Squeaker Rides

After a long day at my day job, I threw the Terry Butterfly Carbon saddle on the bike (a saddle ride-able for century mileage or less due to the overly narrow cutout which does not relieve pressure as well as the old Terry cutout saddles did), and rode a quick 22 mile ride last night in just over an hour. Being late September I had to race the sunset in rather chilly temperatures. Riding through the Snoqualmie valley area I had a red tail hawk glide parallel to me only 20 feet away for about 1/4 mile, as if it were joining me in the fun. This made the ride worth it, in spite of having to really crank the last 2 twisty miles of pitch black night without lights. It was a squeaker trying to squeeze in a ride before dark, but with the days getting shorter rapidly there will be many more squeakers to come I am sure.

Saddle Dissection

Here you have a saddle that worked fairly well for me up to 100-150 miles per ride, but beyond that the presence of a convex nose just put too much friction and pressure on precious soft tissue. As you can see It's not rocket science, this saddle building. Essentially it's a hard layer of plastic or carbon fiber in a shape meant to cup the sit bones comfortably, covered with a thick layer of closed-cell foam for padding, and a thin leather upper for durability and minimal friction.


When the leather upper is removed, followed by the foam, the shape of the hard surface underneath is revealed as well as a gasket of some type of silicon or rubber possibly meant to contain the foam as it is molded (it was a smooth, single shaped piece indicating that it was molded that way). Of course my model of the BiSaddle will differ substantially from this due to the need for adjustability (each half will be narrower) and the nose will be absent entirely. Where this saddle had 2 rails which link right into the underside of the saddle, on my saddle the rails will have to be shaped differently to link into a separate frame to which the upper carbon surfaces will attach.

I have ordered my first carbon mold kit and carbon fiber kit to begin the next phase of saddle development. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Skeletons on the table...

I have ridden about a dozen different bike saddles in the past year and a half as I try to jump into the world of ultramarathon cycling headfirst. Most saddles are brutal torture devices not meant to be ridden further than down the block, and "women's specific" in the cycling world amounts to a men's saddle with pink stitching or a girly name, or worse, a wide-load bearing behemoth implying that all women have enormous rumps. Most racing saddles seem to have shapes that just make no sense...you stand there in the shop looking at that perfectly flat surface that looks so sleek and aero, wondering if the creator of that saddle has ever even seen a human backside. At this point I think I have tried it all, Bontrager, Specialized, Selle, ISM Adamo, Terry, Fizik, and multiple models of many of these brands. So far the Fizik came closest to working, but 200 miles into a race I found it capable of great harm to the soft tissue if you know what I mean...

So my quest has now led me to the BiSaddle, as recommended by a friend who is a nurse and an avid cyclist himself. I test rode a version and found it to be rather "Sturdy" (read industrial strength and weight), and not quite what my sit bones demanded in terms of fit and comfort. The beauty of the BiSaddle concept in my mind was it's adjustable width and most importantly the lack of a nose (the part that nearly all saddles still have regardless of how much that nose mashes on the delicate soft tissue a girl values more than any other body part except the brain...and even that may be a toss up ;)

Feeling defeated from my uncomfortable test ride I shipped the saddle back to the manufacturer, emailing early on a Saturday morning to explain the issues I had with it, and in an unexpected turn of events received a phone call mere minutes later from Jim Bombardier, the inventor of the BiSaddle. We discussed what problems I had experienced with the saddle on my test ride, and he insisted we could figure something out. Shortly after the phone call we met up in Seattle. I arrived at the restaurant for our lunch meet up carrying a courier bag containing several off-the-shelf saddles that I had been riding over the past year, and what do I see, but a man with actual human skeletal remains (pelvic girdles) on the table. It was then I realized this guy was either a serial killer or a man more obsessed with sitbones than even I had become after riding thousands of miles on uncomfortable saddles!! It turns out he has been studying anatomy for years working to meet the world's need for a good cycling saddle. So long story short, after much discussion and some further test riding we have started a collaboration to develop a sleek new carbon-fiber, ultra-marathon race-ready version of the BiSaddle.