Oh My Aching…!

January 22, 2024

One thing has never changed. The Collective You are less happy with your tri bike saddle than any other tri-specific possession. Starting in 2008, when 1-in-3 of you either hated your saddle or said you “could be much happier” that one-third fraction is remarkably durable over time. In 2017 you were asked what could change on your bike and you were given 10 options. Thirty percent of you said saddle, and next was bike position (18 percent) and then aerobar comfort (14 percent).

In 2018 one-third of you said your “biggest product need” was your saddle, only 23 percent of you said “I’m good,” and the rest of you were scattered about (10 percent cycling shoes, 8 percent swim goggles and so on). As recently as 2021 we conducted that same poll and, still 26 percent said “I’m good” and 31 percent said your saddle needed to change.

Why? Mostly it’s because you ride with a flatter bike on your tri bike and this causes your pelvis to rotate clockwise (looking at you in profile from the drive side of the bike). This means you’re riding with your weight not on the fat of your fanny, rather on what we might call “soft tissue” and you all can insert whatever more precise term you want for that.

In way of update here are trends and news from where I sit.

Certainly there remains quite a bit of interest in what I call “split nose” saddles and by far the brand for that style is ISM. Emblematic of this is the white saddle above, which is its PS1.1. The narrative of this saddle, and the theme of its most important patent, is that the twin “noses” are not connected, allowing each nose to act as a kind of independent suspension. Every other split nose saddle on the market is connected in some way, somewhere, even if that connection isn’t visible without looking straight down from above or from underneath.

But there is some movement toward a saddle style that isn’t quite traditional single nose and isn’t quite split or double nose. That saddle pictured highest up is Selle Italia’s Watt 3D and that’s pretty new to the market. You see it here below as well.

I think the Koobi saddle must’ve been ahead of its time, for tri in particular, because a lot of these saddles like the Watt and the Watt 3D are reminiscent of this design (Here are Koobi's tri saddles but I would look at their road/gravel products, even for possible use in tri). There has been a shift toward this style of saddle in the pro IRONMAN ranks over the past 3 years. Why? I don’t mean to speak for those who’re migrating to this, but for myself I can say that the weight has to come down somewhere. That somewhere is either your soft tissue or, the way pros tend to (really nose ride) the ISM, those twin noses support your sit bones (ischeal tuberosity), and this spot is the origin of your hamstrings. For some this causes trouble.

If I were to ask a dozen pros who’re now riding the Selle Italia Watt (or the Watt 3D), or the Gebiomized Stride (pictured just below), or the Scott Belcarra (same shape as the Stride, coming out of the same factory, almost the same saddle), or the Bontrager Hilo or Specialized Sitero, I don’t think I’d get anything like the same answer. I doubt I’d get a granular analysis of where the saddle hits the body, although saddle sales for Gebiomized is mission-adjacent. The meat of that company is pressure mapping and the saddles they make are the result of pressure mapping sessions.

The saddles coming out now tend to be of this variety and for your consideration is the latest tri model from Ergon below. I could just as well have shown you a Bontrager Hilo, a Specialized Sitero (in either it’s 130mm or 155mm width), A Profile Design Vertex 80 or a Wove V8. They’re all in the same broad genus of saddles: not split nose, but not single nose. Some of them I certainly would, and probably will, try to ride as road/gravel saddles because I’m not very enthused by recent models of saddles for these use cases. Oddly, for some brands it’s the road saddles that’ve gotten shorter while the tri saddles have remained closer to standard 27cm saddle lengths. I say oddly because it’s the road saddle with many usable positions (on the rivet, on the back and in between) while tri saddles have one one-the-rivet position. Dash is a saddle brand that undersands this.

I went down to see my friend Emilio De Soto last week, and brought a box of saddles with me. While I would understand if you misidentified these two distinguished gentlemen below as Pierce Brosnan and George Clooney, in fact it’s a pic of Emilio and me at our lunch spot last week. When I left my everyday gig as a wetsuit maker to begin my 24-year odyssey here at the site you’re reading, Emilio took up the mantle of U.S.-based manufacturer of triathlon wetsuits.

We who have (or have had) our own rubber cut-and-sew factories frequently engage in a pair of side hustles: half-shoe covers for winter riding (which Emilio offers) and neoprene seat pads. While it should not be the case it nevertheless remained true that a tri saddle is rarely made that a neoprene seat cover doesn’t improve. But new saddle shapes, over the past dozen years, don’t conform to existing seat cover patterns. Hence this little experiment I asked Emilio to engage in with me. (With him doing almost all the work.)

Emilio makes his own stuff. Here in California. He still has walking-foot zigzag and double needle sewing machines, and blindstitch machines because he, as I said, makes his own stuff. Let's see if he can come up with seat covers that take saddles like these above and offer additional comfort options. I'll report back on that.