But the spring system and adjustability (which I will demonstrate in a very short video below) reside in the cleat. You’ll see here a set of cleats, and they cost $55, and you might think wow, that’s a lot of money for a set of cleats. A good deal of their functionality is in the cleat. Here’s where Speedplay pedals are often not understood. I’ll write about the Shimano shoes separately, but the process you see here is the mounting of these pedals on Shimano SH RC701. It’s that my old Bonts (in the image below) had served me well, but after 8 years of using both the Bont tri and the road shoe they finally just wore out, and there wasn’t any more use in them. I mounted the Garmins on the 9s (in the image just above) and I’m mounting the Speedplays on the 7s (in most of the other images here). I wanted to test both the RC9 and the RC7, to see whether the RC9 was really worth the extra money, or whether you’re fine with the RC7. This is the pedal’s Achilles heel (Achilles sole, actually).

It’s also easy to step into, because it’s got 2 sides, you can step into either side, and it would be a great pedal for cyclocross if it was better at shedding mud. It is lightweight, it’s aerodynamic, it’s pretty easy to walk on, and all of this makes the pedal a good choice for triathletes. I’m writing about the Zero, Speedplay's ubiquitous road pedal. I will follow this up (in another article) with a discussion of Garmin pedals because, while the 1st and 3rd place in Kona were in Speedplays, the guy in between was riding Garmins. The reason I like this pedal is that I can use this pedal to cross-reference the performance of other devices that either deliver resistance or calculate the power I’m producing.īut today it's Speedplay and I’m going to show you how Speedplay pedals are mounted, and when I do this I hope to impart a few of the virtues of this pedal, and why the very best athletes in no-draft triathlon tend to choose this pedal. The big deal with Garmin’s pedals is that there’s a power meter built in of course, and once Garmin chose to become an actual pedal maker – rather than partner with a pedal maker, which it did in the earliest versions of the Vector pedal – the actual pedal function itself improved. Garmin’s pedals are cross-compatible with Look’s KEO pedals. The two I’m riding are Garmin Vector 3s, and Speedplays. For my own riding I’m using two pedal systems today, and I really like and appreciate each.

Fitting speedplay zero cleats