I remember taking my first proper road bike for its first ride. After about 20 minutes I thought, “This is great. I love this. But I really, really need to do something about this saddle.”
To this day, about 20 minutes into any given ride, I still think the same thing. It’s been 30 years.
And it’s discomfiting. As roadies, the skinny saddle is what defines us. Many, many times, in the face of outsiders cackling, “That must feel like sitting on a razor blade,” I have explained, in as boring a manner as I can, that the narrow shape and careful anatomical shaping means that counterintuitively it’s much more comfortable than the big, squashy saddle on a cheap hybrid. I do this with a straight face, while less intellectual parts of me are muttering, “Mate, a razor blade is exactly what it’s like.”
I’ve tried saddle after saddle, and never managed to find one that I truly like. There’s better. There’s worse – all the way down to the one that I removed and threw into a Fenland river in rage, preferring to ride home standing up. But there isn’t really “good”.
There is something wrong with each of them, as if the saddle manufacturers are deliberately withholding perfection:
“We’ve found the perfect shape!”
“Great. All we need to do is add a weird plastic trim under the nose of the saddle.”
“I’ll do that. Shall we make it really sharp, and ensure it sticks into the rider’s thighs?”
“Of course! Why do you even ask? Mamma mia, it’s like you’ve never designed a saddle before!”
A couple of years ago, in desperation, I went for a saddle pressure-mapping session with a bike fitter. The fitter put a pad over my saddle that, when I sat on it, showed how my weight was distributed – red for high-pressure areas (the uncomfortable bits), then orange and yellow, then green, and blue for lower.
It’s oddly intimate. No one has ever paid so much attention to that area, or blown it up to such size on a monitor. And never has the phrase, “Oooh. That’s strange,” filled me with such anxiety.
The image looked like a thermal imaging camera shot of a burning petrol station. We swapped saddles, again and again. We never achieved the soothing blues and greens of proper comfort. We did, at last, get to something that looked more like a crooked financier burning evidence while eating curry under a patio heater, but never any better.
Apparently what I needed was a very flat saddle without a hole in the middle. It seems strange that that should have been so difficult to find. Inevitably, the best saddle we came across has been discontinued.
Of course, I don’t know what it feels like for anyone else. Perhaps after 100 miles, every rider is equally blighted by pressure points and abrasion. It could well be that I’m just soft figuratively rather than literally, and everyone else has grown numb from the waist down.
Certainly there is some evidence in that direction. It came from my friend Bernard. He was openly contemptuous of my saddle-mapping exercise.
“You know when you get a really big saddle sore,” he said. “Well, that doesn’t stop me. Even if it feels like I’ve grown another testicle, I keep riding because that’s what bike riders do. When it boils down to it, no one should ever stop doing what they love just because their backside hurts.”
I told him he should put that on a T-shirt.
