Feel The Burn!

With the increase in my mileage on the bike recently, my backside’s been feeling the pressure. So when I read about the delights of saddle sores (be sure to check out this picture - not for the faint-hearted), I decided that prevention was almost certainly better than cure & bought a tub of chamois cream from the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative.

The product’s called Assos Chamois Creme (it’s to put on your ass - I wonder what the “os” means at the end of the name though?), and comes in a medical-looking tub, complete with a the Swiss flag emblem. All very encouraging. And the ingredients listed are:

Deionized water, glycerine, propylene glycol, decyl oleate, polydecene, witch hazel extract, almond oil, sorbitan stearate, menthol, cyclomethicone, oak bark extract, methylparaben, palminate & BHA

. . . so nothing too scary looking there.

ANYWAY, on Sunday I was going out for a long-ish ride, hooking up with The Irishman for the middle section. A perfect opportunity to try out this Swiss preventative. It’s at this point that we’re going to go into some details, which if you’ve a sensitive nature, or are eating right now, you might want to skip over. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

OK, so it goes on fine - not too sticky or oily, and no real fragrance to it. Then after a minute or so, I start to feel The Burn.

Down there.

It’s kinda like a couple of years ago, when I had to shave there (just don’t ask), and used a shaving foam with tea tree oil in it (”For that rise & shine shave experience!”), only more so, over a larger area. It’s the kind of sensation which is quite pleasant, but feels so wrong at the same time. And whenever I stand up out of the saddle, it feels like someone’s just turned on the air conditioning in my shorts. And this went on for about two hours.

Looking at the list of ingredients again, I think the culprit’s the menthol, and what I was getting there was the cool menthol experience that chewing gum manufacturers go on about. Except I’ve NEVER put chewing gum there.

OK - enough of that. The ride was good fun, and when we got back to The Irishman’s house, we finally got our diaries together, and fixed a date for doing the Coast 2 Coast this year - 30th August. We’ll do it in a single day, and for that I’ll definitely need to apply the creme. And no, I won’t be sharing - The Irishman can get his own.

Filed under: Brick, Cycle, Friends, Silly Stuff, Too Much Information