Want It Wednesdays: Women's G.S. Panache Bib Short

After a few months of super regular posting in the form of Monday morning race reports, I was a little worried about keeping up with material through the winter. My training-related activity since my last post can pretty much be summed up by saying that I've been picking up a lot of heavy stuff frequently, riding a fair amount of base miles, and this past weekend I went on a Sub-9 Death March recon ride with my Speedway Wheelmen teammates that would have provided some good photo opts had I not been riding myself cross-eyed trying to keep up. I suppose I could post another Lady Gaga video (Eh, eh, there's nothing else I can say), but I'll spare you that. So in the interest of finding something to post through the winter, I've decided to participate in Want It Wednesdays.

Long-time readers will know that I've been in pursuit of the perfect pair of bib shorts for years, and that a couple of years ago, I got pretty close. I actually did get officially perfect bib shorts and lycra knickers from Voler as part of my 2011 Velo Bella clothing order, and even though I changed teams, I still ordered a pair of bibs from the 2012 Velo Bella order as a back-up pair. Unfortunately, the 2012 bibs were radically different in a bad way (FAIL!). On the Speedway Wheelmen side, we are using Pactimo, so I just shelled out a big chunk of change to make sure we met the team minimum on the women's custom version of the bibs I reviewed a couple of years ago. On the pair I have at home, the cut and design were good, but the chamois was a little weird and ill-placed. We'll see how the new team bibs work out.

Anyway, all of this got me wondering if there were greener pastures in the women's bib world that weren't available when I really dug into this a couple of years ago. (What's Katie Compton wearing these days??) In all of the team clothing discussions, someone linked to the Panache site and I realized that they have a lot more retail clothing than they did a couple of years ago. I have a men's-cut Panache kit at home, and while it doesn't fit me that great, I was really impressed with the quality and construction. So I was kind of intrigued when I saw they have now have a retail women's bib.



I probably won't be trying a pair anytime soon, since my bib supplies are high and my budget is low right now. (Unless a Panache rep wants to send me a pair to review. This blog gets like 50 page views on a good day, you know.) However, they are definitely pretty high up on my want list.

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And just because this has been sitting in my pictures folder forever and I can't even remember why, here's something relevent to my recent training: