Orthotics in Cycling Shoes

I've suffered from horribly poor foot biomechanics my entire life.  I have incredibly flat feet.  This caused me a lot of headaches in my high school track/XC years but for the most part, was solved after I got hooked up with at fantastic sports medicine doctor at Ohio State who fitted me for some custom orthotics.  I used them religiously for about 4 years (ie. I transferred them into every single pair of shoes I wore), but eventually started to get sick of them and wondered if I still really needed them.  In 2008 I started to "wean" myself off of the orthotics and ran in just a regular stability running shoe.  I'm not sure if the orthotics had actually corrected my biomechanics or if I just found better running shoes (since then I have run exclusively in shoes from the Asics 2100 line), but nevertheless, my lower leg and ankle issues seemed to be completely resolved.

In 2009, I started to get involved in triathlons and trained for my first half-ironman distance race in 2010.  During this time, I drastically ramped up my cycling mileage and also started logging some serious time on the indoor trainer.  Slowly, but surely, my old lower leg problems started to creep back into my awareness.  The biggest problem for me has typically been posterior tibialis tendonitis in my left leg with some component of achilles tendonitis.  During my half-iroman training, these problems weren't horrible and I still had a fantastic race, but they were still causing me some distress.  I assumed, of course, that these problems were caused by my increased running mileage, so I tried to mix back in the orthotics into my running shoes, but it didn't seem to solve it.

Over this past winter, I thankfully came to the realization that the re-emergence of my lower leg problems were caused by my cycling shoes!  I went through a period of several weeks where I didn't run at all and the posterior tibialis tendonitis had gotten much worse.  At this point, I decided to try putting my orthotics into my cycling shoes.  Immediately, I felt a huge difference in the biomechanics of my leg movement on the bike.  Something just felt "better".

I have been using the orthotics in my cycling shoes for about 2 months now and have absolutely no tenonitis pain at all in my left leg.  Prior to trying them out, I really didn't think that the orthotics would make any difference at all in my cycling shoes because when cycling, you don't have the typical weight bearing foot strike and pronation motion.  I think that the problem was that although my cycling shoes fit very well, they didn't have any support at all in them.  Even though my shoe is locked in to the pedal by my cleat, there is still an aspect of "pronation", especially under high power output.  If you are blessed with poor biomechanics like me, I would highly recommend giving an orthotic insert a try in your cycling shoes.