Jon Knoll/Bicycling Magazine: Molded Shorts Not for All

I’ve been a cyclist for over 30 years, and most of those years I’ve been a reader of Bicycling.  Each month I pull the magazine from the mailbox and leaf through it—always front to back, like John Forester might suggest, if he cared about such things—and notate the articles I’ll read more in depth later, and maybe read the shorter blurbs on the spot.

The Issue 2, 2019 was no different: What they ride, ultimate guide, how to stuff.  Then: 10 Greatest Upgrades That Changed the Way We Ride, Train, Eat, Look, Talk, and Think About Cycling. Now, I thought, that’s more a challenge than a section title.

Power meter, a tiny fraction have ever used that.  GPS, most of us use that.  The Peugeot team jersey, interesting stuff in more ways than one.  Mia Birk, someone most cyclists have never heard about but who benefit from her work immensely. 

I turned the page and stared at Jon Knoll’s missive on the molded, multi-density short, and it was almost a Gary Larson moment where a dog barked in the distance, and horror spread slowly within me.

There is a relatively small—or large, viewpoint dependent—group of riders who don’t really find comfort in padded shorts.  And it’s not because they are using padded shorts on an old-style padded saddle, either.

When Bicycling! Did a review of the European company making the ‘finest bibs in the world’, I swallowed hard and bought a pair.  And, despite what newer riders might think, that was less than 20 years ago, not long after wool faded as the material of choice.  Padded shorts were what newbies bought to better cushion their unaccustomed butts, and then discarded for a leather chamois to take their place among the group as a Cyclist.

As Knoll described, saddles were going from thickly padded to almost no (or no) padding, so the padding had to come in somewhere, which meant the shorts, and various technologies came into being that helped.

I found out that riding in the humid Texas coastal climes so saturated the padding in my ‘finest bibs in the world’, from about mile 20 onward the saddle grew more and more uncomfortable.  So, I put those away except in cooler months, when they were reasonable comfortable, and continued with my PI and Trek bibs, leather chamois inside.

As my old chamois bibs wore out I began buying a wool-based bib with the anatomic pad, and once I was only on those padded shorts I began developing saddle sores.  It was a gradual transition from leather chamois and the appearance of the sores, so I didn’t equate one with the other right away.

You’ll also note I said ‘wool-based’, and that’s because my lack of enamorment with synthetics—now the sum total of the outdoor clothing industry’s primary fabric—led me back to wool clothing for my outdoor wear.  Modern merino and Rambouillet wool varieties were not the stuff of my youth, dense and scratchy, but smooth and comfortable in all temperatures.  And once I discovered that fact, I’ve moved away from synthetics almost completely.

I found a company in California, Kucharik Clothing, that repaired shorts, so I sent them my bibs, one by one, to replace the pad with a natural leather chamois.  The sores disappeared almost immediately when I went back to leather and no padding, despite the fact I use a thinly padded (Level 2) saddle.

So, pardon my exaggeration when I used the word horror, because I was more bemused than screamy.  But, I don’t see comfort as the result of these padded saddles, since the greater driver at the time was to lose saddle weight, then regain the lost padding from the saddle to reacquire lost comfort.  

Thus, to a degree, the problem was created by trying to lighten saddles, and addressed—not, for many of us, solved—this loss, by finding a way to make padded shorts comfortable. Something they had not been before.

Me? I continue to send my shorts (aging bibs from Ibex, the late great wool company) to John Kucharik for new chamois, and will until the bibs wear out. For me, sometimes comfort isn’t inventing new, but merely improving what worked best in the past.