Cycling Shoe Orthotics
I am developing a slight pain in the ball of my foot from riding my indoor trainer. The pain almost feels like a bruise where my metatarsals under my big toe push down on the pedal of my bike. I feel it slightly on the bike, but I feel it more acutely when I run, which is worrisome this early in the season.
The high intensity NOS workouts lead me to push down hard on the peddle during intervals. When I do this, I can feel the pedal making contact on the ball of my foot under my big toe.
Doing a bit of homework, I am guessing that I have high arches in my feet, and thus I am putting most of the pressure on a single point of my foot. I think that if I had orthotic inserts, then I would distribute the pressure across a wider range of the surface area of my foot.
However, when I look online there are dozens of different orthotic options out there. Also, I recognize that I will need to measure the depth of the orthotic, and raise my bike seat a few millimeters to adjust.
Ultimately, I could just bring my extra bike and my indoor trainer, and get a new fitting. However, that is certainly a half-day project that will cost several hundred dollars.
Just curious if anyone out there in the EN world has run into this same problem, and how they addressed it.
Comments
What Leslie said.....you need a cleat adjustment......
always worked great
Thanks for all the responses. Will post everyone in a few weeks to let you know how it works out.
Hi, Patrick! Hopefully a bike fitting with cleat adjustment fixes the problem, but if not ... get thee to a podiatrist asap! I had a similar pain a couple of years ago -- went through a fitting that helped but didn't completely alleviate the pain. Turns out I had a neuroma that took a lot of patience to resolve. I think that if I had addressed it earlier, it wouldn't have been so bad.
Good luck!
Just got back from my fitter.
We moved my seat forward, adjusted the left cleat, put a "shimmy" under the cleat and inserted orthotics into my shoes.
The pedal/cleat impact is now between the metatarsal between my big toe and second toe, and the shimmy and orthotics have helped further distribute the impact across the whole ball of my foot.
It turns out that my left knee doesn't "track" straight. In other words, I am slightly bow-legged on the left side. Also, I had this old bike set up for a Mt. Washington race, and my last fitter apparently moved the seat back slightly so that I could deploy more force at a steep pitch.
All of those those things, along with high arches, resulted in the pedal/cleat concentrating the impact on a single point on my foot, which was creating pain when I ran.
I will give it a few weeks, but the early indications are that the seat/cleat/orthotic adjustment will do the trick. Thanks for all the responses!
@Catherine - I am hoping that no trip to the podiatrist will be required... A neuroma seems like it would require a lot of patience to resolve.