As biking lore goes, American cyclist and three-time winner of the Tour de France Greg Lemond, along with some cycling buddies, created a formula for fitting people to bikes. The variation on frame design, due to the different frame materials, makes for distinctly different geometry from bike to bike, so a good fit depends on more than just stand-over clearance.

If you're in the market for a new road bike and planning on dropping a pretty penny for your new ride, I highly encourage you to be measured at the beginning of your search. Women tend to have longer legs and shorter torsos than men, so a fitting can help you narrow your search — although riding a bunch of different bikes is awfully fun. To see what a fitting entailed, I met with Renée Gaumond of Left Coast Cyclery to get sized up. Learn the details.

The first measurement taken is leg length, and because this is cycling, no mere measuring tape will do. You stand over a spring-activated T-bar that goes right where your saddle will go, and it presses against your pubic bone and your lady business — it is not comfortable, but thankfully it's brief. The measurement is taken three times, with walking and hamstring stretches done in between. The final number will be an average of the three measurements.

After your inseam is measured, the length of your torso and your total body height are taken using a good ol' fashioned measuring tape. Then your shoulder width is measured, for handlebar width, followed by arm length — this measurement, when combined with your torso length, helps to determine the length of the top tube of your soon-to-be-purchased bike.

All these numbers are fed into the equation and an ideal frame geometry comes to light, which is then matched against manufacturers' specs. If you have any chronic injuries — nagging knee, back, or hip pain — being properly fitted to your road bike can make long rides feel, if not breezy, considerably less painful.