2020 will be remembered for being the year in which the world was hit by the COVID-19 virus; 2020 has also been the breakthrough year for me, as far as progress on my unicycle is concerned, and the two are perhaps even related. Since COVID-19 ensured that I started working from home, I was missing the workout I used to get thanks to my daily commute to work and back, and I turned to unicycling, to get some exercise. If the weather was poor, I practiced indoors on the 20” uniccycle, practicing riding backwards and idling. If the weather was good, I went outdoors with the 36-er, and I’ve practiced pretty much every day, in all of May. Yesterday, I did a 5 km ride on the 36-er and found that I’m now very much more efficient and that my calorie burn has significantly tapered off, due to my increased efficiency, and this made me realize that I should now start planning for longer or harder rides.

My calf muscles are now considerably more developed than they were, a couple of months ago, and I also can vary my posture and level of work to ease the pressure on my knees/legs on and off, allowing me to ride longer, without getting exhausted. Since I’ve always been interested in riding longer distances, I started creating a few routes of varying distances so I could choose to ride them, depending on the amount of time I have at my disposal, prevailing weather conditions etc. My last long ride was a 13km loop, and the surface was pretty good, with the exception of a certain segment where I had to ride on a stretch of narrow road which I might have to share with a few public transport buses and the occasional truck, so I looked to modify that to eliminate that section, and also to tack on some additional segments, to come up with a longer route. My efforts resulted in shortening the 13km ride to a safer 11km ride where the entire distance is on bike paths, except for the intersections themselves. I also came up with a 19 km, with is a variation of the 11 km ride, but with a few additional segments which I’ve not ridden yet, but an inspection of Google Streetmaps indicates that it should be a nice ride.

With today’s new additions/edits, I now have a nice 5.5 km ride, a 11 km ride, and a 19 km ride, all of which are loops, as I don’t really enjoy out and back rides, if I can help it. Once I successfully complete the 19 km ride, I’ll probably wait for a bit, gaining confidence and speed, before I switch to longer rides, as with my current best case average speed of around 8 km/h, I’d need nearly two and a half hours for the 19 km ride, and more time than that is harder to come by. If I can up my speed to around 10 km/h, I could target a 25 km ride in two hours, which would make a nice goal to work towards.