So, I retired my first pair of bike shoes today…Over a year ago, I never imagined myself to be a bike shoe wearing kind of guy. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t even tell you the difference in pedal types or why bike shoes would be important. I actually thought bikers wore them to look cool. I have since discovered that fact is only partially true. So, somehow, when I wasn’t looking, I became a biker. I think it may have been last summer when I rode a bike across the US on a fund raising trip for BloodWater Mission. I remember thinking of all the things I thought I would need to bike over 3,000 miles and shoes seemed least important and the most utilitarian to me. I remember going to the bike store and telling the guy, “I need some bike shoes…size 12…and I don’t want to spend a lot of money”. He then said, “What kind of pedals do you have?” To which I replied, “Uh…I haven’t got a bike yet…well I mean a road bike”. So needless to say, I wasn’t starting off on a good foot with the “bike shop guy”. After some clarification, it was agreed on the type of shoe and type of pedal and out the door I went with shoes and pedals for the bike I had not yet purchased. So jump ahead a few weeks, and now I have a bike and pedals are mounted and I am learning how to “clip in and out”. There is a learning curve for this procedure and some master this important step quickly and others do not. Those who do not… fall, usually at a stop light when lots of people are looking at you. This passes but always lurks when we least expect it. So, I remember, riding one day through the desert for 112 miles and the air temperature was 108 and thinking, “Maybe I should have got silver reflective shoes instead of black…for riding thru the desert”. I made a mental note to myself on that one. Thankfully, my shoes were well ventilated but my rotating feet were like on a rotisserie inches above the nearly molten pavement below. I thought, “Maybe sandals would have been better…” I made a second mental note to self. I ditched wearing socks about the time I got to Texas. This, of course, goes against all conventional biking wisdom. That’s ok as there wasn’t too much conventional about me biking across the US. Actually, my shoes seemed to fit better as they molded to my foot and became a second skin except for this weird plastic piece on the bottom of my foot called a cleat. This was the piece that snapped into my pedal and held my foot captive for mile after mile. The problem with this…it was great for turning the pedals but life threatening to walk on, especially on any flat slick surface. There was an art to walking on them and you had to keep your weight on your heels and knees locked. This unfortunately made you look like something was really wrong with your bottom or you had some strange neuromuscular disease. This left people, seeing you walk like this, wondering how you could possibly ride a bike in this crippled condition. The cleats being plastic wore down as I sometimes would drag them to a stop on the roads and streets of America. I actually went thru three sets of cleats on the coast to coast journey. In Tennessee, we got rained on briefly and my shoes and feet got soaked. This was …almost the end of the trip for the shoes at this point. I cannot begin to describe the smell the came from these shoes after getting wet. I soaked them in soapy water in Nashville in the sink of the hotel where I stayed when my wife came to see me. She said “Those are the worst things I’ve ever smelled…like a cross between bad smelly cheese and rotten flesh”. The soak for two days did help. It’s funny how many memories I have about something as common and ordinary as bike shoes. However, to me, these shoes will always be anything but ordinary .They could just as easily be ruby slippers and I could at the end of an amazing cross country bike ride and wake up and find myself clicking my heels together three times and saying, “There’s no place like…”.
