Up to Speed by Christine Yu

Author:Christine Yu [Yu, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Jenn Kriske is the founder of the bike apparel company Machines for Freedom. It doesn’t surprise her at all that sporting goods companies have long treated women as a meddlesome exception to the rule, given that all-men design teams are de rigueur in the industry. It’s like playing a game of telephone when designers themselves don’t wear or use the products they’re creating. Women product testers may not convey the full story because it can be embarrassing to discuss pain and discomfort with men, especially in the breast or genital region. Plus, people often struggle to put their experience into words, something that Kriske learned from her years in hotel and restaurant design. “As a designer designing for other people, so much of it is about the psychology of just getting to the heart of what they really mean,” she told me. “They could say, ‘This is a little bit uncomfortable,’ but they can’t really get into detail about why they like something or why they don’t.”

Most of Kriske’s bike kit options were scaled-down versions of men’s clothing and weren’t designed for technical performance. She didn’t love the way she felt in them. While her guy friends debated outfit choices from their extensive cycling wardrobes, she scrambled to find enough gear to get her through a few days of continuous riding. The breaking point came after a 120-mile training ride in the bike mecca of Marin County, California. A seemingly normal saddle sore grew to the size of a lime overnight, and Kriske understandably panicked. She couldn’t cross or even close her legs, and the infection almost landed her in the hospital. It turned out that the chamois, the padded crotch section of her bike shorts—shorts made by a brand that her friends who were men touted as the best—was misaligned. To alleviate pressure on the crotch while in the saddle, the thickest part of the foam section is supposed to be aligned under the sit bones. If it’s not, Kriske says, “You have bunching where you don’t want bunching, and then you don’t have support and padding where you need the support and padding,” leading to saddle sores.

Kriske wanted to take the game of telephone out of the design process. She left her job to found Machines for Freedom in 2013 and create cycling bibs (essentially a pair of bike shorts with spandex suspenders attached) cut for a woman’s shape. She worked with a bike fitter in the Los Angeles area and analyzed years’ worth of data. What she learned was that, while saddles come in different sizes to fit a range of sit bone widths, most chamois didn’t accommodate the widest sizes and left riders vulnerable to chafing and sores.

She ordered every pair of women’s bib shorts on the market at the time. Most fit poorly. The chamois was too narrow or positioned too far forward or too far back. The fabric on some bibs would start to stretch and become transparent—not a great look when riding in an aerodynamic position for hours on end.

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