My last post about unicycling on my own blog dates back to May of 2021, when I’d posted about doing steep descents on a unicycle. Since then, I’ve not posted at all, and have only ridden on a rare few occasions. I’d started to do a bit of offroad riding with my 24” uni, but when it developed an issue with the crank arm coming off repeatedly, that too got scratched off. The situation right now is that I’m once again trying to both lose weight as well as up my fitness game; I turned to intermittent fasting for the former, and unicycling for the latter.

When I started riding again recently, I found that I could ride my 20” and 24” unicycles without much trouble, but the 29-er was a different challenge altogether. Despite my repeated attempts, I found that I’d totally lost the ability to freemount it. Now, ever since I first learned to ride, I’ve always freemounted and started all of my rides, so being bound to start near a pillar, wall, or post seemed a bitter pill to swallow, but when I tried that, I realized that I was far rustier than I’d imagined. The real issue is actually not the technique, but with a combination of lack of confidence and my now lost ability to turn off the fear-receptors in the brain; these fear receptors don’t get triggered when I’m on a smaller wheel, but the minute I’m riding a bigger wheel like a 29-er, they go off like a klaxxon, which means that I freeze up instead of being able to smoothly ride off.

One of the main things that drives up the success ratio while freemounting is one’s ability to compensate for a moderately good or even average jump and being able to ride off. When we ride regularly and the confidence/familiarity is high, the fear-receptors go off, and we can rescue even a potentially botched start, and ride away. When the confidence is low and one is rusty however, only a perfectly executed jump can be converted into a successful start, and even that is not always possible. This results in a very low conversion ratio when one is rusty.

When I started to practice to regain my confidence with freemounting a 29-er, I realized straight away that I no longer could listen to music or audiobooks while I practiced, something I loved being able to do earlier. I decided also to completely ignore freemounting on Day 1. Instead, Day 1 was all about getting comfortable with assisted launches, and practicing stops and starts. I have access to a basement parking lot which has many conveniently placed pillars, which are awesome to both launch off from and to make stops at. I also tried to alternate between my 24” unicycle and my 29-er, and found that riding wheels of different sizes helped to loosen up my brain, and I found myself making better progress. Day 2 was a continuation of the stop/start practice, and with interleaved attempts to freemount. Right at the end of the 30-35 minute long session, I was able to nail my first successful freemount! I was by then already quite knackered, so I had to stop at that. I’d hopped so many times that my left knee was feeling quite sore and I needed a rest day to get better.

Day 3 was much like Day 2, but by the end of the 30 minutes, I’d managed to get six successful freemounts! Yesterday though, was a change of pace; instead of practicing freemounting on the 29-er, I rode 4km in the snow, on my 24” uni, and that was both fun and helped give me more confidence. Today was therefore Day 4 of the freemounting practice, and I started to pratice with an audiobook, and I found that I could now ride and practice while listening to a book again! That’s a big relief for me, as I love listening to books while I ride/train. I found also that I’d been having the crank arms at an angle (9-o-clock and 6-o-clock) which works fine for smaller wheels, but wasn’t working with the 29-er. I switched to 10-o-clock and 4-o-clock instead, and found that it made things a lot better. I also realized that my leaps were not high enough; adding a bit more of bang into the jumps means that I get a natural forward tilt which really helps with a launch off. Today (day 4), I nailed 21 freemounts within a 40 minute session. While I’m still not getting every freemount, and I seem to have to ponder a bit before each jump, I’m getting there. The next litmus test would be to be able to nail my freemounts when I’ve got a bunch of people staring intently at me, as lets face it, unicycling gets a lot of eyeballs and attention. I’m not there just yet, but hope to be there soon.