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I did a 70 miler today on the roadie which is over twice my longest ride this year. While the fitness mostly held up, after about 40 miles I started getting a really numb left hand. After about 60 miles I couldn't operate the front shifting and could barely brake.
I've experienced this before on longish rides even when I have more training miles behind me. Recently changed my position to be a bit more upright which has solved previous back pain, but hasn't helped my hand.
Any thoughts?
Obviously, relaxing your grip can help, gel-mitts or even bar tape. I have a regular inclination to do 200 miles jaunts offroad on rigid bikes and gel mitts helps a lot
I only get pain when I use gloves with inserts. Not a solution to the problem
most likely caused by a fit issue. Look at bike fit advisor on YouTube as he’s has covered this in detail.
Gel bar pads from Fizik and some thick soft tape works for me. Used with Specialized BG gloves or mitts.
IME the palsy is caused more by pressure points than vibration, so the gel stuff can help, but I think it's more by gettting a diameter of grip that suits your hands than it by providing damping. I have large hands and if the grip diameter is too small it's tiring.
The main thing is to pay close attention to the angle at which your bar is set in the stem and the angle at which your levers are set on the bars. Spending a lot of time on the hoods means any pressure points here can really cause problems, and the longer you spend in the saddle the smaller a point it will take to cause a problem: as you go further you may need to make ever finer adjustments. Don't expect to fix it in one go: when I was doing long rides, I'd end up making tiny adjustments to bar setup and occasionally seat position after most rides, until I ironed everything out. The ulnar nerve thing was the very last thing to be ironed out: after a really long ride during which my fingers were fine, after I'd slept my third and fourth fingers were totally numb for weeks. I think it was probably a fraction of a degree shift in bar angle and correspondingly the reverse in lever angle that eliminated the final pressure point and gave me a perfectly smooth run from bend to hood.
So be patient with it, focus on positioning and pressure rather than chasing vibrations, and don't forget that small adjustments can have a big effect.
It’s a fit thing.
I don’t think anyone will diagnose you issue without at least photos. However, I had some numbness In the hands and it was solved (by a professional bike fit) by adjusting saddle position as I had too much weight going forwards. We didn’t adjust the bar position at all.
As above, it's a fitting issue and as @Bez notes, it takes a long while to get sorted mainly because of the length of the rides and the length of the recovery. I took 18 months to get my HT sorted for long rides - a ten hour ride was fine (or so I thought) but twelve hours and my fingers would go numb and I'd need at least a month before the tingling went away. Adjust something and repeat. That's for just one bike, it's now fully rigid but it's still fine for long rides because the fit is correct.
Once you've got the fit sorted then it's working out what gloves and the like work with your setup.
Bars too wide?
or try raising the front of the saddle to stop your weight plunging down on the bars so much?
^ ignore this information.
Unless the OP has something really weird his bars will be within a cm or two of the ideal width.
Saddle should be level or up to 9 degrees nose down.
Sounds counterintuitive but nose-up puts pressure on the soft tissues of the groin and you end up with more pressure on the hands as you try to ease the pain. Putting the saddle nose-down means you actually use the sit bones and also recruit the core muscles of the torso.