It's not your butt, it's your crotch

 In discussions of the bicycle seat, we talk about the effect on a rider's butt, but the points of contact are pretty far under, where the ischial tuberosities contact the saddle in much closer relation to the perineum than the big ol' glutes hanging out the back there. It's a much more crotchal than gluteal situation, especially when a long period of longer rides might lead to some abrasion. Then you have to factor in whether you have protuberant parts that flop around in front, or internally folded parts more vulnerable to multiple kinds of friction.

Time changes us. I used to be as comfortable as one can be on a racing bike seat, on saddles shaped like the Sella Italia Turbo or the Avocet Racing II. When I bought a Brooks leather saddle because I was tired of wearing out modern saddles, I picked the Colt, based on the Turbo shape. It worked well until it no longer worked at all. I don't know if it deformed because of an error of mine or an inherent flaw in the design. All I know is that it no longer supported the parts that needed support, transferring pressure to the exact wrong area.

It doesn't seem like much. For decades it wasn't. But in the past three years or so that little arch has led to distracting discomfort on rides longer than about 25 miles.

When I replaced the Colt with the B17 "carved," I was mainly curious about the cutout. The overall width seemed like it might be a problem, because too wide a saddle will push you forward onto the parts you wanted to avoid. I have noticed the width when I'm pushing the pace in a low position, but it hasn't caused a problem. A rider in varied terrain will shift position on the saddle to improve pedaling efficiency at different cadences and intensities. This is the primary reason that racing saddles are narrow. My high intensity efforts are limited to what terrain and traffic demand along my regular routes. They're also limited by being an old fart who will blow right up if I try to pretend that I'm in racing shape. The B17 turned out to have a good combination of features for long-term comfort for me.

I noted the flat top line right away, but didn't focus on it as a primary feature until I got a B17 Narrow for my sporty road bike. The Colt experiment had been a failure, and it was no longer offered anyway. The dimensions of the B17 Narrow sounded hopeful. It has worked well. The flatness of the frame supporting the seating area at the rear has kept it from developing the painful crest that the Colt did.

Below is the interim seat I dug out of a box of salvaged saddles because it was firmer and flatter than the seat I'd been using on the Traveler's Check. It has less arch than the Turbo, but still has some. So it was better, but still not great. The texture of the covering material also produces a very authentic-sounding fart noise when you shift position on it.

Looking at saddles on the market now, a lot of them have that graceful arch. It has a long heritage in the galaxy of saddle shapes produced by the bike industry since the late 19th Century. However, when you make a point to compare, the flat-top type appears perhaps more frequently. I started riding in the 1970s. My first drop-bar bike had an old and somewhat abused Ideale leather saddle. I replaced that with an Avocet touring saddle on the advice of my expert mentor. For years afterward I bought molded-shell saddles without questioning the concept, wearing through the covers after a few years and replacing them in a conveyor belt to the landfill.

Leather saddles wear out, too, but leather biodegrades completely, and the metal frame either rusts away or can be recycled. They're heavier than molded-shell saddles, but that's only a drawback if it matters to you. I don't know if there's a good alternative for anyone who disapproves of leather because animals were killed for it. If it comes to that, we can just radio tag wild large herbivores and swoop in when they die of natural causes, to harvest some hide before the carcass is dismantled by natural forces. Make saddles out of laminated road-kill squirrel pelts. Or maybe there's a hemp alternative. There always seems to be a hemp alternative.

Ruth doesn't want to quit

Ruth is 92 years old. Her husband and two of her sons are dead. She lives in a cottage her family built in the 1930s -- if not earlier -- on the shore of Lake Wentworth. She stacks her own firewood and shovels her own roof. All the way through her 70s, if you saw her from behind, walking down the sidewalk in her tennis dress, you'd take a minute to admire the view.

Great laugh seeing young strangers in town speed up a bit to pass her and see her face. She does not pretend to be young, beyond an excusable use of hair coloring. Wrinkles to the contrary, she has somehow managed to make that work.

At 92 she shows the miles now. She's fought off Lyme disease, cancer, and been treated for rabies after an animal bite. I joke that other people say, "oh no, I got an illness!" Illness says, "Oh no! I got Ruth!"

She's not one of those annoying sunshine-pumpers who are just so dang positive about everything that you need a nice salty shot of tequila after being around them. She just doesn't want to quit. She gets out and about. And, until some more medical challenges got in the way, she rode her bike nearly every day.

When she tried to resume riding, she discovered she could no longer lift her leg high enough to get over the dropped bar of her 1995 Univega step-through hybrid. She had had her bike rack modified several times as she had more and more difficulty lifting the bike onto it to drive to safe venues for an older rider, but now she couldn't get on the bike, even though she could still get the bike on the car.

She started getting depressed. She grumbled about her physical infirmities. We were used to hearing about her various mishaps, but now she talked of little else.

