34. PEDALS. COMPLICATED? WHO WOULD OF THOUGHT?

I know. Flat things that you stick your feet on and go round and round. That’s about as complicated as putting on a shirt right?

Well thankfully, for the sake of this last minute Monday morning post, the wonderful world of cycling has endeavoured to make it a bit more complicated than that. Please observe.

...now that I look at it, I could have labelled these in a more logical sequence but as the overall effect is to increase the confusion you all might feel, I will go ahead and pretend that it was my intention from the beginning to allow you to feel some of the ‘what the hell’ I got to experience when I started to look into what I thought would be a comparatively simple part of the bike assembly process.

The pedal at ‘B’ is what I have had on my various bikes since the first road bike I got back in the 80’s. Manually tightened toe clips that hung down whenever you took your foot out and were quite often a right pain in the arse to get your foot back into when pulling out at the lights or whatever. While they did anchor your foot to the pedal allowing you to pull up a little on the ‘up’ pedal (a phenomena I have since read is a load of bollocks) they also made it difficult to remove your foot, especially if you did them up tight, leading to some quite comical - 'Ooh look at him. Is he going to fall over? Yes he has!!' – moments.

At ‘C’ we have the pedals the rest of the serious cycling world moved into quite some time go. They are somewhat bizarrely called ‘clipless pedals’. I say bizarrely because the deal with these is that you actually clip your foot into the pedals via cleats screwed into the bottom of your shoes as illustrated in picture ‘A’ with an allegedly effortless, once you get used to it, twisting motion...I am assured.

Road cyclists with any kind of self respect whatsoever would not be seen dead without a pair of these and biomechanically these things give you all sorts of advantages and there’s physics and graphs and all sorts of shit to prove EVERYTHING baby LOOK just put them on your bike or you’re a total loser.

Despite those well put arguments - I have some issues with these pedals.

Firstly – it still seems to me I am nailing my foot to the pedal and I am not yet good enough on unstable terrain to give up my God given option to put a foot down really quickly. Secondly – using these means wearing the fancy shoes and clicking about everywhere whenever you aren’t on the bike like a dirt covered, entirely lost, tap dancer and I’m not sure that’s entirely me.

So I have elected to pay attention to the one or two articles I have found that say riding with flat pedals like these...

Shimano Saint MX80 flat pedals (I assume you get two in the box..)

 ...is entirely the go if you want to perfect your pedalling technique, gain more confidence in tricky situations, become less reliant on the fact your foot is nailed to the bike when bunny hopping etc and be able to walk around quietly in the relatively normal shoes you get to wear (though I should point out you still get the excuse to buy shoes with special ‘sticky’ rubber soles to maximise your flat pedal effectiveness).

Next: Hopefully – attaching the bits that surely have arrived by now....