First ride with clipless Sunday afternoon, 23 miles after a quick parking lot practice clipping-in/unclipping. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it quickly.

My immediate impression was that I like the stiff soled shoes (Scott Road Pro, decent low price). My feet are very narrow with high arches and these are pretty close to fitting correctly. I'll fiddle with some inserts, as I do with most shoes.

First thing I noticed was no cramps in my foot arches. Lately, with platform pedals and cycling/walking shoes, I've been stopping on almost every ride to stretch out painful spasms in the arches and sometimes legs. It's been happening at night in bed too. But so far no spasms with the stiff Scott shoes, especially on hill climbs where it usually kicks in.

But the soles and floating delta cleats feel like ice skating, trying to clip in with Look pedals. Judging from my riding video sounds, it took me almost 30 seconds to clip in completely. That may be even slower than GCN presenter Matt Stephens, for whom fumbled clip-ins are a long running joke. After that I seemed to need only one or two fumbles after complete stops (I stopped completely at most stop signs just for practice).

The 9° of float in the red cleats feels ridiculous. Like I'm slipping and sliding all over the place. I'll try it for awhile but I may switch to the zero-float cleats or those with less float. We'll see how my knees feel after getting accustomed to the red cleats.

One possible advantage to the floating cleats is I'm probably less likely to accidentally unclip while standing to climb hills. When my legs are shaking from heavy exertion I may not be able to fully control my foot position well enough to stay clipped in with zero float cleats. We'll see how it goes.

I wasn't any faster, but I wasn't trying hard either. I was mostly concentrating on spinning smoothly, and reminding myself to unclip if necessary. And I'm just getting over the flu and haven't ridden much this month, so I wasn't pushing too hard.