all the time with a prone grip, especially when we have no sweep or slope to the grip and it's a straight bar situation. We're channel, we're giving this the nurse system a minor challenge all day. Now it's not that you can't ride your bike like that. You can, but clearly someone who signs up for Canada and pays, I don't know, however much it is, $300 for the entry and drives to Kansas and transport or it all year. You're there to race your bike. You want to do as well as you can. You don't want to just ride your bike, you want to optimize things.
So this is where this plays in, you know, 180 miles into the ride. You go down a little gully, things get a rowdy you almost fly your hands almost fly off the hoods, then you've got it yet another climb. You know, the, I've never done Kanza, but up here there's just endless rollers basically. So you're on your 99th roller of the day. That's going to be 45 seconds long. And you go to the tops and things get rowdy and your hands don't fly off the bar or you're able to just put a little more effort into the pedals or breathing instead of stacking up the demands throughout the system because the nervous system is very fundamental. When the body has high chance in the nervous system, it's going to cascade up the up the priority on until things get sideways. Yeah. I think that you see a lot of companies starting to address that notion that combating fatigue in any way possible for these log long events is an important component to success.
Mm. Well you know, Rick and I were talking about this yesterday. This is a really interesting thing about cycling. I mean cycling is such a beautiful sport and it's got such a long sort of dogmatic and iconic history in so many ways and there's so many things about bikes that have just been done a certain way forever. I mean look how long it took us to get over or actual standards, you know, and, and you know, not to go down the rabbit hole of how the bike industry can agree on anything. But I think we can agree through axles are an improvement over quick releases in many ways. Right. And disc brakes are clearly an improvement over rim brakes. I mean the technology is inarguably superior. Yeah, there are pros and cons to both, but come on. So one of those, this is, this is something Rick and I were talking about yesterday is that an interesting kind of carry over from a lot of cycling is this sort of very old school Sean Kelly perspective on things, which is, you know, starting December 1st or January 1st depending on what climate we were in.
And when you're racing season began, you got back on the bike after your break and you just started to endure and what you endured was all kinds of pain and discomfort and this pain and discomfort was to an end, which was to make you tough. Now, the old school model didn't separate certain types of pain and discomfort, meaning at the end of a hundred mile ride or your first hundred mile ride of the season, which was maybe, you know, whatever, January 1st first or something, your legs hurt because you pedaled on her miles and your lungs hurt because you were on the bike all day, but also your neck hurt and your balls were numb, or your lady parts and your hands and shoulders were numb and your feet hurt and your knees hurt a little bit. Right? And this is because there were no foot beds. Shoes were leather, and you got a new pair at the begin of the year and you broke them in over several thousand kilometers.
Were you breaking in the shoe or your foot? Well, nobody really knew the difference. You just did it. And you know, if you sit on a fence post or a screwdriver long enough, essentially it won't feel that bad, right? But does that, does that mean we should be sitting on a screwdriver wall? Of course not. Like so now we've learned, right? We figured out, we've made the huge advances in bite fitting and we've got saddles with channels and cutouts in the proper curve that actually match the shape of the bony issue. I'm not go against it and don't support all your torso weight on your soft tissue, your parent, IAM doesn't matter if you're a guy or a gal. We should not be carrying the weight of our torso on our soft tissue. Right? And we're starting to figure out making little changes and things like the ergonomics of birth, big levers, and making big changes in things like the shapes of the bars we're using so that we actually match the ergonomic demands of the human body instead of simply having a carry over.
Like Rick said, you know, handlebars, the function of handlebar shape was basically like, well, let's make something someone can grab onto and not fall off of, but also let's do it within the parameters of a to bender. And that can get through a Quill STEM and bars have largely remained unchanged from that basic formula for decades and decades and decades. And we finally looked at it and gone, you know, this doesn't really make that much sense. We can do a lot better than this. What, what, how would we design apart today? Now knowing what we know about the human body. And one more point, sorry if I'm rambling here, but there are a lot of carryovers from really old school bike fitting that are just absolute mechanical and anatomical disasters. And now fitters are starting to figure that out because everything's becoming sort of a a Kobe beef sushi roll, so to speak.