We hunted around for quite a while to find a new, deep step-through model that weighed no more than her old bike. Then we did, so she was ready to go again.

But she wasn't. The position on casual bikes these days is way more upright than on her old bike. We had to figure out one problem after another. Each time we though we had it nailed, she came back again looking sad.

With every setback she seemed more discouraged. She talked about how old she is and how many friends she's outlived and all the things that are wrong with her, not in a raspy, carping way, but in a weary litany of hopelessness.

We changed the stem to get the bars lower and closer to her. We cut the seat post so she could get the seat lower until she got used to things. Then the seat itself had such a wide and sudden flare that it shoved her forward of the pedals. I switched her old seat over to the new bike. And we had to modify her car rack some more to fit the new frame.

I forget the last rabbit I pulled out of the hat, but she came back from that test ride with a tentative smile. Twice more she went out to test further adjustments, each time returning with a bigger smile and more of the old Ruthie vigor.

The bicycle is a machine for rejuvenation. The change in her as she realized she could ride again was astonishing, even as it confirmed my belief. Old Bill, cancer stricken and knowing he was dying, had said, "whatever else happens that day, you get on the machine." No one knows how long Ruth will last. All we know is that the time has been made brighter by getting back on her bike.

Horrible seats and cheap pedals

It's hard to spec a bike for industrial production. The seat and pedals on this 1994-ish Bianchi hybrid illustrate the point.

By the time step-in pedals became widespread in the 1990s,  bike manufacturers had already developed the habit of putting disposable plastic pedals on most new bikes. While toe clips were still a viable option, some mid- and upper-range bikes might have somewhat nice pedals in that style, but by the mid 1990s the toeclip was dead, as far as the industry was concerned. After a few seasons in which step-in pedal manufacturers got some OEM spec, the industry decided to save the money and go with disposable pedals on anything that came with pedals at all. They assume a serious rider will choose a pedal system and a casual rider won't care.

The seats present a more complex problem. As I looked at the deterioration of the seat on this Bianchi I thought about what options a bike manufacturer has with that particular piece of the bike's equipment.

The part of the bike that goes between your legs has been a sore point, if you will, since the earliest days of straddled transportation. Among equestrians, saddle toughness is a point of pride. But somehow, among cyclists, the seat has become the bad guy. The sore rider is just an innocent victim. If you look at a lot of OEM seats you can see why. Cheap saddles are almost all really awful. And the high-performance saddles on expensive bikes are more than the untrained ass is ready to withstand.

Unfortunately, the seat is an ambassador for the activity of cycling. How much of the general perception that bike seats are incurably awful is fed by the fact that the cheap original seat on most bikes is incurably awful? And because cyclists don't aspire to saddle toughness anymore -- indeed, many of them never did -- a lot of people feel aggrieved pretty quickly when the ride is uncomfortable.

I see no easy solution. Butts are like snowflakes: no two are alike. So even changing the OEM spec to a higher quality saddle will fail to please a large number of customers because they're simply shaped differently. The bike manufacturer is out the money and the new rider either slouches away grumbling or has to invest in a new saddle for their new bike right away.

The best a retailer can do is acknowledge problems quickly and accommodate changes readily. And that's basically what we do. The process is generating quite a few orphaned and unloved seats, however. Someone needs to come up with a good use for them or a recycling program. Maybe they could be used as part of enhanced interrogation.

"No, please! Don't make me ride that trainer any longer! I will tell you everything!"

Bike Shop Gynecology

Dealing with issues of saddle discomfort, we in the bike shop business often have to provide courteous and thoughtful technical support to people describing their particular problem in their intimate regions.

After years of this I have  -- or thought I had -- developed a few general principles to help a rider select an appropriate saddle. I will never suggest a specific saddle. I don't want the blame if it doesn't work out. But by using a sizer to find the actual pelvic pressure points and then describing how riding style and position influences the choice of saddle shape and composition I can usually help a rider make a good choice on their own.

Yesterday I learned about a new variable.

A woman had called to ask about setting her old bike up with a more upright position and, by the way, trying to find a more comfortable saddle. These are common requests. When she came in with her bike I determined that she could do almost anything she wanted to customize her position. So far so good. Then she pointed to the saddle and said she was very uncomfortable on it.

The saddle looked like a 1990 Avocet women's gel mountain bike saddle. It's a pretty generic wedge. I pointed out that the shape of the top of it makes you think it's level when it's actually pushing you forward onto the narrow nose. I explained how it's counter intuitive, but setting the nose up on a saddle like this helps keep you on the part of the saddle where you want to be. She was nodding along all right, but she had a question.

"I don't know how much you know about female anatomy," she said, "but all vaginas are not the same." She didn't say it reprovingly, she said it to introduce her particular problem. She proceeded to describe her own genital architecture in sufficient detail that I immediately had a mental picture. You might think this was too much information, but it was completely relevant. The responsibility was on me to meet her trust with my own trustworthiness. We discussed various things she can try that have worked for other women I know who ride.

