Cleats?

My Speedplay Frogs

So far I've been riding on regular pedals and wearing my running shoes. I'm still resisting that whole cyclist look. Mainly because I don't really look like one and so far, I don't even come close to riding like one.

I'm told (by real cyclists) I really should be using clipless pedals. I thought great, because my regular pedals definitely don't have cleats. Turns out that clipless pedals really mean that you have to clip in to them. Go figure. It's like pressing the "start" key to close Microsoft Windows.

My wife's cousin Eldon, who was a pro racer back in the day told me that I'm not getting the best experience riding my bike because I'm wan't using clipless pedals. With pedals that you can cleat into, you can pull as well as push on your pedals, with a goal of a smooth circular pedal stroke. The general idea is that you can generate twice the power as a push down only stroke. So I finally succumbed to the pressure and started looking for clipless pedals.

I have an unreasonable fear of getting my foot stuck on the things and falling over. Too embarrassing, never mind the possible injury. I really didn't think I wanted clipless pedals, but I respected Eldon's opinion and I started doing a bunch of research on clipless pedals.

There are a bunch of clipless pedal systems out there. There are specific ones for mountain biking, which are designed mostly so that you can walk on your shoes with some ease, and also not to collect at lot of dirt. Dirt prevents easy clip-in (see what I mean? clipless, but you need to clip-in). They're also used for general touring on a bike. For road biking, the requirement for easy walking and not picking up a lot of dirt doesn't seem to be as important. I guess I can understand not picking up a lot of dirt, but it would still be nice to be able to walk easily... I guess I'll understand better once I become a true cyclist.

I'm still in the "I'm kinda embarrassed to look like a road cyclist in spandex" mode, so I decided on mountain bike cleats. This of course meant mountain biking or touring shoes where the smaller mountain bike cleats are recessed into the shoe's sole for easy walking. So off I went... In the process, I learned about float. Float is the amount of side-to-side motion that the pedal system allows so your foot can swivel on the cleat. Float is desired by many riders because it can be easier on the knees. Cleat systems can have as little as no float, or 0 degrees, up to about 20 degrees of float. There is also free float versus centering float to worry about. How much you need is pretty much a personal choice. I decided I needed a lot of float. Don't really know why, but I figured my knees would thank me later.

Ease of clipping out was also a big concern. I think it is for most new riders. Who wants to ride up to a group ride, get stuck in your cleats and falling over in front of all those waiting athletes? Embarrassing. Also, they should be easy to clip into.

Shimano SPD cleats

The most common cleat system out there for mountain bikes and touring is the SPD system. It's also used in a lot of gyms on their stationary bikes for those new spinning classes. You can get SPD pedal systems with as much as 4 to 6 degrees of float. Prices range from as little as $40 to $50 for the system and up. As the cleat system gets pricier, they generally get lighter and have a few more little bells and whistles. I should mention that the SPD system was developed by Shimano and they also call their road pedal systems SPD.

There are other systems out there, such as Crank Brothers, Time, Look etc. I didn't really check those out because they're not as readily available here in San Diego. You kinda have to hunt for them. But it would pay to check them out if you're looking for mountain biking or touring cleats.

Speedplay Frog - Stainless

After trying out the SPD cleats, which were pretty good I thought, I ended up buying Speedplay Frogs. They're super easy to get in and out of, as the pedal is two sided. They've got a ton (20 degrees) of free float, which I'm sure I need and they're relatively easy to clip out of. So far I love them and I don't really care about some of the "why is he wearing mountain bike/touring bike shoes on his road bike" looks. Being able to pull as well as push was a revelation. I now have twice as much power to drag my big body around.

The one thing I found out about the Frogs, as much as I like them is that the little nib on the cleat (the part attached to you shoe) breaks off easily when you weigh 270 pounds. Replacement cleats are about $20-$30. The pedals themselves seem pretty indestructible. The systems run from about $100 for the chrome-moly steel version to $250 for the titanium ones. I got the middle of the road stainless steel version.

There's a good buyer's guide to clipless pedals on wheelworld.com with lots of useful information that can give you a good idea of what you need for the type of cycling you do. There's also a good section on clipless vs. clip-in and float.

The weight problem

When you’re trying to lose weight, it seems almost impossible. I need to lose about 80 pounds in order to get my Body Mass Index (BMI) into normal range. At 270 pounds, my BMI is 35.6; 5.6 points above obese. To get to normal, I’d have to bring my BMI down to under 25. The task is daunting.

I love food. When anyone asks her about our relationship with food, my wife replies “I eat to live and he lives to eat.” That just about sums it up. When I was twelve years old, I was as skinny as a rake and must have had a high metabolism, because I could eat anything in any quantity and my weight barely changed. I remember coming home for lunch when I was in high school (we lived five blocks from school). I’d eat two tins of tuna, put it over rice and then smother it with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. It would gross everyone out, except me. I loved it (I still love it!). By high school, I had grown to about 6'2" and 160 pounds and never seemed to gain any weight. My BMI had always hovered between underweight and normal.

Food was always a central theme in my family. I was born in the Philippines from Spanish parents. As with any Latin family, our lives revolved around food. We ate to celebrate, we ate to mourn, we ate when we were depressed, we ate when we were happy. Any occasion was a good excuse for a feast. My mother spends most her time in the kitchen to this day. She’s 80. What makes it even worse is that I belong to a couple of cultures that loved to eat! I remember as a boy living in the Philippines, I was always told never to leave any food on my plate... Think about all the starving kids in whatever part of the Philippines it was. When we moved to Spain when I was twelve, it was starving children in Biafra, or Ethiopia, etc. To this day in my late 50s, I still think my mom is gonna give me a bad time if I don’t eat every last morsel on my plate.

