Quick, how many different types of bike component can you get with a built-in power meter? We make it five (cranks, rear hub, bottom bracket, pedals, and cleats). And now six, if you count the power meter shoes just announced by Spanish shoemaker Luck.
Luck says its power meter shoes will have a sensor in each shoe, located below the foot's metatarsus — just above the cleat mounting area, in other words.
The sensors will collect information about power and cadence from each leg each leg and use Bluetooth to transmit it to a mobile phone in real time. Luck says it will be compatible with Android and iPhone, by which we take it to mean there'll be a matching app for each platform.
The sensors will have rechargeable batteries and will be interchangeable between shoes, so if your shoes wear out or get damaged in a crash, you can move them to new shoes.
The sensor and electronics shown in these pics are prototypes, says Luck, with lots of details still to be finalised. The production version will be very light and compact, the company says, and practically imperceptible to the rider.
Luck's power meter shoes are still some way from production, so don't get too excited just yet. The company says it's hoping for Christmas 2014 availability, but the history of power meters outside the main bike transmission is one of long delays.
Acknowledged by the Telegraph as a leading cycling journalist, John Stevenson has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc editor Tony Farelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013 and these days he lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.