Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
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.
Pretty-much every piece of equipment (except one) provides a small benefit.
If the drawbacks outweigh the benefits, then it doesn't make sense. No one should care about whether clipless doesn't work for
you.
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
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.
?? Your first post mentioning "ego" said
nothing about people "freaking out" over negative comments about clipless.
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
People get a huge ego investment in clipless like they get in a BMW - it's mostly about status and ego, with a few much smaller things that are actual improvements.
Here, you manage to attribute merely
having clipless as being "mostly about status and ego". If that's not what you meant, your words fail to convey what you meant.
And, it's quite likely that very few people using clipless actually "freak out" over negative comments about them. You should probably wait until people actually "freak out" before complaining about them freaking out.
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
I didn't say using clipless is about ego, I did say that freaking out that clipless didn't work for someone and trying to insult them about it was about ego.
You may have meant that but you did not
say that.
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Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
And you can just see the other posts to see why I thought it would be a big improvement - but it wasn't.
This is a big problem with cycling. It's fairly common to present things as having a large benefit when the improvement is small. People often think that if "racers do it" the benefit is large when the reason racers do it is because small benefits are valuable to them while racing (saving a few seconds in a race is valuable in a race but not really otherwise).
Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
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.
Many people might find enough benefit to using clipless even if they are not racing.