Today was the second day where I was trying to relearn to freemount my KH-36 unicycle. After my experience with regaining confidence while freemounting the 29-er, I knew that I had to take it one step at a time. Day 1’s drill started by practicing safe-aborts; jump up, try and hit the pedal, and then go over the uni and allow it to drop behind, catching it from behind the back, as a bonus. I was able to get the safe-abort to work from the first time, and the fact that I seemed to be hitting the left pedal nicely gave me a lot of confidence. I then tried the jumps while standing close to a wall, where I could use support from the wall, to position myself on the uni and then performing a launch. I noted a bit of hesitation with the launches, but this is because I’d never really learned to launch from the wall/pole in the past! Once launched though, I found that I was able to ride quite well.

One of the surfaces I’d not ridden on a unicycle, was grass; moist/wet sand has a lot of resistance, but grass, particularly grass with moist earth underneath is particularly challenging thanks to the greatly increased resistance. Grass doesn’t seem particularly hard to bicycle on, as it’s easier to lay more power down, but when our point of contact is one wheel, we need to ensure that we use our weight to stay on the uni while maintaining a forward tilt, to keep plowing through. The reason I’m interested in riding on grass is that it can serve as a gateway to riding on other kinds of challenging and uneven surfaces.

I recently checked out my old post about routes for unicycling/bicycling and made a few modifications. Planned routes are like gourmet recipes; they don’t mean much unless they’ve actually been experienced, so I decided to try a 22 km ride, by choosing this route. This is the ride that I rode:

I decided to set off on a 10+ km ride today, hoping to hit my old stomping grounds, along Ekängenvägen (which my wife and I have dubbed Snigelvägen aka Snail-road) for the sheer number of snails that turn up on the roads during the summers!

One’s ability to ride a unicycle is similar to that of riding a bicycle; one learns the skill for life, however the similarities don’t extend much deeper. Many skills that one learns on a unicycle are heavily confidence/form related, so unless one is really relaxed and confident, extended skills such as freemounting, idling, hopping etc can be seemingly lost, at least till the confidence returns. Another aspect of one’s abilities on a unicycle that suffers adversely with long pauses is the speed; when we are less sure, we find that we simply can’t push harder, so the top-speed becomes very conservative.