soft landing

When I was small most of the pedals on our bicycles were flat platforms of plastic. A few were lucky enough to have ones with nice grippy serrated edges, which occasionally scraped a bit of skin off a shin but were generally much better in the wet and muddy conditions in which they were often required to be used. As the serrated ones were generally referred to as rat-traps that's what I've always considered a rat-trap pedal to be, though apparently the term can also be applied to particular types of clipless cleaty-compatible pedal, forcing rat-traps to be demoted to quills in some lexica. Shortly after installing my first set of SPD pedals last year I gouged the fuck out of my shin simply by attempting to walk through the station pushing my bike, but have not since experienced much pedal-related injury until my skipping chain (chainring is on its last legs) resulted in an unintended unclipping (I've avoided an unclipping-error moment by keeping them nice and loose) and either the chainring or the pedal or both dinging and scraping my calf, fortunately not in such a way as to cause me to fall off in front of the bus behind me. Once cleaned up it didn't look anywhere near as nasty though I did have to put an old towel underneath the leg whilst I slept to avoid transferring too much semi-coagulated scab to the sheets.