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Steffi is our owner, founder and
Master bike fitter. If you see her name constantly mentioned
in our reviews, it's because she
works with every single one of the customers.
Knowing your bike fitter, the
background and the experience level is important. You don't want
to trust your cycling performance and biomechanical alignment to
just anyone!
Steffi has built A Perfect Bike
Fit
from the ground up with a specific goal in mind.
"I wanted to create a bike
fitting center to provide the kind of services that are needed
and not
found anywhere else. There is a gap between bike shops and
cyclists. Bike shops struggle with quality bike fitting because
it's time-intensive.They must focus on sales turnover to be successful.
They are pressed for time. Employee turnover also keeps
bike shops from maintaining the personnel consistency and depth of
knowledge required for proper bike fitting. I wanted to
fill service gap for A Perfect Bike Fit customers. My goals is
to provide a place where people can come with confidence to get
a bike fit that addresses all their needs - without hurry. I want
to give all cyclists the time and attention to details they
deserve. I want to bring to the average cyclist the
technology and know-how that was previously only available to
the Pros. I want to provide the know-how to our customers, so
they have the right shopping tools when it comes to a new bike.
And I want to cooperate with
shops, helping them be successful with their sales process by
alleviating the load of detailed bike fitting and sizing and
providing them with customers who have been informed and
educated on their special needs, so they can close targeted
sales that make the customer happy."
A Perfect Bike Fit was born based on this ideal.
It serves the greater cycling community providing a bridge
between the time-demanding needs of accurate and advanced bike
fitting and bike shops pre-sales (with bike sizing services for
a new bike) and post-sales (with bike fitting services).
Steffi's knowledge accumulated
from a life-time in cycling and sports. Growing up, you could
hardly find her apart from her bicycle. A passion for
speed and a relentless belief that human power could be
improved, Steffi found herself growing
up in elite junior athletics programs.
"My
bike was my faithful companion when growing up. First it became
an endless supply of thrills, constantly providing me with
ever-growing challenges for speed, distance and steepness of
climbs. Then it became a mode of transportation: it took me to see my friends who lived
miles away in the nearby hills and it took me to
the track every day for practice. Eventually, my bicycle became my
entire life."
Her athletics career started in
track and field where she was part of a prestigious junior
development program. This is where she was first exposed and
learned about sports medicine, biomechanics and very advanced
training methodologies in an environment that brought athletes
to the world stage. It made a huge impact on her life setting up
the background of her eventual profession. Curious
and always highly invested in her own personal growth, she
absorbed, internalized and made this precious knowledge her own. She
was racing on foot, but she insisted
on training on her bike and in the swimming pool - a futuristic
cross-training methodology at the time.
Track was not to be. After
a debilitating injury, Steffi had to switch focus.
"I wasn't the greatest student
growing up.
Actually, there was a time I struggled to get passing grades. I
trained too much and I was always too tired to study
effectively. I didn't value school and general book knowledge as much as I should have,
thinking I'd be the next track star. The injury helped me pause,
see the need for a good education and my potential for growth in
life."
And so she went on to train
her brain, as she put it. Her passion for mechanical things
like bicycles and fascination with speed like fluid dynamics met
the entrepreneur within. Degrees in Aerospace and
Mechanical engineering came first, followed by a MBA.
Meanwhile, athletics had become
a constant companion, but no longer a profession: "Anima
sana in corpore sano: the Romans belief in a healthy mind
because of a healthy body. Fun with sports and adequate training
helped me focus and study better and expand my horizon in many
disciplines without the rigor of competition."
But she couldn't stay away for
too long. A new opportunity arose organically from her fun with
sports.
The turning point for Steffi
was in the late 90s when she discovered mountain biking and
something just clicked. In less than 2 years
Steffi turned Pro. This is were her life took a turn for the
cycling world, both as athlete and industry professional.
