I like pedaling. But pedaling through turns freaks me out, because I’m worried that if I lean too far, I’ll catch my pedal/shoe on the road and cause myself to take a spill (my cranks are 177.5’s, so that eats into my ability to lean a bit). Is this rational or am I a Nancy? Do people actually lean far enough to have pedal kiss pavement? Got any pictures/videos of people pedaling through turns and leaning pretty far?
It’s pretty easy to catch a pedal on the ground when really banking into turns while pedaling (I have 172.5s). I’ve done it a number of times, but it has never caused any problems. More like a little scrape - it didn’t affect my turn at all. But I believe there’s a comfort issue with leaning that far too, I used to ride motorcycles though and my favourite part was banking into a sharp turn, looking in my mirror and seeing the world on a nice sharp angle. So much fun!
Yes, it is easy to clip a pedal in a corner. If you only hit mildly, there is no problem. However, hit a little harder and now the pedal and your front wheel are touching the ground as the rear wheel gets lifted up. This quite often results in a nasty crash. For a lower speed version of this, check out Discovery in the final section of the Giro team time trial. Yaroslov Popovych did just this, and went down hard.
It is hard to learn how far you can go. It is further complicated when you change bikes (some have higher/lower bottom brackets than others) and crank length.
So be carefull…
Paul
I never pedal through a turn since I have 200mm cranks!!! Have yet to hit them on the ground.
Dave
Try a fixie. You really don’t have a choice about pedaling. I’m guessing this is the reason many people run 165 or 170 cranks. I’ve been using 175’s to be consistent since I’m riding the fixed gear to work on my pedal stroke. I slow down for most of the corners but I’ve had a few close calls.
When I raced criteriums I would scrape pedals accelerating out of turns several times per race. Never crashed because of it though.
200 cranks! Dave, I know you are a super gearhead, but that is about 198 more than you need. Are they all on one bike? Can we see a photo?
i get pedal scrape every crit. no biggy. it seems that you’d really have to lean hard to go far enough that a half a stroke would do anything. usually it’s just a light scratchy sound and you’re only at that far of a lean for a second. put your crank down and lean your bike until it hits. it’s farther than you think. however, your pedals will look like crap very fast if you scrape alot.
I used to catch the old quill pedals with toe clips quite a bit, but with my Speedplay Zeros, I pedal through virtually every corner without a problem. Today’s clipless pedals have a lot of clearance.
Spot
During a HIM in Montreal, I had a close call when @ the 3/4, almost the end, of a hair pin, right pedal touched the ground when I started to accelerate (maybe too early), I only ended up unclipping but it was a close call though.
Other than that I have a tendency to pedal a bit during whenever I turn and my pedals never touched the ground except that one time (I have 175’s)
Cheers,
Fred.
It depends on your bike, whether it’s american or euro designed. At least it used to be common for European designed road bikes to have a lower bottom bracket, because of more road racing, and less cornering, which made it more likely to clip a pedal at high speeds pedaling through a corner. American designs tended to have a higher BB because of the prominence of Crits in north america. I’m not sure if this is the case now, because I haven’t really pondered this question in the last 12 years.
I pedal through corners 95% of the time, and that comes from road racing and riding alot of crits where you pedal through and accelerate out of corners (in fact if you coast through the corners, you need a huge acceleration out or you get dropped). It was a few near missses with my old Look pedals, but I’ve got the speedplay zeros and have never had any pedal scraping occur. Even if you scrape a lil you should be able to keep it upright as long as you don’t panic. I’d wear some crappy old cycling clothes, and maybe pad yourself a lil, and than find a small loop and just hammer a bunch of corners at high speed and lean aggressively, this will build your confidence in pedaling through the corners. Either that or if you have a road bike, try riding a few crits, it really teaches you how to handle high speed corners, with people around you, and without crashing.