Bicycle seats shift to comfort

ALBANY, N.Y. - Modern bicycle seats are less about style and more about the well-being and comfort of your nethermost regions.

The term nethermost regions substitutes rather nicely for the considerably more jarring medical terminology used to describe what amounts to your anatomical Australia, your personal undercarriage. It’s the same tender vicinity that’s been squirming to get comfortable on bicycle seats since the first two-wheeler was invented somewhere in France in 1861.

The bottom line, ahem, is that a delicate network of veins and arteries, insulated only by a thin layer of skin, surrounds the portion of your chassis that presses against your bicycle seat. This seat-toseat union has been linked to all manner of maladies, including numbness, infections and chafing.

In men, it’s even been associated with sterility, impotence and testicular cancer.

It’s not surprising, then, that today’s bicycle-seat technology is geared toward comfort, a trend led by a woman’s ingenuity in a male-dominated sport. For more than a century, men would no more consider asking for a more comfy seat than they would stop at a gas station and ask for directions.

Georgena Terry, a former mechanical engineer who founded a national women’s cycling equipment and apparel company in the basement of her Rochester, N.Y., home in 1985, introduced a seat in 1997 that butts were drawn to like tired feet to a showroom recliner. It was brilliantly simple: remove the offending part of the seat, every bit the great notion of turning a glob of dough into a doughnut by cutting a hole in the middle.

And to prove her ingenuity was matched only by her sense of humor, Terry named her split-seat invention “The Liberator.”

“I remember when we took them to a trade show and everybody laughed at them and said they looked like a toilet seat,” said Paula Dyba, marketing director of Terry Precision Cycling. “But before we knew it, bike shops started to order them like crazy and we were swamped with catalog orders.”

Dyba said the design caught on with men, the ones with numbness and other health issues related to traditional, less forgiving seats. “They had no alternative until they found us,” said Dyba, adding that men bought more than 50,000 Liberators in 1998, the same year a controversy surfaced over whether sterility was linked to bicycling.

“It was incredible,” Dyba said. “It changed the seating industry.”

The influence of The Liberator is apparent in most men’s and women’s seat designs. Some seats have a stretch of the center cut out, while others have what amounts to a sort of irrigation ditch or canal running up the middle.

While the traditional narrow, rigid seat is still popular among purists, Liberator-influenced seats at bicycle shops and department stores entice visitors to reach out for a test squeeze as if they had just happened on a stack of Charmin.

Designed to cradle your sit bones in marshmallow softness, they are made from all manner of high-tech gels and memory foams. They are basically the same for both genders, though the women’s versions are slightly wider since their sit bones are farther apart, a reasonable concession since men don’t give birth. Eric Whalen, manager of Downtube Cycle Works in Albany, said while cushy is nice, the softness revolution should not be embraced blindly.

“Seats are a lot like bedding in that you want comfort, but you also need a certain amount of support,” said Whalen, who has been at Downtube for 17 years. “It’s the balance of those two things that matters. A feathered bed feels great but if you slept on one night after night, you probably wouldn’t find it supportive or as good for you as maybe a firmer base.”

Downtube has a stationary bike set up where customers try out seats before they buy.

“The other thing that comes into play when selecting a seat is how it’s installed on the bike,” Whalen said. “We install all our seats perfectly level, or sometimes maybe with the nose down half a degree. That’s going to give you good support.”

The prices of Downtube’s seat inventory run from thick memory foam ensembles for $39.95 to sleek traditional racing seats with titanium mounting rails for $300. There are others in the $100 range with spring networks that Whalen said provide a hammock dynamic for your rocking rear end.

Picking the one that’s just right for you, Whalen said, requires trying them out, the way you would if you were shopping for a sneakers.

But he cautioned that, for the most part, bicycle seat shopping isn’t further complicated by color schemes.

“Yeah, like Henry Ford said about his Model-T, ‘You can get one in any color you want, as long as it’s black,’” Whalen said.