Clipless

I did it!  I went clipless!

I’ve been using toe clips and they have worked just fine for me. They are cheap and simple. For the type of riding that I did – they worked fine.

However; for the type of riding that I do now – they weren’t all that great.

I mentioned this back on my post about riding White Mesa. It simply boils down to getting into the toe clips quickly and without looking – that is kinda hard to do.  When riding a technical trail, spending time getting into your pedals isn’t the greatest. Of course, you can pedal on the reverse side of the pedal and not worry about getting into the clips. That leads to another issue, though less significant. That is having them drag on the ground – that is just annoying. Probably looks/sounds silly too.

For those that are not familiar clipless pedals are the ones that have a “cleat” mounted to the bottom of a shoe that clips into the pedal. Toe clips are the cage and strap mounted to a pedal into which you insert your foot.  Pretty confusing, eh?  Clipless pedals refer to the fact that there is no toe clip – but there is a clip. 🙂

My existing pedals were beginning to come apart (first noticed during my Mt Taylor ride) so I needed new pedals.  Pedals seem to be one thing that all cyclists agonize over and everyone has an opinion about them.  I read as many of the opinions and discussions as I could stand (pun intended) and then spent some time on the trail/road trying to imagine the differences.

The options that I was considering were platform pedals and clipless.  When I raced BMX, many years ago, I used platform pedals (everyone did). They worked great and I loved them.  I suspect they probably work pretty well on mountain bikes and downhill bikes. Dirt/Trail riding is a fair chunk of my riding but I also put in a lot of road miles (for health/fitness). I could not imagine platforms being ideal in this scenario.

So, I purchased a set of Shimano PD-M424 pedals (on sale, of course!) and a pair of used MTB shoes from ebay.  No reason to spend a bunch of money simply to find that I don’t like something! 🙂  I purchased these pedals as I wanted to be able to use my street shoes for my occasional ‘ride over to the neighbors’.  This is probably only a problem for a noob like me that has only one bike.  Maybe someday I’ll have a fleet of purpose specific bikes. 🙂

I’ve now got about 100 miles with the clipless approach and I like it.  I’m certainly not an expert at getting in or out of them yet. Nor have I had my first fall… yet – I’m told that there are two types of clipless riders: those that have and those that will tip over at a stop light/sign because they could not/forgot to unclip.  I have no reason to expect that my old and feeble brain will beat the odds so I’ll just expect that tip-over and hope it is on dirt/grass and with the fewest possible number of people watching.