Another saddle-suggestion thread.

[Sky King]

Everyone has inspired me to measure my sit bones, I did the flour method and then also legs over head and backed it up with a squat measurement and I have pretty narrow sit bones. 75 mm center to center. Now I understand why the gilles berthoud I have been on for just over a year isn't as comfortable as my old fizik's vitesse sport (154 mm x 265 mm) The Gilles is 160 mm by 265 mm but is about 20 mm wider where my sit bones land than on the Vitesse Sport. In other words the gilles has a shorter nose and a wider platform whereas the Vitesse stays narrower and gradually widens in the platform.

With that said, I just spend some time on the fizik's website, was pretty entertaining - they are now promoting a saddle based on the flexibility of your spine - I am a snake... I didn't see the vitesse sport but they have a vitesse tri saddle with similar dimensions.

I just went through our warehouse and looked at all the Brooks saddles, the gilles berthoud and the Zimbale saddles, don't have anything in stock that is as narrow and as short as my old fizik's so for now am going to put that back on my touring bike and do some more research. Will look at the ones you all are discussing!

[Owlie]

I took the Jett on a 26-mile ride today. Thing one: my butt is sore. Thing two: nothing else is. No chafing, save a little that was probably due to my being remiss in shaving (TMI much?). I have a little more arm and knee soreness than I'd expect, so I need to go adjust the tilt and move the saddle back a bit. (Getting the damn thing on was an exercise in frustration, so I put it where I had the SI.)

I don't know if the butt soreness is a good or a bad thing. It either means the saddle is somewhat too narrow, or it means what I've been sitting on while riding...wasn't my sit bones. (Okay, I knew that part...) Or both.

(Oak, I'm sorry it's taking me so long to reach a conclusion on this!)

[Owlie]

Took it out again today. I'm pretty sure it's the saddle change that's making my knee unhappy, so I'm going to have to go play with it again. Much less butt soreness than after mile 15 on Friday. My wrists and arms are much happier this time. I'm still finding myself shifting around a bit to give my sit bones a break. This thing is quite hard compared to the SI.

I'm still not sure how well the 143 works for me width-wise. I'm only getting soreness in my left sitbone, which is kind of odd, but I know I sat on the SI weirdly (even DBF pointed it out). I'm going to give it another couple test rides and see how well my sitbone copes.

[ny biker]

Make sure the saddle is pointing straight ahead. I had problems with pain on the right side only, and when I asked the my LBS fit guy about it he said it's usually caused by a saddle that is crooked. Sure enough, it was slightly off center.

[Owlie]

It looked straight when I put it on, but I'll double-check that, since I have to tweak stuff anyway. Part of me thinks that it's just because I sat so weirdly with my old saddle. Since most of my power seems to come from my right leg (hence the knee pain, I'll bet!), I think I was shifting far to the right on the saddle to spare my right leg the rather unpleasant chafing, so I either wasn't sitting on my left sitbone much, or I was sitting somewhere odd so it didn't get a lot of pressure put on it.
I'll make sure I check if it's on straight. I know I had a bit of a problem in that particular regard with the old saddle, mostly after the LBS I took it to fiddled with my seatpost...

Out of curiosity: How the heck does one put on/take off/adjust a saddle with no cut-out? Any adjustments I've made I've done through the cutout. DBF took off the one that came on my Giant, before I had any clue how to do anything remotely mechanical with my bike.