Define "Comfort"

The following is a little treatise in the most recent Bicycling Magazine that you might have missed. The beauty is in defining comfort.


Forgive me, but putting "comfort" and "bike'; in the same sentence, I just can't make it add up.
If I want comfort, I drive my Ford F-150 to Cracker Barrel, park as close to the door as I can, and comfort myself with a chicken-fried steak dinner with all three sides, sweet tea, and brownies and ice cream for dessert.
But if I want a bike, I'm thinking about this: Cyclists love to suffer. We love agony, misery, sweating and drooling and pushing ourselves past our limits and into the even more painful recesses of the unknown.
You don't believe me, think of the cyclists we' idolize. Take French champion Thomas Voeckler. When the climbing brutes of the Tour de
, France dropped him last July; he would cock his head to the side, grind through unfathomable reservoirs of pain and, by god, fight his way back to keep the yellow jersey. We didn't watch him and think, if that boy only had a tush-sensitive seatpost or more neck-friendly geometry, he wouldn't be in so much pain. No way. We wanted to go out and ride ourselves into a hurt just like his.
Because in our real lives, we get dropped all the time-something goes wrong at work; something breaks at home; we get sick-and precisely because our sport requires us to suffer, we can say, "Okay, I've been dropped, but I'm not going to stay dropped. I'll go through hell to catch back on, to reaffirm to the world around me that I'm still riding strong here, I ain't never gonna quit."
I don't know about you, but that's the kind of comfort I'm looking for in a bike. -Mike Magnuson