My only regret with ISM Adamo saddles is that I didn't get one much sooner. I chose the model they call Road, and I'm happy with it, although I'm only a long-distance triathlete and not a real road cyclist.
Wow, what a huge difference it makes right away - from the first seconds of the first test ride I discovered without any doubt that this design will work for me. Of course some fine tuning regarding the saddle position might be necessary later on. I installed it about the same height and position where my old Selle Italia saddle would have been (if it's nose had been cut away), but the front tipping a little bit lower, so the saddle top is very very slightly angled forward.
Thinking back (pun intended) all those countless hours of suffering spent on my old saddle, I don't know whether I should laugh or cry. The pain was evident all along, but I just got a Quintana Roo neoprene saddle cover and told myself it's ok. It did help somewhat on shorter rides (especially with those wet shorts after swimming), but on longer rides it was far from ok.
Surely a top end classic road racing saddle with titanium rails can be lighter than ISM Adamo Road's 303 grams, but so what? When your race distance is a 180 km time trial, saddle comfort will play the leading role. On relatively flat triathlon courses, a 50-100 g increase in your saddle weight will not be even noticeable.
ISM Adamo's gave been available for years, and they are reasonably priced, so the only reason that must have kept me from doing this before is the weird-looking design. The design sure is different from other saddles, although now it actually looks cool on my Cervelo P3. So the problem seems to have been only my stubborn mind combined with an extremely high pain threshold developed through a quarter century of endurance sports.
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