Bike Tours: Seat Comfort

Video Transcript

"The saddle on these bikes, I opt for one that's very comfortable. This is a saddle that's sort of, it's like half-couch, half-saddle, you feel like you need your bag of potato chips and a beer when you're sitting on this thing because it feels like you're sitting on a couch, maybe a remote control. So anyway, I opt for something like this, a lot of people opt, when they're touring, for a saddle that's more traditional. You know, leather, something that gives them that aesthetic sense, but I, for my part anyway, in my experience, the best thing to prevent saddle soreness, is not, is really just comfort. On a touring bike, your set up, you're going to tend to sit up very upright. You want to achieve a comfortable position, after all you're going to be on this bike for six, five, six, ten hours a day, you never know. We've definitely pulled our share of ten hour days, in the saddle. So you want to be sitting upright so you're not putting as much pressure on your shoulders, your back, your wrists, your hands, your elbows, etcetera. So you want your handlebar nice and up high. You see what this bike has is a adjustable stem. So this stem, can go up to an angle of, you know, up to probably sixty, seventy degrees, so that you can really achieve that nice, upright posture on the bike. Another thing that many long distance tourers do is, and I've done this before, is wrap the bar with a gel insert. So the last tour that I did, I had this bar double-wrapped and I had gel in there, to kind of give me some nice, you know, damping against the road vibrations and things like that. So with, with the touring bikes you want a steel frame, you want to aim for comfort. I've seen quite a few people out touring with, on racing bikes, or trying to tour on racing bikes. And they are just generally miserable, they've had multiple rack failures, they're sore because their body position is too aggressive, they're you know, slanted down like this, you know, and their neck gets sore and their arms get sore. Touring is about comfort, it's not about speed. Speed's always nice, but comfort is a nice thing to have."