Difference in Handlebar width.

I have been riding 44 cm handlebars for a very long time. And I have always had sore shoulders after long rides.

I changed my LeMond to a 42 as a test and it made a remarkable difference. No more sore shoulders on the hard rides I've been doing.

Yesterday I rode the Colnago on the metric and when I got back from the ride my right shoulder was so painful I couldn't rotate my elbow above shoulder level.

On Friday I had changed the 100 mm stem on the LeMond to a 120 carbon fiber model that has a full contact front piece. In this process I didn't fully align the stem properly. Today riding out on a short 21 mile recovery ride my LEFT shoulder began hurting and leaning down and looking closely I could see that the stem as only a couple of degrees off perfect. Midway I stopped in a store and got a coffee and then pulled out a multitool and aligned it as well as you could by sight. Riding off the pain was completely gone.

So not only is the bar width pretty important but the alignment has to be a whole more closer than you might had suspected.

Yesterday's Metric had a 14.5 mph average and I had missed breakfast so stopped and got a Breakfast Jack which I sure won't do again. I had a slight stomach ache all day. So I started the ride a little low on energy and the stops sure didn't help any. Trail mix and bananas?

On the second rest stop I had half of one of those plastic glasses of Gatoraide which I also don't like. My brother had showed up early so I didn't have my extra water bottle with Propel in it.

In any case, I'm sure that the stress on me yesterday made me more sensitive to the alignment of the bars today but it did show that the alignment has to be really close.