Anyone ride MTB shoes/cleats on their road bike so they can have one shoe for all bikes?
I’ve ridden Look cleats on my road bike for almost 20 years, but I’m primarily a gravel/mtb guy these days. I do all my TR workouts on my gravel bike using “gravel” shoes and SPD pedals. Yesterday, I decided to mix it up and put my roadie on the trainer after not using that bike/shoes for several months.
My road bike fit is almost identical to my gravel bike, but whole shoe/cleat setup just felt weird. I’m sure it’s just because I’ve been using the other shoes for so long, but it got me thinking.
The shoes I’m using are the Shimano RX8 which they say are a gravel shoe (I call them half road, half MTB). I find them extremely comfortable and I use them on my MTB, my gravel bike, and all my trainer rides. After my experience with my road shoes yesterday I’m wondering if I just go all in and get some SPD pedals for the road bike so I can have one shoe for all my bikes.
Anyone else do this? Seems logical to me but, I was a roadie for a long time so it just seems wrong to put MTB pedals on a road bike.
I’d assume road pedals/cleats are “faster” but I don’t race on the road anymore so we’re just talking group and solo rides on the roadie. Can’t imagine using a MTB pedal would really matter that much in those situations.
I did this for a while with Speedplay SYZRs, but when I upgraded to a racier road bike it made me feel dirty to run gravel pedals on it. It’s vanity, I know, but I went back to my Speedplay Zeros on the road bike. That made me realize that I like the Zeros a lot better, so I’ve been thinking about going to Speedplay Paves on the gravel bike for the one-shoe-life, too…just in the opposite direction of you.
Really I think it depends on what bike they’re going on. Most mountain pedals are fine on everything except road race bikes to me. Endurance bike? Rock it. Race bike? Ehhhh, I’m not as sure.
Yes, with the caveat that the vast majority of my outside riding is typically MTB, so I’m not very concerned with having an ideal road setup. I run SPDs on both.
I ran PD-M530 pedals for a long time on my road bike. If you remove the clip mechanism from one side of the pedal they are 186g vs 224g stock and still give you more of a platform than the standard mountain bike pedals. I only switched because I got assiomas, and I miss being able to walk around in my cycling shoes.
I’ve done exactly that because the Zeros seem to fix my long term knee problems, but the Paves still use the same cleats so although they are better they will still clog up in mud. I suppose it depends on the sort of gravel…
It depends. I run SPD on the gravel and the trail bike, SPDSL on the trainerbike and the road bike.
I also have winter cycling shoes for SPD pedals, so on sunny but cold days, I change the pedals to SPD on my road bike. I don’t really like the feeling on a road bike because they float a little bit more and the SPDSL feel “locked in”.
