CLIPLESS SLIP UPS
WHEN BIKERADAR’S STEVE WILLIAMS MOVED FROM FLAT TO CLIPLESS PEDALS IT WASN'T A SMOOTH PROCESS. HE SHARES HIS MISTAKES TO LEARN FROM
Thinking of making the switch to proper road shoes and pedals? Are you wondering if it’s worth all the hassle and additional expense? I will help you to discover what it’s really like to clack around like a proper roadie, ‘clipping in’ to your pedals despite them being literally clipless...
1 Don’t expect adjustment to be easy
Tiny movements of the cleat – a single millimetre or degree – have huge effects, because somehow they’re cumulative. Get one foot a fraction behind the axle and as the miles rack up you go from feeling completely even to like you’re standing on a surfboard.
With this in mind, I was delighted to find the alignment marks on my shoes were almost completely obscured by the cleats. It takes a certain dedication to the underlying absurdity of the universe to go to the trouble of including lines, but then making them too short to be useful.
It’s really hard to adjust your cleats in one direction without accidentally adjusting another. Leaving the bolts pinched instead of totally loosening them helps, as does leaving one pinched harder if you only want to adjust the angle.
It’s best if you can only just move the cleat. Make tiny adjustments. Keep the relevant hex key handy to save faffing with a tucked-away multi-tool on your first couple of rides, and expect to stop often. Try hard not to fall over sideways when you do.
2 Pay attention to the angle of your feet
It’s quite hard to judge the angle that your feet naturally rest at. An old injury means my left ankle doesn’t bend very well, and the whole foot tends to angle out more than the right. I tried to ‘fix’ this by straightening the cleats and giving myself less ‘toe out’ for what I thought would be a better angle (one I adopt on flat pedals whenever I think of it). The result? Rapid onset of knee pain, within 10 miles. It turns out both my heels need to be tucked in very close to the cranks.
I’ve reached the limit of adjustment and still have some low-level knee issues. I’ll be trying arch-supporting inserts next. If you have flat feet like me, you’ll notice your heels roll in, twisting your knees as they go. Glued down level to the pedal axles via cleats, the only way to adjust this is within the shoes themselves. Here’s hoping there’s room…
The best way I found of seeing how your feet really want to align is to jump on the spot a couple of times. Stay relaxed and they end up pointing where they want to point. Follow this alignment (even
I DIDN’T BELIEVE THAT SWAPPING TO CLIPLESS PEDALS WOULD INSTANTLY MAKE ME FASTER, BUT AFTER A FEW RIDES EXTRA PERFORMANCE IS STARTING TO APPEAR
if it’s not symmetrical) rather than trying an idealised, parallel-with-the-bike one.
3 Don’t forget to adjust your saddle
And maybe everything else on the entire bike. It’s unlikely your feet will be the same distance above the pedal axles as they were with your old pedals/shoes, which means the effective distance between the pedals and seat has changed.
It took me a while to realise my saddle was now too low. Raising it around 4mm was a huge help, taking more pressure off my knees and allowing a more natural ankle motion. Raising the saddle also moves it back slightly, and tips more weight onto your hands. You may need to adjust for that, too.
If you’ve been using flat pedals for a while, note that the heel check (put your heel on the pedal and an almost-but-not-quite-- straight leg means the saddle is the right height) doesn’t work. The heels of clipless shoes actually sit higher than the fronts, because not all of the cleat disappears into the pedal.
4 Expect to forget about 4 pedalling smoothly
Riding a road bike on bright blue flat pedals and in Shimano mountain bike shoes is a terrible sacrilege, one for which I will pay dearly, and their lessthan-perfect suitability forced me to really think about my technique. It was vital to concentrate on powering all the way down through the stroke, and spinning smooth circles (instead of mashing), to maximise what efficiency I could.
Just a few rides in with clipless and I realised all of that had gone out of the window. I was spending the climbs thinking about other things – partly about pulling up on the cleats, which certainly helps, but mostly just about ploughing my way up the hill and nothing about smoothness. Bad habits, it seems, come easily with clipless.
5 Don’t expect instant extra speed
I didn’t really believe that swapping to clipless pedals would instantly make me gigantically faster absolutely everywhere, but after a few rides extra performance is starting to appear. There’s a benefit to the weight drop (273g over my old setup), but oddly that’s most noticeable in it being easier and smoother to spin, rather than snappier to accelerate.
There’s also a surprisingly large benefit to never having to reposition my feet during standing climbing. Unloading one foot (my left) enough to reposition it without pausing pedalling wastes a fair amount of energy, it seems. Having my feet always perfectly positioned is a luxury.