Winter riding in the Wisconsin Northwoods means traveling icy gravel roads to groomed singletrack and adventures riding from island to island, exploring frozen flowages. The gravel is now soft, the singletrack is closed for the freeze/thaw, and the lake ice is melting. So yesterday, I started the annual tradition of swapping studded tires for regular rubber and moving my studded winter boots to the basement in favor of my trusty Thorogood riding boots that I wear most of the year.
New to the tradition this year, I swapped my warm-season PNW Range composite pedals for the rubber iNVRS pedals from our friends at 9point8 in Ontario, Canada, that I have been riding on the Panorama Chic Chocs 3 test bike since Sven gave them a first look back in February. Prior to getting the iNVRS pedals, I would continue to ride with studded boots on either the PNW or Fyxation Mesa MP Subzero pedals, which are on all my bikes. I ride flat pedals rather than clipless since my racing and group ride days are in the rearview.
While the iNVRS pedals are designed for year-round use to avoid slashed shins from traditional flat pedals with aggressive pins, they stand out as winter platforms for icy conditions. Our driveway and the area gravel roads get so icy in the winter that my wife and I wear some form of studded boots almost all winter. I did an overview of my winter footwear options in this studded boots shootout.
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I often ride on frozen lakes and flowages. I am surrounded by lakes here in Seeley, WI, so even if I am just out to ride gravel or groomed singletrack, it is always an option to inject an ice ride when passing a frozen lake. Having studs on the bottom of my boots makes stopping and getting off the bike on ice safer in low-snow years like this one.
If you don’t own studded boots, 9point8 sells kits with carbide studs of varied lengths that you can install or a studded cleat that fits on clipless MTB boots. Before I owned Icebugs and Nexgrip studded boots, I used to put hex-head sheet metal screws in my Keen Summit County winter boots. Just to see how they install, I used the special bit in my Dewalt drill to install a few studs in my Keens. It was easy and they seemed to hold as well or better than the sheet metal screws.
As you can see by the scale above, the solid rubber iNVRS pedals are not lightweight. By comparison, my beloved Fyxation Mesa MP subzero pedals weigh 350 grams, and the PNW Range Composit pedals are 390 grams a pair. I am hardly a weight weenie and I no longer race, so I don’t mind adding some grams to increase utility.
When Sven first received these pedals and asked me to review them, I was sceptical that I would like them. After riding on them for a couple of months in all kinds of cold conditions, I am totally sold on them for the winter season. I will probably purchase an additional pair to install on my Omnium Cargo when I outfit that with studded tires so Cowboy can join me on longer rides in the winter.
I’m not sure if the iNVRS pedal and studded riding shoe system is going to upend pinned flat pedal industry, or that the BMXers will start screwing studs in their Vans, but our Canadian pals at 9point8 have revolutionized ice riding for me. While my studded boots always worked OK on regular flat pedals with pins, the solid, soft-rubber pedals grip much better without any boot stud-on-pedal pin grinding.
There have been a lot of flash-in-the-pan ideas whose inventors were initially ridiculed but now considered genius inventors. In the 1750s, Londoners laughed at Jonas Hanway when they saw him walking the city’s streets under the umbrella he had modernized for use in rain. I remember people laughing at me when I rode the Southern Kettle Moraine MTB trails with a heavy Motorola brick phone (with an Onza stocker on it) in my jersey pocket when I was a freelance photographer. Even the engineer who led the team that built the first mobile phone was wrong for saying, “Cellular phones will absolutely not replace local wire systems. Even if you project it beyond our lifetimes, it won’t be cheap enough.” — Martin Cooper
History will be the ultimate judge of Steven and the crew from 9point8, but I’m down with these iNVRS pedals for our long winter here in the Wisconsin Northwoods.
iNVRS Pedals are available now at https://9point8.ca
Interested to learn what Tony thought of the iNVRS Inverted Pedal System for Commuting? We have a story about that over at Full Spectrum Cycling!