What's wrong with eggbeaters on a road bike?

[beanbag]

BliarOut said:

Thanks, so you'd still remain attached to the pedals if you fell off/over with eggbeaters?

I think to begin with it's inevitable. It's just one of those things you need to get used to but before long it becomes second nature and you find yourself unclipping when you least realise it.

Saying that, if you yank hard enough at a pair of eggbeater style pedals, your feet will pop out. Since you never use that kind of force whilst cycling, it's never a problem whilst on the move.

[BliarOut]

beanbag said:

BliarOut said:

Thanks, so you'd still remain attached to the pedals if you fell off/over with eggbeaters?

I think to begin with it's inevitable. It's just one of those things you need to get used to but before long it becomes second nature and you find yourself unclipping when you least realise it.

Saying that, if you yank hard enough at a pair of eggbeater style pedals, your feet will pop out. Since you never use that kind of force whilst cycling, it's never a problem whilst on the move.

My last off was an overenthusiastic stoppie where I went over the bars. With half clips I was free to leapfrog the bars and land on my feet, not sure I'd be able to do that with anything more secure than half clips. I like to think of it as a gravity eject

[Fatman2]

Uriel said:

Fatman2 said:

Sadly that's not quite right. Holding a block of cheese at arms length requires a fair amount of work as your arms have to react the weight of the cheese due to gravity (the cheese has some potential energy). So there's quite a lot of work being done to keep it still and prevent the cheese from falling to the floor.

Yeah, that's argument I was making. I was talking about 'work' from a physics point of view, that being the product of force and distance. The cheese doesn't move, so just looking at it from a physical point of view, there is no work being done. Of course from a biological point of view there is a massive amount of effort going into keeping the cheese aloft. My argument was with the point made earlier confusing the physical and the biological (no heat, light or noise produced by the use of eggbeaters or less rigid soled shoes, therefore the pedals must be efficient and all energy supplied by the legs must be going into the turning of the cranks).

It's not SPDs that I think slop about, it's eggbeaters, which I believe is in fact a feature that a lot of people that use them want, for reasons which no doubt trump any tiny loss of efficiency they may have.

They way I see it; if you take it to extremes and had some cleated slippers with a soft and floppy sole, you'd have a hard time pedaling. Wearing those, you'd be better off the larger the pedal and the more rigidly the cleat clipped to the pedal. In the real world we have stiff soled cycling shoes, but they're not perfectly stiff so suffer in the same way those slippers would, just to a lesser degree. And similarly, you'd benefit from the larger pedal and more secure clipping, just to the lesser degree.

Don't get me wrong, I think actual benefits are tiny, not some night and day thing that is going to aid a weak rider or hamper a strong one. But what do they say about the aggregation of marginal gains?

Yeah I take your point. The biggest differences are between using a pair of trainers and proper stiff soled cycling shoes. Everything else is marginal but whether these are significant depends on so many factors.

In truth I don't know much about Eggbeaters so can't really comment on just how flexible they are but I still (mildly) disagree about the energy thing. With soft soled shoes, then fair enough but if we're talking about a spring inbetween the shoe and the pedal then all force exerted goes straight into the crank. There may be energy stored in the spring but what goes in must go out.

You can use a car as an analogy. Just because a car sits on suspension i.e. 4 springs, that doesn't mean that the full weight of the car isn't the same either side of the springs, yet the springs store the weight energy that the car exerts upon them. If you then took the car and placed it directly on the ground (without the suspension) it would still apply the same weight force irrespective of whether the ground presents a more stable platform.

Re: the aggregation of marginal gains perhaps you're right and is why I never feel too fresh after a ride out LOL