Originally Posted by
Seattle Forrest
SPDs are great if you want to be able to walk around easily in your bike shoes. Some people have problems with these that they don't typically have with road pedals, like the bottom of their feet getting sore around the contact point. You can usually fix this by getting very stiff shoes, and larger pedals with more contact area to spread the force. Like A-520s:
I have found that the platform of this one-sideed SPD pedal doesn't interface very intimately with the shoe, and therefore doesn't offer any advantage in terms of stiffness or stability. However, it suffers from the disadvantage of being one-sided, making clipping in less convenient and causing the clipless mechanism to wear at twice the rate of a double sided pedal. Plus the additional platform adds about at much weight as an additional clipless mechanism. If it breaks, you can't clip into the other side. If you go with an SPD, go with a normal two-sided pedal.