I won't pretend I did not have a few mental gyrations going on as she took me on this journey into her pants on a beautiful sunny morning. I make no claim to superhuman powers of detachment. I'll find the detachment when it's required, but I may have to dope slap a few primitive compulsions while I'm doing it. If my work more routinely exposed me to intimate revelations I might develop a more seamless compartmentalization. Instead it's like so much else we deal with in our shop. You never know when you'll have to go from a Huffy to a Cervelo, from a billionaire to a dishwasher, from laughing it up with your fellow greasy grunts to guarding someone's intimate secrets. I'm going to assume for the moment that she doesn't just dart around telling everyone about the configuration of her private parts. That's all up to her. Like I said, in this case it was completely relevant. That's all I know.

Colt 58

After two commutes of 29 miles each, the Brooks Colt seems to be shaping up nicely.

Very subtle differences in shape seem to make a difference in rider performance. The Colt has a narrower nose than the Turbo. One issue with the Turbo had been the way my thighs wore away the thin leather on the sides of the saddle. On the Colt my legs come in that little bit farther and still rub the sides. And that tiny change in angle may improve pedaling efficiency. I've had my two best commuting times of the year on these first two rides on the Brooks.

Other factors may be at work. Oddly enough, I had my two best commuting times last season on almost exactly the same dates. But the most recent times were faster.  I did not note in my obsessive little record book whether I was rested or tired last year, but I can tell you that this year I'm thrashed. I get to bed too late, drag myself out early and guzzle coffee just to get started. The dog we adopted has been squeaking to go out a half an hour before my alarm is set, thus disrupting even the inadequate amount of sleep I had intended to get. Yet I get on the bike and hammer. I really think that the narrower saddle is putting me in a better position over the cranks.

The saddle is shaping to fit me, as promised. On the first ride it felt comfortable enough. Aside from slithering around on the bit of residual Proofide that had escaped my polishing rag the saddle felt reassuringly similar to the one I had removed. None of the noticeable shape differences struck me as ominous. The second day was only better. So this colt is breaking nicely.

The workshop is filling up with the bikes of triathletes tapering their training ahead of a busy race weekend just over a week away. I hate doing race tunes because if anything goes wrong it will be my fault. When I raced I did all my own work. If I messed anything up I only ruined my own day. Not that I intend to mess anything up, but when lots of urgent jobs come in at once and other riders are also trying to get a last shot at summer fun it can get pretty chaotic. And we're operating on a survival crew of two this week.

Off to work. At least it's rainy today. That should keep the bike rental business quiet.

My bike wears English leather

When you find a saddle you like, buy several of them. For me, the Avocet Racing II was a great fit. When those disappeared I switched to Sella Italia Turbo saddles. Even when Sella Italia quit making the original model I was able to scavenge lightly-used ones and even found a new-old-stock saddle still in a box. Then Sella Italia reintroduced the "Turbo 1980." I bought one.

After only two years, the Turbo 1980 looks like this:

Looking at that I realized that all the older ones had gone the same way. The leather covering is paper-thin. So screw it. I'm investing in real leather. I'd had a leather saddle before. My old Peugeot came with an Ideale leather saddle, but I bought the bike used and the saddle had suffered some abuse before I got it. That's when I started using Avocet saddles on the advice of a friend.

This return to real leather is the end of a research program lasting years. I've almost bought a Brooks several times. Two things kept me from going ahead with it: the weight and the care of the leather itself. At this point I can't claim to care a whole lot about bike weight, with rack, fenders, generator hub and lights. So I'll undertake the care of the leather.

After exhaustive study of the Brooks catalog I narrowed it down to the Team Pro, the Swift and maybe the B17 Narrow. I kept glancing past the Colt. But then I checked the dimensions more carefully on the Brooks site and decided it sounded like a good transition from the saddles I had used before. It's a few millimeters wider than the Turbo/Avocet, but not wide enough to cause problems. A saddle that's too wide for your bone structure will just push you forward onto the narrow part of itself. So choose wisely.

The saddle just went on the bike today, so I have not ridden more than a few yards on it. We'll see how the notorious break-in goes. Some people have a very easy time. Others willingly suffer to achieve the personalized fit for which fine leather saddles are known. Then there are the riders who run as fast and as far as they can to get away from the old leather torture device.

The way the rails are shaped the saddle can't be set very far back, but measuring with a plumb line I was able to get the nose of the saddle the same distance behind the bottom bracket as the nose of the Turbo had been. The saddle itself is taller, so I had to adjust the post height slightly. After just a couple of minutes riding I could feel that the leather had begun to reshape. Rapping on that wood-hard saddle in the box I would not have believed it.

So there it is.