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.