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RACE
RESUME at a glance |
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NOTABLE RESULTS
2016
5X Elite Track Florida State Champion
2016
5X Masters Track Florida State Champion
2013-16 Rumble in the Jungle 50 mi MTB Winner
2014
Mountain Bike Florida State SS Champion
2004
Norba Nationals Finals Top 5 finisher
2003
Road Texas State Champion
2002
Mountain Bike Texas State Champion
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She raced many disciplines:
road, mountain, track, cross and triathlon (on and off-road). Sponsored by the prestigious
Italian bicycle manufacturer Colnago and other Italian brands
like Limar Helmets, NorthWave shoes, Biemme clothing and
Campagnolo components and support from other manufacturers
like Kenda Tires and Answer-Manitou suspension components, Steffi went to race with
quite a few accomplishments.
Her passion for bike fitting
was born out of necessity: "I hit a performance wall. I felt
that I could go faster, that my legs had more. But I just couldn't
get all of it down to the wheel. This is when
my curiosity, passion for human power and my education converged
into bike fitting. I understood that bike fitting was the key to
performance. I set out to find how to make it work." |
At the time, bike fitting was a
secretive field. Mostly art; somewhat science; and fully
contained within the Pro circle. There wasn't that much
information available. Steffi studied anything she could find and
went on to create her first bike fitting protocol and software.
"It was somewhat crude, but it worked. It made a huge
difference in my performance. I started dominating my local
racing scene and beyond. Soon, other people asked to get fitted. This
taught me early-on how to deal with the situation of other
riders. I learned to transcend my own experience. This gave me the biomechanical understanding needed to
develop a system that wasn't simply based on my own experience."
At the time she worked for
the prestigious niche manufacturer Colnago bicycles. She had access to Ernesto Colnago
himself, the father of performance-oriented geometry design.
Ernesto Colnago was the first to build modern racing bicycles
based on the concept of rider-bicycle integration. He set the
benchmark. And Steffi had a lot of questions for him.
"You can't understand bike
fitting if you don't understand bicycle design. And vice-versa. What I
learned in my years at Colnago is invaluable." Her bike
fitting technology evolved with growing knowledge and
understanding of human biomechanics. She sought to improve on
the old-school plum line and protractor methodology which
dominated bike fitting for over 30 years. She saw the
limitations of static bike fitting and sought a solution. The
availability of new technology like lasers and high-speed
cameras provided her with the opportunity to put together the
tools and develop her own dynamic motion capture bike fitting
protocols. In the early 2000s this was state of the art and very few
people were invested in developing bike fitting technology. "I
never realized I was working on something so advanced. I just
needed a better solution for myself and the other cyclists I was
helping."
In
2004, it was an encounter on a
critical mass ride in Boulder, CO that exposed Steffi to the
Retül 3D motion capture technology. She met and befriended the
key individuals who were developing this new technology in bike
fitting. It was love at first sight.
Retül was still a prototype in the early stages and not
commercially available yet. They were operating out of a
garage-sized warehouse space. To the untrained eye, they might
have not looked like much at the time; but Steffi knew the
potential and made a mental note that
she'd buy the system when possible. She saw how this technology
was superior to anything ever conceived to date. The connection
that was to change her profession was made.
When in 2006 Retül was first
offered for sale, it wasn't financially feasible for Steffi
to own it - just yet.
In 2010 gen II of the Retül
technology became more affordable. Steffi bought it and
introduced it into A
Perfect Bike Fit as the next step in bike fitting. As she came
to master the Retül 3D motion capture system, she started
finding opportunities to make it perform even better. She created a set of
complementary and supporting
technologies to further enhance Retül and even developed it
further.
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"I knew what Retül could do.
I saw that to maximize its performance and have the best tool
for my customers I needed to develop technology to support it
and enhance it. I wanted to create the best-of-the-best in bike
fitting technology and give to the average cyclist even better
services than the Pros."
The fit rig and the
sizing rig were born,
followed by the Dream Bike software to take Retül
data and turn it into custom geometry design.
Here we talk about the development
of this technology. |
Center: the fit rig. Right: the sizing rig |
Steffi created a
technology-rich environment. She coupled it with her vast experience
in bike fitting and human performance. The way bike fitting
should be. It
made her the go-to person.
Clearly Steffi is what you'd call a bike geek. Technology,
computing, aerodynamics, biomechanics, design, training,
nutrition... you name it, she has done it.
