Clothing care is an aspect of cycling that can be easy to forget about. Yet we need to remember to give those duds the TLC that they need; especially cycling shorts.

It might not matter that you haven\’t washed your cycling jacket for weeks. Or that your leg warmers got spattered with mud yesterday, and there wasn\’t time to wash them.

But how often to we hear/read: always have a clean pair of shorts to wear. Riding in dirty shorts is only too likely to result in saddle sores. Saddle sores are always a possibility for cyclists; but the risk that you\’ll develop them goes way up if your shorts aren\’t clean.

Thus I always have three or four pairs of shorts, which I use in rotation. That\’s important if you live in a humid climate, and the chamois needs more than 24 hours to get dry. A damp chamois isn\’t much improvement over one that\’s not clean; so I wash a pair of shorts almost every day.

I wash my cycling clothes by hand. I don\’t have an automatic washer with a spin cycle, and wringing out things by hand doesn\’t get out as much water. That\’s why I don\’t wash my cycling jacket very often; it takes too long to dry before I need it again. An easy solution would be to buy a second jacket, but I\’m always needing that money for something else.

What should you use to wash your cycling clothes? I opt for a mild, fragrance-free detergent. On days when the ground was wet, and a lot of grit got splashed on me, I rinse the clothes well before I wash them with detergent. I wish I could do that outdoors, rather than wash all that grit down the drain!

Clothing care is admittedly a nuisance; but isn\’t it better than getting saddle sores?