January 09, 2006

What you're looking at right here is a pair of Rocket7 custom mountain bike shoes. These are the shoes that will carry me across 5,000+ miles of American roads.

The foot-pedal interface is the most important part of the whole cycle-human cyborg. It's where the power of your organic legs is transferred to the mechanical gears of your drivetrain. If the footbed of your shoe is too squishy, you lose power, spending it in compressing the soft foamishness instead of pushing the pedal. If it's too stiff and unyielding or not shaped properly, you'll end up with foot pain. I've got some weird nerve thing that happens in my patooties, and after a round of visits to various podiatrists and orthopedists, and experimentation with various "stock" footwear and pedal platform combinations, the custom footwear option was the last resort.

"Clipless" pedals, for those who need to know, actually clip onto the shoes you're wearing (the terminology is a holdover from the days when Tour de France riders raced on wooden rims, smoked cigarettes after long climbs, and sometimes raced drunk). This direct connection to the drivetrain gives you a more efficient power transfer, because you can "pull up" on the pedals as well as push down on them. Switching to clipless pedals on my commuter cycle in New York City was a revelation! My bike and I were one.

I justified the expense of these shoes the same way I justified the expense of the trike: I will be traveling across the continent under my own power, and I damn well better be comfortable doing it. Getting these shoes made involved a soft foam casting, tracing, and three-point "girth" measurement of each foot. The first go-round wasn't quite right - the arch in the right shoe was way too high, resulting in the big big pain while pedaling. So the shoes went back to Rocket7 for modification in mid-November, and I've just got them back now.

They're sweet cycling footwear: hand-made, with close-grained synthetic leathers that resist decay, and a custom carbon-fiber footbed. 230 grams per shoe, which is important: reducing the weight of anything that "spins" (wheels, pedals, cranks, shoes, etc.) provides a significant performance gain over weight reduction in static parts, such as frame elements or handlebars. Which means I really should lose a bit more belly before I leave.

It's a little scary spending this much on an item like this, because even if it's made perfectly, it will still be uncomfortable when you first put it on, and will stay that way for a couple of weeks. That's because the leather and the foam insole need time to mold to the foot in the course of normal use. I'm wearing them now to speed up that process a bit, as I sit on the couch watching "The Road Warrior"...getting all the moldable bits used to my feet while I contemplate an apocalyptic future wherein the suckers kill each other for gazzoline and black leather assless chaps while I pedal on my merry solar-powered way.