Barefoot cycling?
Sure, people do it, but is it, like, a thing?
Well, it could be:
Because people are now realizing the footbinding tradition that has dominated cycling for at least the last three decades (super stiff, super snug, etc.) is not optimal for performance:
Not only can having stronger, more comfortable feet benefit overall health, but as founder at the eponymous Phil Burt Innovation and former Head of Physiotherapy Burt explains, getting the most out of your feet can drastically improve power output, a discovery he made ahead of the Rio Olympics.
Having created custom, moulded shoes for track riders, he discovered “quite amazing uplifts in power,” something he put down to the fact that “the foot, all of a sudden, wasn’t wiggling around in the shoe”
Coming into my own as a Fred, I always took for granted that when it came to cycling shoes, stiffer was better. No, I didn’t seek out the stiffest shoe I could or anything like that, but I also didn’t have to, because all of them were pretty stiff, and you’d have to go out of your way to find a pair that wasn’t. It was the writing of Grant Petersen that made me realize that the whole stiff shoe thing doesn’t make any sense, and while I don’t have time to find where exactly he explains it, I seem to recall the example that really drove it home for me was that you don’t need a stiff sole to walk up a flight of stairs, so why the hell do you need one to sprint on a bicycle?
Clearly more and more people are also realizing this, and it’s creating an exciting new business opportunity for the enterprising cordwainer:
No doubt the Fred Set will soon take notice, because while they may not listen to some guy who paints his own pedals and is arguably overenthusiastic about twine, they always stand ready to Follow The Science:
As a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Tripp Hurt co-authored two scientific papers on cycling shoe stiffness, examining how that stiffness affected sprint performance. The conclusion of both studies: It doesn’t.
“Ninety-nine percent of people, (a stiff shoe) does not give any performance benefit … there’s no benefit,” said Hurt, a former top runner whose degree is in mechanical engineering. After college he worked as a biomechanist at the Brooks running shoe brand before starting Brevay, a cycling shoe brand, with partners.
Of course the most effective real world solution to harnessing the power of toe splay and maximizing your foot’s biomechanics while riding the bike is probably to just use flat pedals and wear sneakers. But this is cycling we’re talking about and sorry, that’s not gonna fly. So you can expect to see a flood of $5,000 clipless finger-toe monstrosities soon:
[The image above is 100% AI, because I am part of the problem.]
Or, perhaps cycling shoes will evolve into ultralight Kevlar mesh ballet flats, only with cleats:
[The above image is not AI, I just stole it.]
At which point we have finally come full circle:
[Also stolen.]
Just like with tires, which started out plump:
Got super skinny:
And have now fattened up again, much to the delight of cycling journalists who seem to enjoy nothing more than running around race starts with measuring calipers:
“Oooh, this tire’s 31.6mm.” “Wait, this tire’s 32.3 mm!” Who cares?!? It almost makes me miss the days when all they cared about was weight.
Anyway, the older I get the less certain I am about anything, and this is especially true when it comes to bikes. Mostlly, I’ve just learned how little I know. However, after all these years, there are three things I have come to understand about cycling, and they are:
- Everything comes back around eventually
- When something does come back around, it boomerangs with such force it quickly becomes ridiculous (to wit: how quicky we went from “You know, tires should be a little wider,” to “15 Reasons You Need To Buy A 32-inch Gravel Bike With 55mm Tires Today”
- Grant Petersen should be getting a royalty on pretty much everything
Once you come to terms with these three things nothing else will ever surprise you.