Shoes

  Cycling shoes are an improvement on trainers as the soles are more rigid allowing better power transfer.  There are as many shoes as there are types of cycling, from numerous manufacturers and a with number of means of attaching you to the pedal if required. 

  Historically and still available are toe straps.  I used straps for years and while OK, in the winter I suffered from cold feet. No amount of socks and overshoes would keep my feet warm.  Straps, properly adjusted, restrict blood flow to some degree ending with cold feet in winter and pins and needles after long rides.  This, for me, is history post clipped pedals.  If you’re happy with them, fine, I’m not knocking you but they have bonuses and draw backs.  The main bonus is you don’t need specific cycling shoes you can scoot out in a pair of trainers.

  The clipless pedal as with many things in cycling was invented in the late 19^th century, for those of you interested there is a very nice timelinehere.  Nothing really changed until Cinelli’s M-71 in the early 1970s and then in 1973 LOOK turned the pedal world upside down with their patented clipless pedals.  Two years later Bernard Hinault won the Tour de France using LOOK pedals and in 1976 they went on sale to become the first commercially successful clipless pedal.  Twenty five years on LOOK pedals are still up there as a road and racing pedal, but they have rivals.

There are two main types of clipless pedal system.  Road are usually bolted to the shoe with a three bolt system a la LOOK originals.  Speedplay road pedals have a four bolt system. 

MTB/Leisure pedals use a two bolt system a la Shimano SPD.  The big players in the market are as follows;

           Road,  LOOK, Time, Shimano and Speedplay.  Campagnolo have a road system as well but the first four are the big guns.

All the big four are well represented in the pro peleton and not having used them I can’t really comment on plusses and minuses.  The nature of these systems means walking comfortably is not high up the list of features as efficient power transfer and weight are the primary objectives of a race pedal and associated shoes.

          MTB/Leisure, Shimano, Speedplay and Time. LOOK and Crank Bros. are also in this market which is dominated by Shimano’s SPD system.  SPD is cheap, hugely available and in marketing terms this means the best.  This is arguable. There are thousands of Rover 75s on the road this doesn’t make them the best car.  There is no comparison of Shimano’s build quality in the last sentence just price levels.  The sheer numbers tell their own story but for my mind there are too many moving parts for not enough float (left right rotation) with SPDs.  

   There are a myriad of MTB/Leisure shoes available and everyone has a different needs list. 

Suffice to say my oldest cycling specific shoes are a battered pair of Specialized Sonama used both with toe straps and clipless pedals, mine are the old laced ones. Demoted to turbo training shoes we have ridden tens of thousands of miles and they’ve been great.  I succumbed in middle age to a pair of Italian leather floozies who keep an old man very happy.

  There is a degree of learning in any clipless pedal system. Some time spent riding around an empty car park getting used to clipping in and out without looking is time well spent.  Most people have an unplanned dismount when learning and it just reminds the rest of that it wasn’t just us.

   When I decided to go clipless I already had shoes so the two bolt MTB system was a must.  The Sonama already fitted the “Able to wear off the bike” criteria so cleats needed to be fairly low profile as the shoes had little in the way of tread to conceal cleats.  I’d tried SPDs and didn’t like them so looked at Speedplays’ Frog MTB pedals.  The male part of the cleat is on the pedal so the shoe part was nearly completely recessed in even the Sonamo’s smooth sole.  The ease of clipping in and out was what sold it to me. Locating the round male pedal into the V shaped shoe cleat is very easy and unless you pull the cleat off the shoe you cannot disengage with normal pedal action.  As with all systems moving your heel outboard unclips you, but the Frogs action is so light there is no restriction of any kind in unclipping.  Only Flanders mud has ever clogged them and as it had already ground the bike to a halt clogging mudguards and brakes the so wheels wouldn’t turn I don’t call that a fail.  You don’t walk on the male cleats so you aren’t buying new cleats every so often or skating on smooth floors.  I use them on the tourer, fixed and everyday/commuter/club bike without issue.  I love them.  Downsides?  They aren’t cheap but good things seldom are.

  This entry was prompted by a customer enquiry and I am beholden to none of the manufacturers mentioned.

Neil

Riding an Italian Filly

We’ve all seen inappropriate pictures of portly middle aged men with sleek much younger women on their arms. (See Private Eye ad nauseum)  Last night the weather held and my will power failed and I took the shop demonstrator Colnago CX3.0 home to meet the cat.