When I was fifteen we moved to Vancouver from Madrid, and I was into full blown puberty. My metabolism must have changed because I started putting on the weight. Still I managed to graduate from high school weighing just under 170 from all that tuna, mushroom soup and rice. Oh, and I ate bananas like there was no tomorrow. If you ever need proof that we humans are somehow genetically related to apes, all you had to do was monitor my banana consumption when I was a teenager.

During my college years, I quickly gained another 15 or so pounds and by the time I got out of there, I weighed about 185 pounds. However, I maintained that weight for a few years, even after I was married.

In the late 1980s, I began to put on serious weight. When I hit 195 pounds, I started trying out different diets, in desperate, yet mostly failing attempts at losing weight. I only wanted to lose about 10 to 15 pounds, but it seemed next to impossible. I tried the “rice” diet. I didn’t eat anything but rice for about a week. That was a total disaster. I gained weight! Then I tried the “soup” diet. All I had was brothy soups. After about three days, I nearly passed out from hunger. Naturally I had an eating binge after that. Then I tried the “popcorn” diet. That was another waste of time. When we moved to San Diego in 1990, I weighed 200 pounds and slowly but surely the pounds were creeping in. Having tried all the crazy diets, and realizing how futile they were, I pretty much ignored my ever-increasing girth. By the late 90s, I’d ballooned up to around 240 pounds. After a large lunch, I’d get really sleepy and was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. In 1999, I was driving home in the early afternoon and I fell asleep for a second or two at the wheel. I woke up a couple of lanes over, adrenalin pumping and wondering what the heck just happened. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about a week later and have been using a CPAP ever since.

I was still relatively active, played tennis, sometimes skied, etc. But those activities began to hurt a lot more than they did when I weighed 50 pounds less. As the years went by, I got less and less active, and by the early 2000s, I reached 270 pounds. My waist was at 40 inches and my belly was as big as a watermelon (and just about as heavy). I had back issues, I wheezed my way through the day, getting tired at just about every little activity. My wife, who worried about my deteriorating lifestyle was constantly on my case about losing weight and getting healthy. I naturally resented her constant reminders, the furtive looks at my dinner plates heaped with food, comments about second and third helpings at mealtimes. The thing is, I never considered myself obese. I saw myself at the same weight as I was during my college days. Talk about deluded!

Thing is, I don't really eat a lot of junk. I rarely, if ever go to fast food restaurants. I seldom eat white bread or white rice. I ate my veggies just like my mom told me to do. But I was eating a ton of it at a time. What I didn’t realize at the time was that without exercise, there was no way to burn off the thousands of calories that I was piling on. I knew I needed to add exercise to my regimen. But I had to find something I liked and that I could do by myself. Running bores the heck out of me, swimming to me means lounging around a pool with a margarita. Cycling seemed to be the logical choice.

So here I go...

Flight of the Bumble Bee

It's time to get serious about biking. I'll never lose any significant weight riding short downhill rides. So here goes...

SR 56 and Three Witches Loop

Yesterday, I mapped out a route that I thought was relatively flat and would get me all the way home without having to climb any hills of consequence. I also wanted a loop as opposed to an "out and back" to break up the monotony (I go real slow). So I picked a route which would take me down the 56 bike path to Torrey Pines State Beach, north to Del Mar and back home through Fairbanks Ranch and Rancho Santa Fe on San Dieguito Road. Looked pretty easy.

I did my usual “get on the bike, open the garage door, yell out to my wife to shut the garage door as I bolted out of our driveway” before the neighbors could see me in my riding clothes... I mean kit. On the 56 bike path, it’s mostly downhill until you get to Torrey Pines State Beach. Then I turned right to head into Del Mar. I thought, “hey, where did this hill come from?” It turned out there was a climb up into Del Mar. It was pretty slow going, with all the cyclists on the road passing me by. By the time I got to Del Mar, I was pretty winded. But, I figured I’d already done most of the climbing. 

Was I ever wrong. Stupidly, I really thought it was gonna be nice and flat the rest of the way. Except that there are a series of climbs on San Dieguito Road called the “Three Witches” that should’ve been called Three Bitches! As I labored up the three hills in succession, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. But the fear of humiliation was more powerful than anything else. I had to stop a couple of times and I pretended there was some mechanical issue with my bike. It was especially important to pretend I had a problem with my bike when some young twenty something female was going right by me chatting with her friend as she effortlessly climbed the hills. I was almost hoping for a real mechanical, like a flat or two so I could call my wife and ask for a rescue. But then, I really needed to persevere. So I clawed my way to the top of the Three B... Witches. After almost 3 hours and change I rolled into my driveway exhilarated! I had done a 30+ mile ride and I was still alive. Not only that, I felt great. I even lollygagged in my driveway OUTSIDE the garage. C’mon out neighbors! I don’t care that you’ll see me in tights! I think I'm a cyclist. 


Then I had a huge lunch.

A cross between a bumble bee and a whale, he said!

Flight of the Bumble Bee

During that ride I found myself in the middle of an organized charity bike ride (The Tour de Cure) and along the way, my photo was taken. I found the photo on the web this morning and paid an exorbitant amount of money for a digital file of the photo. I was on my Silver Thunder Rocinante, my tight shorts and my yellow and black jersey. My chin was hanging to my chest and I think I might have been drooling too. I’m so proud of the picture. I sent it to everybody I knew. My son, he’s so encouraging. He sent be a text message to acknowledge getting the photo with a note: “Pop, you look like a cross between a bumble bee and a whale!” I feel like Rodney Dangerfield... No respect.