We're getting, and we're taking bits and pieces from different industries and starting to integrate them. I mean I've actually heard bike fitters coach, we want your knees to be as close to the top to you as possible. And if you squat in a gym like that, any trainer who knows what they're doing, even remotely will immediately run up to you and say, do you want to have knee surgeries? Stop school fighting like that. So there are a lot of, there are a lot of ancillary benefits. We're beginning to integrate from other modalities of exercise strength and conditioning that we're taking into the world of cycling and are paying off in terms of superior anatomical positioning.
Yeah, yeah. Now I think it's interesting and I'd gone back to your point about sort of the, the Sean Kelly approach to cycling and cycle training. I think gravel has, has just begun over the last maybe 18 months to kind of break free a little bit of, it's sort of road history and it's really exciting and creating these opportunities for new products like the wave. Rick, maybe you can talk to some of the sort of the market friction that you see from a sales perspective and just getting people to try something new. And what are some of the approaches you're taking to kind of free people's minds to think about their, their, their components differently?
Well, it's, it certainly is a challenge, but I would say that you know, the, the advantages to the gravel rider using the wave are no different than the advantages to the road rider. But when you, when you, the reason I think we were finding earlier adoption and adoption, it's not easy. We're still crossing the chasm of acceptability. But gravel writers are less fashion conscious and there's, there's this desire and the road community, the look, the asked at the coffee shop and, and our bar doesn't look fast, were in fact it is much faster than a flat top, you know, wing shaped bar. Why? Because it the shape of the top actually reduces the rider's frontal mass versus what a flat top are. So although handlebar to handlebar and a glass showcase, our bar doesn't look as aerodynamic, it puts the body in a more aerodynamic position now that when you go to the gravel guys and gals, they just want to get through the day, have a good time, and not have a sore elbow or hand so they can hoist a beer at the end of the ride.
So if the, if I, if I talk to a gravel rider that I know, I simply say, you ride this far, you're happier, you're more comfortable and it's easier to drink a beer after the ride. And that seems to be the sales technique that works best in gravel. I also talk about the thumb notch on the drops and how that provides an added level of security because you can just lock into the bar and a very familiar place as you move around on the bike and prepare for technical descents washboards things of that nature. We also, because everybody's to a certain degree of weight weaning, we talk about the exceedingly lightweight of our handlebar of 42 is under 200 grams. And we also talk about the rigorous of testing we've put the bar through to make sure that the writer understands that [inaudible] our mechanical engineers, our testing protocols, our manufacturing protocols are equal to the best bars in the market.
You know, that we're not just coming at this as a shade tree mechanics, you know, build in bars in our basement. Those are all things that help bring the rider to a point where they're comfortable trying the bar. And I think mostly you know, whether it's to a bike shop and we do protect manufacturing suggested retail prices or to our website to buy direct we offer free shipping and a 100% money back guarantee within 45 days of purchase. If you just don't like the bar, of course there's a longterm gigger guarantee. If you have any other structural issues with the bar, but try it doesn't cost you any shipping to get it, put it on your bike. And I will say with the with the hundreds of bars we've shipped out, we've not ever had one bar return.
So for your listeners, between Colby science and category and the fact that we've never had a bar returned, I think that's pretty much speaks for itself. Yeah, it says a lot. Reckon I think you've done your best to what you can do to eliminate the friction. And I think judging from the site and the testimonials about the bar and listening to Colby speak, people just need to give it a try. It's something that's interesting. It's going to add, it's going to add to your enjoyment of gravel and people need to shake free of the old stereotypes of what the bike needs to look like at the coffee shop and really start moving towards things that are gonna increase their enjoyment of the ride across the board. So gentlemen, I appreciate the comments, Colby. This was really great to hear the science behind fit and some of the philosophies behind how a change in position in gravel really can add to your performance. That was really insightful. I appreciate that. And Rick and Rick, as always, I appreciate talking to you and getting your long insight into the, the history of the sport and and the future really with this new great product. Thanks, Greg has been great. Hi, Colby by Colby. Thank you, Craig for the opportunity to be on the podcast. I'll look forward to, to when it comes out. I'll be sure not blessed all my channels. So, right it.