No this is not about my cellphone but actually about dialing in my road bike, or at least my butt/bike interface!
It seems strange that after having the bike for nearly 4 years having put a lot of miles on it that changing the seat would be on the cards but it always seemed a bit of a compromise. I could ride with it for a while but to be honest the longer the ride the more uncomfortable it became. With the discomfort comes a lack of form, power, speed and so on.
With that in mind and given that I have a lot of cycling miles ahead of me it made much more sense to go back to the drawing board.
I spent a fair bit of time researching saddles for my tri bike back in 2011/12 so that seemed like a good place to start. I ended up with an ISM Breakaway saddle and that has been perfect for me. I wasn’t worried about the tri saddle on a road bike thing that some people consider a faux pas, mostly because;
- I am sitting on it so no one one can see it
- It’s my ass!
That said there were some provisos. Mostly driven by my OCDness was that it should in some way match the color scheme of my bike; red/white/black, (as a side note any other color schemes, unless you are a Pro, don’t count…j/k!). This presented a problem as the Breakaway is only available in White with Black/Blue or Black with White/Blue. The blue is just the labeling but you know red/black/white is not blue!
With this in mind I spent two weeks trialing an ISM Attack, it’s 99% white. After a couple of hundred miles I decided that it was too narrow (or my ass was too wide) either way it wasn’t working. I resorted to trying the Breakaway and it was really no surprise that it was perfect.
Three weeks of solid use including the Golden Gran Fondo had me sold. All that was left was to solve the color issue. That was pretty easy, after a long chat with ISM Customer Service they suggested that I try the Prologue, it’s not a available as a demo version but it is basically the Breakway with a bit more padding and chrome rails. The Service was great, listening to me endlessly babble on about color and so on! They even said if it didn’t work I could return it and get a Breakaway…just don’t crash in it they made sure to tell me!
The saddle arrived, I fitted it and there were no issues, it’s been on the bike for three weeks or so now.
To recap; Prologue model; chrome rails, a tad more padding, all black and $60 cheaper! Customer Service…priceless!
No problem!
If you want more info on the Breakaway you can read my review here.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for reading this post and leaving a comment, if you are entering a contest, please ensure you put some sort of unique name down so I can get back to you. E-mail addresses are ONLY displayed to me, and never shared, sold, pilfered, or anything else unhappy.