Field Journal

Stories Behind the Gear: Kostüme
Photography by James Busby & Fergus Coyle

In June 2026, Dr Sarah Ruggins will attempt to break the world record for cycling south to north across Europe – a project called One Way North, using technical apparel from Kostüme. We catch up with Ed Bartlett, owner and founder of Kostüme, to learn more about how their focus on quality over scale has helped to make this ambitious journey possible.

Sidetracked: Sarah set the outright fastest LEJOGLE (Land’s End to John o’Groats to Land’s End) time in 2025. When did Kostüme first get involved with her?

Ed Bartlett: I’d been following Sarah for a while, but when I read she was planning to use a one-piece aero skinsuit for her LEJOGLE endurance record attempt, I offered her a pair of our bib shorts to try. My feeling was that she would eventually save more time thanks to our clipless toilet break function than the skinsuit would save her in aero gains.

Unfortunately it was too close to the event to make such a fundamental contact point change. But after Sarah required hospital treatment for severe saddle sores post-event – an extraordinary 2,700km ride she completed in 5 days, 11 hours and 14 minutes, beating even the men’s record – she reached back out for a pair to test. There was no partnership, no expectations, no PR angle. I just wanted for her to see how they held up under the extreme conditions she rides in. And I was curious too!

What happened once she started riding in them?

She took them straight into heavy training in the Pyrenees for long mountain days, back‑to‑back climbs, 40°C heat. If the shorts had weaknesses, that kind of riding would expose them immediately. But the opposite happened. She was genuinely surprised by the performance, especially the consistency.

For ultra‑distance athletes, consistency is everything. Kilometre 400 needs to feel like kilometre 40. That’s where performance lives, in repeatable stability over time. Comfort is basically a compounding factor in performance as the duration gets longer.

So what convinced her to partner officially with Kostüme for One Way North?

The product first, closely followed by our ethos. Clearly it wasn’t for the size of our brand, marketing, or sponsorship budget! Sarah chose Kostüme because the gear does exactly what she needs it to do, and because her values align with ours.

We release our products in small preorder-only batches, so we can invest significantly more in engineering and reduce waste at the same time. Those aren’t always the loudest principles in the industry, but they matter deeply to us. And they matter to Sarah.

Ahead of her 2026 attempt, you arranged a professional bike fit. Why was that important?

Surprisingly, Sarah had never had a professional bike fit before. Believe it or not Sarah has only been riding a bike for a relatively short time, and has always been very intuitively led in her setup. With One Way North ahead of her, we wanted to pay extra attention to saddle comfort to avoid a repeat of the LEJOGLE issues.

So we took her to visit our friend Jon Wild at Pedalling Perfection for a full rider analysis. Saddle choice, pelvic stability, pedalling symmetry, and – crucially – how the bib shorts and chamois interface with her anatomy. During the session we actually discovered a previously undiagnosed biomechanical asymmetry in one leg. It had been subtly affecting her stability and long-distance comfort.

You also tested her original pair of Kostüme shorts during that session. What did you find?

That was actually a bigger shock to everyone than the hip issue. Those shorts had done more than 15,000km of extreme training, which is the equivalent of several years of riding for most cyclists. Normally, at that mileage, you’d expect visible degradation: pilling, collapsed foam, uneven compression, the works. But when we compared them to a brand‑new pair right there in the fit studio (we caught it on camera too, thankfully) the chamois was still performing almost identically. Pressure distribution was stable. Structural integrity was intact. That blew all of us away.

For Sarah, that level of long-distance reliability is reassuring. For me, as a brand owner committed to product longevity and reducing waste, it was a huge validation of our approach. And our support of Sarah will also help us to communicate the value of product longevity to consumers, in a market segment that traditionally suffers from high levels of returns.

Comfort is often dismissed as a recreational concern. Why is it so central to Sarah’s attempt?

At elite level, people traditionally obsess over power, aerodynamics, mental resilience. Comfort gets misrepresented as ‘softness’ or a nice‑to‑have. But when you’re riding 16 to 22 hours a day across a continent, comfort is just physics. It’s pressure stability. It’s fabric that doesn’t break down. It’s tissue protection. It’s the ability to repeat the same movement hundreds of thousands of times without damage.

If pad pressure is uneven, power drops. If friction builds, inflammation follows. If tissue breaks down, the entire record attempt collapses. For ultra-distance athletes, comfort is directly tied to performance – and at the scale Sarah is racing, it may actually be the most important controllable variable, which of course also puts a huge amount of pressure on our shoulders. But as with everything Sarah touches, we’ve covered every possible base, including a recent session in the wind tunnel at Silverstone.

What does One Way North mean for Sarah’s kit?

She’ll be attempting to ride across mainland Europe in under 17 days, in all conditions, from searing heat in Spain to below freezing in Norway. That’s 6,000km where the margins are microscopic. The bib shorts and their consistency, their ability to hold their structure under relentless load, become one of the defining factors in whether she succeeds. But on top of that we’ve also developed brand new UPF 50 jerseys, bib tights that can cope with sustained rain and –10°C temperatures, and a gilet featuring Polartec’s revolutionary Power Shield RPM fabric. It’s pushed us all to new levels.

We’ll be sharing behind‑the‑scenes updates as she gets closer to the attempt, but the core message is this: comfort, engineered properly, is a performance multiplier. And in Sarah’s case, it might just be a deciding factor in a new world record.