A few points up front.  I’ll be 49 next week, I’m easily 10, realistically 15kg overweight a cycle tourist and bike commuter with no bike racing ambitions whatsoever.  Sure I turbo train over the winter, enjoy a dash to the 30 mph sign on a club run but that’s it.  So why try a bike that’s not for me?  Opportunity.  Here are a few thoughts, nothing Earth shattering, little contentious, just my thoughts.

My commute is to all intents and purposes flat, finding a route without flooding took a few days but I managed.  So, after moving the phone mount, fitting my pedals and purchasing a saddle pack I don’t really need we set off.   

I am no fan of Shimano, many are and we’ll agree to disagree.  I’ll cover the groupset (105) and wheelset (R500s) briefly and to the point. Very average.  Buy me a pint and I’ll bore you to death why I don’t like Shimano, this group did nothing to change my mind.  A visiting customer looking at the demonstrator was shocked and said that fitting 105 on this bike was, akin to dressing a beautiful woman in Primark.  Financially prudent, but not the act of a gentleman.

This frame wants to be ridden fast and is at its’ best when done so. Precise and responsive it was a few miles before I got my head together and rode it in a manner it expected.  Oxfordshire’s poor road surfaces disappear beneath the carbon frame.  What is a washboard on my commuter is a vague buzz on the Colnago.  It corners better than I do and reminded me why I should do some core work when I got out of the saddle.  I found it a rewarding and lively ride and would really like a thrash in the dry. 

The carbon saddle asked a few questions of my posterior but to be fair I hadn’t properly adjusted it and a little nose down and some time and I doubt it would bother me.  I probably should have come to work the hilly way this morning but I was running late and to be honest wanted to stay in bed.  Deda bars and stem are a stiff comfortable choice but I am unsure about the Colnago branded brakes.  Given more time I’d swap the pads for Koolstops to get a better idea of the callipers performance but I felt I had to grab too much of a handful to get the response I wanted.

In summary I do like the bike, would I have one?  Probably not.  It would have to be a reward purchase for shedding 15-20kg and it should be raced which isn’t in my cycling makeup.  I’d buy it as a frameset and fit SRAM Apex or Campag Athena and a pair of Fulcrum Racing 5s.  Not bank breaking top of the range but, in my humble opinion, better than this stock fit.

30 Days of Biking Summary

It rained.

To be fair it didn't rain much the first week of April then the heavens opened.  In the vain belief that somebody outside the UK might read this, some points of reference.  The southern half of our normally rain and windswept island in the top right hand corner of the Atlantic is suffering a drought. 30 days of biking is an annual social networked event to cycle every day in April.  April 2012 was the wettest April in the UK in a century.

April fools day was a gentle ride in the sunshine with a mate who owns a bike.  don't get me wrong he enjoys a bike ride but he's more BMW than BMC.  Weekdays were easy I rode to work I have longer commutes but by this stage it was a dash between the showers and on the whole I stayed dry. Easter saw a dry if cloudy ride to my sisters' in Guildford a couple of short rides in the rain Saturday and Sunday as we were doing the dutiful offspring bit followed by a train trip to Didcot to avoid a gale force headwind and rain. Coffeeneuring lunch and lunch runs saw out my weekends and to be fair to the weather Gods I dodged the showers.  The rain last week was pretty much continuous so I got a bit damp in the shorts dept. but only really soaked on Thursday and Friday.  The last weekend was atrocious.  I snuck a drizzly ride through Newbury Saturday morning but Sunday looked like my first "no show"  I drove back from friends on Sunday and a miraculous bit of blue sky appeared.  I got wet feet from the flooding but no waterproof required.

Despite the poor weather I've quite enjoyed it and got to try out in anger a few items of foul weather kit that haven't been truly taxed before.  See previous posts for details.  I used the smart phone app Endomondo to track my rides and really the only problems have been operator and phone driven.  It took said operator over two weeks to realise having mobile data switched on completely threw my Sony Ericsson Experia's ability to look at a satellite and relate it to useful data.  Hence the mileage recorded  is utter Murdoch, the timings are right and apart from one deleted record the mapping is mostly translatable to logical road routes.

May is a calorie challenge on Endemondo as I havent lost a bean!