Reviewed: Liv Avow Advanced SL

It’s probably been about five or six years since some of the biggest players in the bike industry decided women didn’t need their own tri bikes anymore. The likes of Specialized, Felt, Cervélo, and Trek all started pulling their women’s-specific frames, replacing them instead with a smaller size, a shorter stem, and the reassurance that the fit data said we’d be fine.

Liv, Giant’s women’s brand, took a different path – and ever since, the Avow has been the lone women’s-specific triathlon bike on the market. The Advanced SL is its flagship – and after riding it for the past month or so, we’re delighted that Liv made the bold decision to ignore everyone else and bring a bike to market that caters to a highly underserved demographic.

The basics

The Avow Advanced SL comes in three sizes, XS to M, and that’s it. So here’s a word of warning up front: If you’re a woman taller than 6 feet then you’re going to struggle (but you’re probably used to that because just finding jeans that fit is likely a struggle too).

Everything about the spec is built around a smaller rider: 160mm cranks on the XS and S, 165mm on the M, paired with a 48/35 SRAM Rival AXS chainset and Giant’s branded power meter. The wheels are Giant’s SLR 2 50 carbon with tubeless tires and braking is hydraulic disc. There’s an integrated 850mL hydration reservoir in the down tube (that’s the medium; the smaller frames hold a bit less), and a bento on the top tube. So yes, this is a true tri bike, not a shoehorned time-trial frame.

For an additional $50, Liv offers a home delivery service (if you live close enough to a retailer) so it arrives built and ready to ride, which seems like a marvelous way to spend $50 if you ask me. There’s no need to spend your Saturday afternoon getting it ready to ride. My test bike was a medium, and the only thing I needed to do before my first spin was add pedals. As someone who is very fussy about saddles, I was shocked that the saddle it comes with (the Liv Contact SL Tri) suited me from the first ride to the last without any fidgeting or curse words. This really matters, and I’ll come back to it.

The features

The frame is Liv’s Advanced SL-grade composite, which is the top of Giant’s carbon hierarchy, and the tube shapes are the same aero profiles you’d find on a Trinity. What’s different is the geometry, which Liv builds from its own database of female rider fit data rather than simply scaling down a men’s frame. In practice that means a shorter reach and a lower stack across every size, so a 5-foot-4-inch rider isn’t stretched out over a top tube designed for someone six inches taller.

The cockpit is where Liv has done its best work. The base bar is a one-piece carbon unit with armrests that adjust for stack, reach, angle, and width, independently of each other. The range is enormous. I could have set this bike up for a rider with a torso two inches shorter than mine, or two inches longer, without touching a single aftermarket part. Anyone who has ever tried to make a men’s medium fit a woman’s frame by stacking spacers and swapping stems knows how rare that is.

The hydration system is neat: The straw runs up through the head tube and can be trimmed to sit exactly where you want it between the extensions. The bento is big enough for three or four regular-size gels. And the whole thing weighs 21lbs 8oz with pedals (note: This weight is with an empty reservoir), which for an aero frame with disc brakes and 50mm wheels is perfectly respectable.

The good

I’ve been riding tri bikes for more than 20 years, as a pro and now as a recreational rider, and I can count on zero fingers the number of times I’ve sat on a bike straight out of the box and thought, yes, I can ride this saddle. Until now. The Liv Contact SL Tri fitted to the Avow was comfortable on the first ride and remained just as comfortable on every ride subsequently. This has never happened to me before.

Every bike I’ve ever owned has started with the ritual of pulling the stock saddle off and bolting on whatever I was riding before. If you’re a woman who has been through that process, you know exactly how big a deal this is, and it tells you a lot about how seriously Liv takes the “built for women” claim.

Then there’s the ride itself. It really is a joy to pedal. When you put power down, this bike goes. The bottom bracket area is stiff enough that nothing feels wasted between your foot and the road, and the acceleration out of a turn or over the top of a roller is immediate. It’s a proper carbon race frame that feels and performs like one. I found myself attacking short climbs on training rides just because the bike made it fun.

Handling is the other big win, and again I suspect this is due to the fit as much as the frame. Because the position is correct from the outset rather than a compromise, the bike feels planted. It holds a line through corners, it doesn’t get twitchy when you come off the extensions to brake, and in crosswinds (like some of the exposed flats north of Boulder), it stayed composed without me having to muscle it. That stability translates directly into confidence – and confidence is speed.

And the adjustability I mentioned above isn’t just a spec-sheet number. It means you can get properly fitted on this bike, the kind of fit you’d get on a custom frame, without spending another $1,000 on a cockpit swap.

The not-so-good

The hydration reservoir takes some learning. The straw sits close to the extensions and on the first few rides I kept catching it with my hands or it bounced around when I hit a pothole. Trimming it helped, but remember the old adage: Measure twice, cut once – there’s no untrimming a straw. It also ships with a metal threading tool for cleaning the tube, which is welcome, because cleaning it without one would be a nightmare, but it’s a fiddly job, and it’s one of those things that triathletes who like to procrastinate will find themselves putting off (hello, yes, it’s me). If you’re the type to let a bottle go a few days without a rinse, this system will need more discipline from you than a standard setup.

And of course, three sizes is three sizes. Liv has done the hard work of making those three sizes fit an unusually wide range of riders, but if you’re a taller woman, you’ll be shopping elsewhere, which is a shame given how good the rest of the package is.

Finally, there’s the price. At $10,000 with Rival AXS, that’s a lot of money for SRAM’s third-tier groupset. Rival shifts well, and I never missed Force on the road, but plenty of competitors at this price will give you Force or Ultegra Di2 and comparable wheels.

Here you’re paying for the frame, the cockpit, the power meter, and the fact that nobody else makes this bike. Whether that’s good value depends entirely on how many of the fit problems above you’ve personally paid to solve over the years. For me, it’s conceptually closer to a fair price than I’d expected.

Conclusions

The industry’s argument against women’s-specific bikes has always been that with enough sizes and enough adjustability, a unisex frame will do the job. The Avow Advanced SL is the counter-argument, and it’s a persuasive one. Here’s a bike where the crank length, the geometry, and the cockpit range have all been chosen with a smaller rider in mind, so that the bike fits you instead of the other way round.

It’s fast, it’s stiff, it handles beautifully, and it’s the first tri bike I’ve ever ridden that felt like it was made for me before I’d changed a thing. It isn’t cheap, and the hydration setup might test your patience until you’ve dialed it in. But for a woman training for 70.3 or full iron distance who has spent years making do, this is the bike that meets you where you are – and you’ll have a helluva lot of fun training and racing on it.