Sweet seats

Take your seats ladies and gentlemen .... the bike seat is probably the single most important component of a bike ! The comfort of a seat is not necessarily related to softness ie giant lambswool covers may not really help. What is more important is the set-up of your bike - the distances from shoulders to handle bars, height of seat, tilt of seat, size of frame. Katrina was lucky enough to have Brad of Cycling Supermarket in Altona set up her bike - he fine-tuned all the adjustable parts, and tinkered and tweaked (the bike, not the body), and achieved a certain amount of improvement - but the real change came when Brad found in his store room a magic women's seat ... called, aptly (Katrina thinks), a "Venus". Like most road bike seats it has a cleft in the middle for what Katrina calls "the squishy bits" (no, she wasn't very good at Anatomy in medical school). You need to sit on your two ischial spines, and not on the squishy bits.

Katrina was going to go into the special problems guys can have if they sit on their squishy bits, and certain symptoms they have to watch out for, but Bruce has censored all that, (even though Katrina is a doctor, and she was just doing some public (with an l) education) . So we have left that section out (you can alwys post a question to us in the comments though !).

Well, now you have the right knicks (no undies), the right seat and the right set -up - will your bum be ok ? There is another mysterious factor called "conditioning"- we don't understand it, but it is a fact that the more riding you do the less your bum suffers... we hope this remains true between Geelong and Albury !

Bruce is worried we are concentrating too much on the nether regions in our blogs, so in the next blog we will go from seat to cleats and feets !

This is our 12th blog so please scroll down and read the others !