Thursday, April 13, 2006

 

Warm feet

Went for a ride last night with Harry. Harry is our most regular Wednesday night rider, in fact the Wednesday night ride actually developed from Harrys Wednesday evening training ride. We've been doing the Wednesday night ride for a couple of years now and over that time our riding skills have developed considerably, as has our light technology. From commercial incandescent type lights with dry cells to Halogen lamps powered by brick sized lead gel cell batterys to Nickel type batterys and now we've settled on high power LED lights and in my case with a Lithium Ion battery. My present setup is probably less than a quarter or the weight of my original setup. Mine is home-made, I'm really proud of it. It even looks home-made but I haven't had any faults at all with it since I put it on my bike. I was one of the first to use the 5 watt Luxeons and every time I mentioned it on the internet there were cries of doom from the masses but it hasn't missed a beat. I get people from all over the world checking out my design. I know this because I use Google Analytics to keep track of the number of hits on my web page and it has a world map with dots that indicate the source of the hits. Mountain bike riding is truly international.
Harry has a Cateye Triple Shot light, it looks quite rugged and works well but I still prefer mine.
The other cool thing last night was the weather, well it wasn't that bad but you feel the winter chill comming on, which was good because I wanted to try out my new Sidi Winter Storm boots. Now I always suffer from cold feet when it's cool, your feet are at the end of your legs and there isn't a lot of blood flow down there, and boot manufacturers like to tell us their shoes are cool and "breath", which is great for hot weather but no good for riding to work at 5:30 am on a frosty morning. So getting the boots out of the courier delivered box (from America to Australia at great expense) I was keen to see how these things would perform. I expected them to be thick and padded looking, which they weren't. they didn't come with cleats but I had some new ones somewhere in my bike cupboard so that wasn't a problem. I was also worried about size, since I never had a chance to try them on. I was going by my older Shimano boots and my running shoes to estimate the size, which is about a ten and a half, and as it turns out my estimate was spot on! So I put on the cleats, rode around a bit and adjusted them some more until they were about right and tightened them up. I found the optimum position for me was when you turned your heel inwards the boot should almost be brushing the crank. I've got no idea where my feet are while I ride but I seem to like more inward movement than out.
After riding for nearly two hours my feet were snug and warm, not too hot and not too cold but "just right" (as Goldilocks was alleged to have said). Am I happy with them? you bet! Any drawbacks? Well.. just one. If you need to put your foot back on the peddle in a hurry and you miss the cleat you have to be careful your foot doesn't slip off the peddle. The bottom of the boot isn't as flat as my old boot so it doesn't sit on the peddle as easily when it's not clipped in. It's not a major problem but is just something I noticed, I'll soon adjust to it. So anyway, now I'm looking foward to riding to work. Oh, I forgot to mention that it's held on with three velcro straps and also has a flap that wraps over the ankle, also secured with velcro. It feels like wearing bootys because it covers all of the ankle area. I didn't go through any puddles yet but it looks quite water resistant, and the other thing to mention is that the material used is called Outlast, which is one of those high tech materials probably invented to keep astronauts warm when they go mountain bike riding on the moon.

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