Originally Posted by
njkayaker
Too many people expect magic out of a particular piece of equipment, when the reality is that the benefit is small.**
I suspect the benefit of clipless for normal riding (eg, "cruising") is that it it allows you to unweight the non-power side. That is, you can pick up your foot instead of having the power leg push it up, which lets that power (small as it might be) go to move the bicycle instead. In normal riding, people don't appear to pull up with force. That's not something people would be able to do for very long anyway. Unweighting, on the other hand, is something people can do all day. That's for normal riding, not for things like aggressive riding (eg, sprinting) where the benefits of clipless might even be larger (but not really used much by normal riders). A no-clipless pedal, even with pins, rules out any unweighting.
** The only piece of equipment that has a large benefit is something that everybody has but not many use: the lower ends of the drop bars. Between being in the drops versus being on the hoods, you can go around 18mph versus around 16.5 mph for the same power. No other piece of equipment is likely to produce anywhere near that benefit.
What you wrote is pretty close to what I was saying, yeah - the benefits for the kind of riding I do were small at best, and far outweighed by the drawbacks I was having.
Originally Posted by
njkayaker
Pot meet kettle. It's not a big deal that you don't use clipless. It's unfortunate that it took you so long to figure out that it didn't work out for you. What doesn't make much sense is arguing that people use clipless for "ego" rather than clipless working better for them.
I would agree with you if that's what I was saying, but that wasn't. I was only saying that freaking out when anyone had a bad experience with clipless and calling it "stupid" was about ego. Perhaps I've been reading a larger dose of politics than is healthy, it's an annoying tactic, if anyone says anything negative about your candidate policy, you try to pretend they said something else and freak out about it to silence them.
I couldn't find the ideal picture, but I've seen road racing like this:
You're shoulder-to-shoulder with other riders, sprinting to try to get ahead, etc...I can see why, in this situations, you'd want your foot to be securely attached to the pedal in the most secure way possible. I think that is the primary motivation to use clipless for racers. Flats with pins and flat shoes for what I'm doing - commuting to work, rides with family, riding around town - foot retention has been great. But I'm not shoulder to shoulder in an all out sprint with a whole pack of other riders.
For the purposes I'm using my bike for, it was a waste of money for me to invest so much money, time, and energy into trying to make clipless work. And you can just see the other posts to see why I thought it would be a big improvement - but it wasn't. For what I was doing, and the issues I was having with my feet hurting to a point of making me not ride sometimes. If I was racing it would be different. And I didn't say everyone had issues either.
Though I will say that for my purposes - biking to a destination and walking in and around - I have found flats to be superior to clipless. I can bike to work, wear the same shoes at work, bike to a friends place, go out to dinner, and go home, all in the same pair of shoes with flats, whereas it was a real pain with clipless.
But I'm not racing. If I was I imagine I would have a very different opinion. There's no doubt clipless is the best foot retention you can get, if that's what you need as your
#1 priority.