A couple weeks ago at the Rocky Mountain Bicycle Festival I met the guys at A-Line insoles. I was intrigued because I have D2 shoes on the road that have been better than anything I’ve used previously, but wasn’t interested in throwing down for two sets of D2 cx shoes (plus they have a heavy vibram sole and seem to take a couple adjustments to get them to fit quite right).
So I went and got fitted for the A-Lines (basically they put an attachable shim to cant your foot properly once you have been measured for the overall size – I’m an R, whatever that means). Walking around for the first few hours was interesting (I put them in running shoes to try and figure out how they worked for me). They said try them for an hour and bring them back if I didn’t like them.
Well an hour was enough time that I was intrigued. I bought them.
Yesterday I got in my first shake-out ride on one of my cx bikes since re-building it. Put the A-Line soles in my mtb shoes and went for it. The long and short of things is that I’m thinking about pulling the insoles out of my D2 shoes and giving these a whirl to see if I can make the D2s feel as good as the cx shoes did. Last year I had such a hard time going from the D2 shoes on the road to my mtb shoes for cross with the stock Shimano insoles in them. Then I tried Your Sole heat moldable insoles, and Superfeet, and everything short of having Don Lamson make me some D2 insoles for them. This year, I think I’m going to have a problem going the other way.
They are not light but not inordinately heavy. I haven’t weighed my set, but they add a noticeable amount of heft to your shoe (probably a couple ounces). And the cost falls in the range of fair, but not cheap – I payed $60 for them. But in terms of making the rider-pedal interface much, much better they were a huge score.
lancejohnson
In the Hudz 