The Corratec brain trust visiting the studio |
She has been highly involved with
the cycling industry with many connections to
manufacturers and Pro cyclists. She has strong
relationships with many bike shops that rely on her to
provide advanced services to their customers. This is only part of the equation. It's
not enough to understand and design bike fitting and cycling technology. It's how you use
it that makes a big difference.
This is where you see Steffi shine like no
other.
Her ability to work with a vast variety of
cyclists in their disciplines is amazing. It makes her unique in
a field were fitters tend to be highly specialized in one riding
style only.
She has accumulated a vast knowledge that makes her
the go-to person for road, mountain, tri, track and cross. |
With "El Diablo" Italian Pro Claudio Chiappucci |
She is capable of reading subtle body
movements and trace them back to their origins. She can elicit
information from her customers to further follow down the rabbit
hole the underlying situation. This helped her develop the
fit for injuries protocol that is so unique and advanced, she is
approached by cyclists who thought they may never be able to
come back to the sport.
She wrote the book on mountain bike fitting.
It goes beyond biomechanical performance to include bike
handling, weight distribution and center of gravity location.
She is one of the very few who has the desire and the
know-how to deal with the most complex of the bike fitting
protocols.
She is re-writing the book on aero bike
fitting protocol, opening new frontiers of performance. Her
knowledge of fluid dynamics and experience in the wind tunnel
give her a unique knowledge that is helping debunk the myth of
cycling aerodynamics. She has introduced the element of
biomechanics together with flow management optimization to
traditional and experiential aerodynamics - consistently
resulting in 2 mph average speed gain for her customers.
This wide-ranging knowledge of bike
fitting comes from her curiosity, extreme work ethics and her own experience racing and riding
everything: road, mountain, track, cross, tri. However, the real
skill set that makes it possible for her to be competent (some
would even say an authority) at so many levels comes from her
personality.
Always inquisitive, curious and never
satisfied by the easy answers, Steffi is able see things that
escape most people. She makes her customers comfortable to
discuss personal issues. Her intuition takes her down paths not easily
explored and her knowledge of technology and biomechanics
allows her to address the littlest nuances needed to make your
bike fit perform.
She is the artist behind the technological
canvas.
Steffi
is very adamant in supporting the cycling community. For years,
she has been part of many initiatives and organizations to
support the growth of cycling.
Never afraid of rolling up her sleeves and
helping, she is an outstanding member of the cycling community
and is part of many regional activities. Whenever
possible, she volunteers and sponsors charitable events and
individuals.
Involved with several local mountain
biking groups, she donates her time and expertise to build and maintain
Virginia Key and Oleta River bike trails and has sponsored
The Markham Trails Fund. She is the Race Director of the
Gran Fondo Miami. She contributes as ride leader and sponsor to charitable rides
like the Annual Breast Cancer
Awareness Ride and
Cycle Fest.
A prolific writer, you can find her
articles in magazines like The Racing Post, Miami Sports
Magazine, Activate People Magazine and, of course, on this web
site.
She was the
directeur sportif of 3 times USA
Cycling Club of the Year NorthWest Cyclery and she helped bring
USA Cycling Junior Nationals to Houston, TX in 2003 with this
club. She sat on the board of the cycling governing bodies of
Texas for both road and mountain bike racing and she was a
founding member of the Greater Houston Off Road Biking
Association - the governing body maintaining 13 trails systems
around the Houston Metro area.
A
fierce competitor, she is also the nicest person to race with.
Well-loved by the cycling community, it's not unusual to hear roaring
cheers of her name when she is racing through the start/finish
line. She believes in clean, ethical racing
that's fun while still gunning for that top spot on the podium.
Always with a smile on her face, she maintains close friendships
with many of her competitors - and, often, she contributes to
their success by fitting and/or training them.
Nicknamed "the
bike fairy", she is often found on the side of the
road or trail, fixing the bicycles of stranded cyclists.
"I can't help it. I just can't pass by
and see a fellow cyclist in distress and not lend a hand. I
can't resist the call of duty. It sometimes frustrates my
training buddies who'd like to just go. But I tell them: how can
I not stop when I always have a tool in my jersey pocket and I
know how to use it? At least, I'll help them get home..."
Come meet Steffi. We think you'll enjoy.
