I had the best road bike ride tonight that I’ve done in a good ten years. And I put that down mostly to my new saddle.

Okay, so I bought my Ridley Fenix road bike four years ago. I hadn’t been riding consistently for several years before that and wanted to get back to it, and my old Eddy Merckx just wasn’t cutting it any more.

I loved the Ridley from the get-go… except the saddle. It came with a Fizik Twin Flex, while I’d been a die-hard Selle Italia Turbo guy for the better part of two decades. But I’d read somewhere that Fizik just didn’t make an uncomfortable saddle, so I went with it.

Well, unfortunately that first summer I suffered a serious episode of sciatica before I ever really got riding, so bad that I literally lost some function in my left leg. (Sciatica is nerve damage originating in the lower back, but with referred effects all the way down the sciatic nerve – through the hip and all the way down the leg). What little riding I did that year was all-seated and of rather short duration, so the saddle soreness I had seemed normal.

The next two summers I didn’t make too much progress, with my time split between running and biking. I did a longer ride here and there, but never consistently. So again, the fact that I was sore wasn’t a big worry.

Last summer I buckled down and started getting back to it for real, including adding a new Marin B17 2 mountain bike to the mix. I did more long road rides, but between stuff like Scouts summer camp keeping me from any real consistency, plus starting back to real trail riding, I again figured my saddle soreness was par for the course.

But then there’s this year. I quit running once the weather got warm, hit both bikes hard, and have done more close-to-50 milers on the road than any year since 2008. (That’s when I swung pretty heavily to running, completing three marathons between 2009 and 2014.) But I quickly realized that with consistent miles, my saddle soreness wasn’t getting better like it always had in heavy-mile early seasons in the past – it was getting worse. Like, bloody worse, and I’m not using British vulgarity there. I realized that even on short rides, I was hurting so bad it was affecting my performance.

What’s more, as I also ramped up with more trail rides, I realized I didn’t have the saddle soreness on the Marin.

So I finally decided to go back to what used to work. I ordered a Selle Italia Turbo SLR, exactly what my old Merckx had, and put it on before today’s ride. And headed up the short hill I start on in my neighborhood, I could already tell the difference.

It was amazing. I hadn’t even realized how much I was hurting… until I wasn’t. And what a difference it made. Right away I was more comfortable because I was sitting on my sit-bones, not on my flesh. I was a few millimeters higher, because the Selle is a flat saddle, where the Fizik has.. well, a saddle to the saddle, a slight negative arch in the middle. With the Selle, I was able to change positions more frequently, which meant my hands didn’t go numb and my neck wasn’t as tight. I climbed better, because I could stay seated and power through without it hurting my tail. And I just stayed fresher, even though I was on a new route for a weekday ride that’s four miles longer then what I’d been doing. I averaged 17.5 mph, where I’d been averaging mid-16-ish ever since I got over the first slow rides of the year.

By the end, I was a bit sore. After all, I’m sitting on parts I haven’t sat on in years. But I was never SORE-sore, if you know what I mean. No blood!! I felt great. What a lesson it’s all been.