^ Lol.

Yea, I'll admit. When I first saw the use of the word "Tombay" on this forum, I was subjected to the injustice of having to search the forum to figure out what that meant. FWIW, it was worth it. The word is now in my lexicon.

I've not given my Tombay story, so here goes.

Just bought some new cycling shoes. This is in the Biker395 dark ages before I got a torque wrench, so I was concerned not to overtorque the screws holding the cleat into the shoe. I dunno ... they looked kinda fragile.

So I attached the cleats to the point where they were what I thought was good and tight, and took off on my inaugural ride.

There are a lot of stop signs in my neighborhood, and a disproportionate number of them are disposed at the top of a slope. And I'm one of those fools that actually stops at stop signs. So I get to the top of this very short, 10% hill, stop at the stop sign, and try to clip out on the left side ...

... and realize that the cleats were not tight enough. My shoe twisted all right ... but the cleat stayed firmly where it was. And I realized there was no way I was getting my cleats out of those pedals. No way. No how.

And in the instant it took for this epiphany, I was already heading downhill backwards.

At moments like that, instinct takes over. And being a skier, my instinct is to turn the bike perpendicular to the slope. That worked fine, but the momentum swung me around on the downhill side and slammed me to the ground.

Ooof.

That was bad enough. But there was still the problem of getting out of the pedals. The only way I could think of doing it was to take the bloody shoes off. I just finished doing that when I noticed I had an audience ... a couple of cars stopped at the same intersection.

With my feet out of them, I was able to twist the shoes enough to get the cleats to release. That saved me an inglorious walk home in my socks with the shoes dangling from my pedals.

Trust me. I've not undertorqued a cleat since.