Road Cycling Shoes

Cycling shoes are your connection to the bike, making them, uniquely, an important part of both athlete and machine, and meaning that shoe design is a fine balancing act between comfort for the rider’s feet and effective power transfer through the pedals. As with everything else in our sport, advances in shoe design progress at a phenomenal rate. We no longer have the thin, flexible plastic soles through which you could feel the pedal nor the early carbon soles, which were so thick and rigid that comfort wasn’t even part of the equation.
 
The best road shoes are expensive items and spending £300 is no longer considered ridiculous; however, spending that on the wrong shoes would be. So we have decided to try to help you get the right shoes with a quick guide. If you have ‘standard shaped feet’ then you may have a wide range of options open to you, but few of us are standard and moving away from a normal foot shape, it would appear that choice is still more limited.

There are a few major issues to take into account: firstly width and length fitting; secondly pedal type and the appropriate sole fitting; thirdly fastening type…
 

Length

 
As when buying any shoe, the most important factors to get right are the length and width.

Length is critical with cycling shoes. Too short and your feet will soon be complaining, leading to the inability to transfer power effectively into the pedal. Too long will see your foot struggling to remain on the sweet spot over the pedal (usually on the ball of the foot) and the dreaded heel lift, which will do little for your power transfer or your sense of connection to your bike.

Not all shoes are equal, especially when it comes to length. You would have thought that a 42 was a 42, equivalent to a certain length of foot, but it seems not. One manufacturer’s 42 is the same as another’s 42.5 and as a third’s 43. It makes it very hard to choose the right size and even harder to switch between brands. Take care when selecting new shoes and do your research, especially if buying online. Be prepared to send shoes back if they are not perfect.

This is one reason many riders will prefer to go into a retailer to buy shoes. Many online retailers have tried to create handy size guides; problem is that we have found at least two which are still in use, despite some of the featured manufacturers they refer to having changed the last (the mould, shaped like a human foot) they use to make their shoes. Some manufacturers (notably Bont and Lake) do help with handy feet measuring and fitting guides that are available online.

Get your feet properly measured and checked for imperfections that might need in shoe adjustment

There’s a simple test to see if your shoes are too long. Do them up normally and then tighten as you would if coming into a sprint at the end of a race. Try and force your finger between your heel and the inside of the heel cup of the shoe; you should not be able to do so. If you can get your finger in, even under extreme pressure, forcing your foot forward, the shoes are too long for you.

If you buy a pair of shoes and find that they are too long, send them back immediately. If you can’t, then buy a pair of mouldable, after market insoles. Invariably they will be thicker than the standard ones and will achieve two things to prevent your foot moving forward: firstly they’ll take up some extra volume in the shoe and secondly the foot moulding will help hold your foot in position.

Width

Width is the other essential factor that you must get right. Most riders will fit into a standard width shoe but did you know that cycling can actually be responsible for broadening your feet?

The longer you cycle and the more mileage you do, the more your metatarsals (the bones located over the ball of your foot) start to move apart from the constant downward pressure you exert on the pedals, in essence broadening your foot. This is made worse in communities where no shoes are worn regularly, such as in hot climates where you spend all day in flip-flops, or where loosely tied trainers are worn everyday due to casual dress codes in modern offices. This widening effect, which obviously requires years of regular cycling to occur, can also lead to a slight lengthening of the foot…

Therefore, as you progress in your cycling career, you may find you need larger shoes and wider shoes. Not all shoe companies offer a wide fitting as an option. Some of the more forward thinking companies are breaking the mould though and offer a range of fittings, Bont and Lake in particular. SiDi offers a Mega range with more volume including a slight increase in sole width but many other companies just don’t bother, believing that using more supple uppers will help accommodate a wider range of foot shapes.

Again if you buy a shoe and it is not wide enough for your foot, there’s little you can do but send it back. However, those aftermarket insoles may come in useful again if you are stuck. We have made this work well with a thin shoe, that was slightly long. When you fit the insole, you usually have to trim them slightly. Do not cut it to be an exact match of the sole of the shoe; instead cut it a bit larger. The extra insole will help to push the shoe out a bit wider, allowing a more comfortable fit.
 
Apparently this is a top pro tip, used to get riders’ feet into their sponsor’s shoes when wide fit was not an option. The good news for most of us is that we don’t have to squeeze our feet in and are free to choose our brand, so read on…

Pedal Type

Whilst, thanks to adapter plates, not an essential consideration, the type of pedal you ride will have a bearing on which type of sole you need and which shoe you end up buying. Most pedals fit onto the LOOK 3-bolt standard sole but Speedplay requires a four bolt fitting. To get the most from the pedal system it seems logical to seek out a Speedplay specific sole. However, this severely limits your choice in shoes.

Some riders, usually track sprinters, still favour Shimano SPD-R pedals which require a totally different sole drilling and are becoming much harder to find, as are the pedals. Bont have a good system to solve this issue, whereby allegedly you can drill your own sole to accept whichever cleat you like, though it still doesn’t work for Speedplay.

If you walk around a lot and prefer a spd, mountain bike style pedal, with a recessed cleat, then you need to look at mountain bike or cyclocross shoes, which we’ve covered before. See our cyclocross shoe guide here.

Fastening

SiDi will claim to have used the first wire fastening system, with their Tecno buckle system. However, Specialized really kicked off the current trend towards the widespread adoption of BOA closure. It is now standard on most top of the range shoes and expect it to filter down to the mid-range shoes over the next couple of years.

 
Interestingly Giro have gone a different way, influenced perhaps by a certain pro rider, and now offer laced shoes to the market.

The reason that BOA and laces are popular is that, when used with a supple upper, they spread the tension across the foot evenly, eliminating the hotpots and pressure points associated with stitching, plastic panels and buckles.

The new BOA systems also allows adjustment in both directions, allowing you to adjust tension either way on the fly, something that laces and the older BOA designs can not do. Some manufacturers, such as Shimano, have stuck with ratchet buckles and velcro, and there is certainly little to fault them for. Indeed, Specialized and Gaerne use BOA and velcro on their top shoes.

 
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