I have taken the plunge and gotten a pair of clipless cycling shoes. My biz partner has been a full-time bike shoes guy for some years now and after a while his and a few other friends' dedication to wearing them got my interest piqued.
After poking around in a couple of bike shops and then doing a couple hours of web reading, I settled on these shoes:
They had them in stock at the Kozy's bike shop over on Milwaukee Avenue by me here for a good price, so I was able to go over and give them a tryout. I settled on these because they were allegedly pretty flexible and had a recessed cleat. They seem to be positioned as an "indoor/spinning" cycle shoe, but they seem pretty terrific.
Oh, I forgot about the other thing that made it easy to take the plunge. It was that my bike had already come with these Shimano pedals that are quite functional for normal riding, but made it pretty easy to make the switch:
The great thing about these pedals is that I can still ride with normal shoes quite comfortably.
I have to say that I'm loving being clipped in (clipless, clipped in, the terminology gets kind of confusing). I rode toe clips for a little while recently and though I got the same good feeling of being able to do a full rotation with some sort of power. However, with toe clips I also had a handful of ridiculous incidents of my shoe lace across the face of my shoe hanging up on some little protrusion on the cleat and pulling up to a stop only to comically slowly fall over on the ground. So, the shoes are definitely better in terms of being easy to unclip (unlock?) yourself from them. If you set them up a bit loose, it's a piece of cake.
I think it feels easier on my old man right knee, which would mostly feel pretty stiff when I first started riding in the morning. Now I don't really feel any discomfort in the morning or any other time for that matter.
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