Platform pedals for a road bike

It's been a long time since I started using clipless pedals on my bicycles. My first road bike I put together when I was 17 had Look pedals that I used together with hard, fiber glass sole Shimano shoes. But what worked pretty well on a road, I've never felt like trying in the mountains. My mountain bike at that time had wide, pinned platform pedals installed and I quickly recognized it as the optimal solution. Not being tied to pedals felt much safer in rough terrain where I often had to use my feet for support, yet at the same time pins provided excellent grip and prevented my shoes to slip. In most situations, at least. Sometimes pinned platforms are like a weapon that can backfire badly. If my foot slipped on a pedal, pins easily scraped skin off my shins. It did happened a few times so my legs were decorated with multiple scars at that time.

I stopped mountain biking years ago and since then I have never used pinned platforms again. Until now. It doesn't mean that I'm going back to mountain biking. I just decided that it would be worth trying pinned platform pedals on a road bike for a change. Although, to tell the truth, my bike is not a typical road bike actually, but more like a hybrid between a cyclocross and a touring bike. For the casual riding that I am mostly doing, wider platforms seemed like a good idea. Not only they would provide a better foot support than my old M540 SPDs, but also let me use more comfortable and more walkable shoes. While I really like my SPD pedals, in some situations, such as a very rough terrain, they certainly were more problematic than helpful.

Having said that, I decided to give Blackspire SUB4 pedals a try. They are made in Canada, cost about $88 and are supposed to be relatively lightweight. I weighed them at 414g (on my digital kitchen scale), which is significantly more than 350g you can find reported in various reviews on internet. The manufacturer's website specifies the weight at 400g and is clearly much closer to the truth. Even with all steel pins removed these pedals weigh 378g, so I had no idea where those claimed 350g were coming from. Then, after searching the net a little bit I discovered that old, 2010 SUB4s must've weighed around 350g indeed, but too often riders had problems like this:

Old style SUB4s had much lighter and weaker platforms (Source: NSMB.com)

...which resulted in a major redesign and the new, 2014 model features a heavier and stronger platform (and looks clearly different than those old SUB4s shown in the picture above). So yes, the new pedals are heavier. Should you be really bothered, you can always buy the SUB3 version with a titanium axle - for double the money, of course.

Anyway, Blackspires come with a bag of tiny washers to be installed under the pin heads in case we decided that factory pins stick out too much and want to set them back a bit. This is exactly the first thing I did, as I thought that such long pins will make my shoe soles look like a strainer after a while. After some experimentation, I decided to remove one pin at the front-center and one at the rear-center position and use no washers in the front, single washers in the back and double washers in 4 middle positions, per side. That means I added a lot of washers (and removed 4 pins per pedal) and the final weight came up to 413g (I saved a gram. Yeay!).

All this was done to better match the profile of the shoes I was planning on using with these pedals - Five Ten Aescent. These are amazing shoes that seem to combine everything you would want to find in a shoe - they are very comfortable (much better than any road clipless shoes, for sure), walkable, lightweight, their soles feature some really sticky rubber so they don't slip and at the same time the soles are relatively stiff - stiffer than you would find in your regular sneakers. This makes Aescents perfect for bike riding as well.

Next, was the time for a test ride and my first impressions (after roughly 100 miles) were very positive. Blackspires offer a very nice and stable platform for regular shoes and their pins locked my feet in place very well too. But I quickly realized that now I have to learn how to ride with pinned platforms again. I spent so much time with my SPDs that using SUB4s was a totally new experience. The pedals are grippy, which is a good and a bad thing. You have to land your foot in the right place right away, as any micro adjustments are difficult without lifting the foot off the pedal. At the same time, riding with SUB4s feels nearly like having SPDs installed. They really prevent feet slipping off in 9 and 3 o-clock crank positions. And they feel much more comfortable than the M540 SPDs due to their width.

The big thing is that I am no longer limited to only one position of my feet on pedals. I can ride them SPD-style, having the ball of the foot roughly where the pedal axle is, or I can move my foot forward a bit and pedal with the center of the foot instead. Both positions were very comfortable and this ability to change feet position on pedals may be useful to avoid fatigue during longer rides.

At the same time, pinned platforms require me to think more - every time I mount the bike I have to find the right position for my feet. Clipless pedals always do it for me. I also have to plan ahead. When I stop at the red light, there is no way to pull the pedal up (like I can do it with SPDs) to have it in 9 o-clock position, ready to launch. The best method is to back the bike a bit to bring the foot and the pedal up.

I think I like the SUB4s. They are comfortable and I will leave them on the bike for a while. I don't know if I stay with platforms forever, or go back to SPDs, but I will be subconsciously twisting my foot slightly outward when stopping the bike for some time, for sure.