Sole Material and Shoe Quality
Soles for cycling shoes are usually divided into three categories. Inexpensive shoes mostly use an injection-molded plastic sole, which is economical but heavier and prone to flexing. Mid-range shoes may use a combination of plastic and carbon fibre, plastic and fibreglass, or an all carbon fibre sole. All manufacturers' high-end competition level shoes manufactured post-2002 use carbon fibre soles. The sole material and amount of tread used in a shoe affects its weight; an expensive pair of road shoes with carbon fibre soles can weigh 650 grams, while a budget-priced pair of mountain bike shoes might weigh 850 to 900 grams.
Some mountain bike shoes have a little engineered flex in the toe area forward of the cleat mount. This assists in walking and in climbing obstacles while carrying the bike. More expensive shoes usually have less frontal flex.
Read more about this topic: Cycling Shoe
Famous quotes containing the words sole, material, shoe and/or quality:
“All those who try to go it sole alone,
Too proud to be beholden for relief,
Are absolutely sure to come to grief.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love’s sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“There was an old woman and she lived in a shoe,
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She crumm’d ‘em some porridge without any bread
And she borrowed a beetle, and she knocked ‘em all on the head.
Then out went the old woman to bespeak ‘em a coffin
And when she came back she found’ em all a-loffing.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. There was an old woman who lived in a shoe (l. 1–6)
“The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.... It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.... It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)