Did a little bit of casual riding this weekend. Found a quieter way to enjoy the neighborhood with 75% bike paths. Really only a 20 minute ride but it's pleasant and it's just enough to tide me over. I'm hoping to hit the trail a few times this week, if all goes to plan.
I performed my first bit of bike surgery yesterday. My seat was still really uncomfortable in the forward region, to the point where I couldn't really ignore it. When I first bought Freya she had a narrower contoured seat and I almost immediately hated it, like an almost instant NOPE. Clay's bike had a cushy padded seat, so we swapped, like I think the day I bought it or very close to it.
When I was putting my bike away last night I glanced over at the original seat and all my bicycle rabbit-hole googling paid off: I recognized that it was a Specialized Dolce BG seat -- or in normal person speak, a bike seat designed for women's anatomy. It's narrow, with gel-like padding, and a cutaway in the middle. I figured now that I have padded bike shorts, it was time to give the shunned lady-seat a chance.
So I pulled both bikes out of the garage and set to work. Kind of. I took both seats & seatposts out, and in my absentmindedness thought oh I can just swap them over, seatposts and all. No dumbass. You have to take the seat OFF, and reattach it to your seatpost. Which I knew. Somewhere. That knowledge was probably buried deep in my logical brain under piles of old Mariah Carey song lyrics and 70's tv show theme songs and Looney Tunes cartoons. Good luck finding THAT.
A frustration in my life is that I always overestimate my ability to accomplish basic physical tasks like loosening bolts. It's sad, but I am cursed with tiny baby hands and pasta limbs. I have bucketloads of will and I can visualize what needs to be done but in reality I can't loosen shit for shit. I picture myself with bulging forearms like Rosie the Riveter when in reality I'm a Cabbage Patch doll. If I was on my own I would probably just have banged at the allen key with a hammer til it loosened but I caved and asked Clay instead. Sometimes you just gotta admit defeat. But it was kinda fun tinkering once the blasted things were loosened, and I got the lady-seat attached & adjusted.
I took it out for a test drive today. I was a bit apprehensive - the padded shorts were still in the wash from yesterday so my only option was to ride pad-less. DUN DUN DUN.
It wasn't too bad! That's not to say that no-pads don't suck, it totally does suck. But even without pads the seat is a LOT more comfortable in the all-important forward region, 100% improvement there. So that's good. Bit harder on the old bum, for sure, but the padding in the shorts will help there I think.
But at this point I've accepted the fact that I'm Pee Wee Herman and I'm okay with that. Ha Ha!
Frump out. <3
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