Unicycling is a lot of fun when things go right, but it can be very, very, frustrating too; it’s very much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For starters, it appears to be similar to bicycling, and if you bike a lot, you might even be forgiven if you think you’ll find it easy to pick up unicycling, but nothing can be farther from the truth. A unicycle has a saddle and a saddlepost, much like a bicycle, and even has two pedals, but that’s where the similarity ends. I thought a unicycle might be similar to a fixed gear bike, and it is so, to some degree, but it still requires a completely different set of skills which you need to master, and you’ll need to overcome these challenges on your way to learn to unicycle.

Challenge 1: Combating frustration

Repetition, repetition, repetition. Unicycling is a completely new skill, and your brain needs some re-wiring, to learn to ride a unicycle. You need to try, try some more, and even more, without letting frustration get the better of you. If you are particularly competitive, or have high expectations from yourself, you’ll have a harder time, as you simply need to accept that you’ll suck a lot, till your brain ultimately ‘gets it’. At times, you may even seem to regress, and seem to have lost skills you’d already learned, but this is not really so. Keep at it, and you’ll get it.

Challenge 2: Raising the fear threshhold

Every one of us has our brains preprogrammed with some basic routines, which are meant to keep us safe, and out of danger. During the course of our lives, depending on what we do for a living, and our choice of hobbies and activities, some of this programming is altered along the way; if you want to be a mountain climber, a deep-sea diver, an accomplished mountain-biker, or a big-wave surfer, it’s super important to train your brain not to switch into panic mode, when you engage in any of those higher-risk activities. While fear is crucial to keep us alive by triggering the fight-or-flight response in the appropriate situation, having a low fear threshold can be greatly inhibiting to learning a new skill such as unicycling. How to overcome this? Gradually. You need to get an understanding of the underlying physics behind unicycling, and learn that it can be very easy to fall off a unicycle, and land on your feet, without injuring yourself. Doing this a bunch of times can help your brain to rewire itself not to turn on the panic mode, as soon as you try to get on a unicycle, as it knows and remembers from your training, that is is safe enough. With more practice, you can even learn to catch the unicycle, to prevent it from taking damage, and this will not only help raise your fear threshhold, but also does wonders to your self-confidence.

Challenge 3: Identifying and internalizing skills and skill combinations

Whenever you read about unicycling, or watch unicycling videos, you’ll hear about ‘brain rewiring’ a lot, as it’s such a key step on the route to learning to unicycle. Raising your threshold for fear is an example for brain rewiring/reprogramming, but there are many other kinds of rewiring. Every time you fail to do something you want on the unicycle, you might think that you aren’t learning anything, but your brain is taking it all in. After some 50 failed attempts, you may find yourself suddenly capable of something you weren’t able to do before; this is an example of a successful rewiring. However, unicycling involves the use of complex combinations of a number of simple skills; while your newly reprogrammed brain might be able to manage things when a set of parameters are aligned correctly, you need to be able to identify the individual processes involved, so you can internalize them, and allow muscle memory to take over and do it automatically for you. When things work, it seems exhilarating, but try to instead work out the components involved in that successful action. It’s a bit like trying to work out the ingredients of something tasty that you put in your mouth; the ability to correctly identify the ingredients would help you both to recreate the action, as well as design new actions/tasks.

Challenge 4: You seem to lose skills you’ve learned already

Unicycling is extremely dynamic; there are several things happening at the same time, and your brain is trying hard to keep things coordinated, managing more processes than you are even aware of. If you fail to identify skills and skill combinations properly, you may end up mistakenly believing you’ve learned something, while you haven’t really understood all of the underlying processes. You need to learn to break down a process down to several intermediate steps, that you can then practice individually, and then try and combine them, to get the desired effect. When you seem to have forgotten something you’d learned, don’t get frustrated; instead, split it down to the components, practice them individually, and put them together again, to land it.

Challenge 5: The wait

I’ve watched videos in which people mention that they learned to unicycle within 3 hours! And there are others who say it generally takes about 15 to 30 hours. If you are taking longer, don’t get disheartened. Your best bet is if you learn to identify the basic skills you require, and practice them individually, and then combine them together, rather than trying to blunder your way into learning, but your mileage may/will vary, as it’s highly subjective; what works for you might not work for me, and vice-versa. No matter what, just don’t get disheartened. If you are serious about learning the skill, try not to fret the hours it will take you to learn it. If you have only say 15 hours to throw at it, and if you won’t learn it by then, you are willing to move on, that’s fine too. Just don’t start out with a lot of expectations, and get frustrated when you can’t match them in reality. How long does it really take? As long as it takes, is the only right answer!

Challenge 6: The body

While learning to unicycle, both your body and mind have to adapt a lot. After you learn a set of skills, you may think you are ready to start riding, but you may find that your muscles hurt after just a little while. There are a few reasons for this; as beginners, we are quite inefficient, our muscles are often needlessly tensed, and we also tend to apply a lot of back-pressure, to stay balanced, all of which lead to tiredness and fatigue. Even after we get more efficient, unicycling is still a very different exercise when compared to bicycling, for instance, and engages different muscles differently. Once you learn the basic skills, you’ll expose the limitations of your body, but again, don’t get frustrated. Every time you practice, your body adapts to the requirements, and you’ll soon get stronger, and better. Learn to be forgiving on yourself, and never overtrain due to impatience. Your body needs time to build the required muscles, and your brain needs the time to perform its rewiring, so give yourself the time you need, and you’ll come out on top, with a stronger, fitter body, and a skill which most people in the world don’t have! Now how’s that for motivation! Ride on!