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quoc pham night road shoe

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

we've all been there, haven't we? i mean, i'm not about to admit to a somewhat regular faux pas that will single me out amongst the cognoscenti am i? because i fully expect to see the sagely nodding of heads accompanied by stroking of chins as you identify with my predicament. "we've all been there," i expect to hear you say.

sunday morning; having arisen at the crack of 08:30, made enough porridge for its slow release carbohydrates to see me through the morning's ride, ensured that i have adhered to a shaving regime that would spare me from fausto's admonishment, i completed final pre-flight checks, though obviously not as precisely as i ought to have. after extricating the bicycle from its nightly repose, it is at the point of clipping in that i realise all too late that the cleats on the shoes are no match for the pedals on the bike.

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

we've all been there, right?

disappointingly, this has happened on more than a singular occasion, a fact that i'm keen to place at the door of the ageing process, but is more likey that of erroneous disorganisation. as you can infer from the above monologue, i am in possession of more than one brand and type of pedal, the result of several years of reviews. to further complicate matters, depending on the bicycles in the bikeshed and the pedals available, they tend to rotate (if you see what i mean?) and i can't always recall which pedals are affixed to which bicycle. i'm sure it happens to us all the time.

doesn't it?

however, on receiving a stunning pink and long awaited pair of night road shoes from quoc pham, i made sure that the colnago and the specialized roubaix were replete with an appropriate pair of road pedals, the ones that accept triangular, three-point fixing cleats to avoid sunday morning complications.

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

following recent trends in road shoe design, quoc's road shoes feature good old-fashioned laces; unless you have a verifiable demand for tightening your footwear prior to a sprint, i would contend that laces are very much where it's at. according to quoc "We use a lace closure system partly because of our heritage, but also because it spreads pressure really well across the top of the foot.
Ê "We also hold a world wide patent on the double hole, 'Lock Lace' system that holds tension when needed and controls the pressure."

quoc refers to the two parallel lace holes featured at mid-point on the top of the shoe, as well as at the end of the closure. intended to ensure the laces do not loosen when in use, it's a system that works remarkably well indeed. every other pair of lace-up shoes in the cycling cupboard has a tendency to relax pressure over the course of a ride, as indeed do my day-to-day normal shoes. there's also a cunningly concealed elastic strap on the tongue to hold the excess lace in place, one that i bemoaned a lack of to quoc before he was kind enough to point out the error of my ways.

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

as mentioned above, quoc's new road shoes (available in black, pink or white with a synthetic upper, along with a real leather version) took a month or two longer to make it to market than previous correspondence might have suggested. "We wanted to release the shoe before autumn last year, but our first generation outsole had too much flex. So we had to revise it to make it stiffer." on the basis of my recent riding pleasure, the upgrade has made it well worth the wait. the combination of the lock lace system and the minimal amount of designed flex in the carbon composite sole makes the 'night' road shoe as close to state of the art as it's probably possible to get at the moment.

"For our first road shoes, the main goal was comfort, It is designed for the long distance ride; the gran fondo."

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

the synthetic microfibre upper not only offers a superior level of comfort and breathability, but makes it eminently practical to wipe off any inadvertant marks incurred in the heat of battle. the heel features an off-centre reflective strip in case your gran fondo takes a tad longer than planned and coupled with the salmon pink uppers of my review pair, you'd be hard to miss in the chainset region. the micro-fibre lining seems particularly adept at preventing sweaty feet, always an unwelcome trait in the showers at paris-roubaix (so i'm told) and at an all-up weight of under 280 grams per shoe, they were only marginally heavier than the tubeless tyres on my colnago master.

quoc pham 'night' road shoe

the ride is sublime; it's very rare that i have all but forgotten about my footwear when riding. standing up to climb as quickly as churning legs could manage, elicited no untoward movement from either the sole or the laced upper. combined with their incredible lightness of being, a bicycle with featherweight tubeless ready wheels and a pair of actual tubeless tyres defied gravity far more confidently than the physique of the rider would have initially suggested. and, i cannot really underline this fact enough, they're salmon pink.

each pair comes with a spare set of laces; the pink ones had black factory-installed and a pair of white ones concealed amongst the tissue paper lining in the box. a replaceable heel pad is a welcome bonus. for those less disposed towards velocipedinal ostentation, quoc's £219 per pair road shoes can also be purchased in black or a peloton friendly white. and for a mere £20 more, you can purchase the black leather version.

i have every confidence that from henceforth my sunday morning, quoc pham shod bike rides will suffer not from inadvertent shoe/pedal interface malfunctions. these are superb.

quoc pham 'night' road shoes

thursday 6 april 2017

twmp ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................