One of my biggest unicycling wins in 2025 has been regaining my ability to freemount the 36-er. The low-point was in April, when I did an outdoor ride in which I spent a total of 52 minutes trying to mount, and got in all of 11 minutes of riding time for my efforts!

If the lack of freemounting success was one of the low-points of 2025, one of the high-points was certainly regaining the ability to land my 36-er freemounts. Here’s from when I managed to land some 20 freemounts in about 20 minutes!

Next goal: landing tight turns

Having regained my confidence with freemounting, I did a couple of outdoor rides, and while the freemounting in real-world conditions were a bit harder than landing them in an indoor parking lot, I was able to get in some good riding, which allowed me to identify areas for further improvements. Two of the areas I identified for improving upon, were the ability to handle camber better, and the ability to make tighter turns. While gentle 90 degree turns were not too hard, I couldn’t land tighter turns that would allow me to execute for example, a U-turn.

Known issues

Here are some of the issues that need to be addressed, in order to be able to land tighter turns.

• Not leaning enough: this is directly related to confidence levels; the more confident I get, the easier it’ll be to dare to lean a bit further in, while turning.
• Conservative hip-flexes while turning: again confidence related. Sharp hip-flexes can give 90 degree or better twists pretty much without any forward movement. This would massively help reduce turning radii.
• Straightening out instead of continuing to lean into the turn. When the wheel straightens back, we end up traveling straight for a bit, before forcing the wheel into the next lean. Keeping it from straightening is therefore the key to get a tighter turn.
• Dropping the revs too much while twisting; the trick is to get the speed down to barely moving, but without actually stopping fully. An anology that works is a plane flying acrobatic moves; it should get really close to stall speeds in order to pull off some stunning moves, but it shouldn’t actually end up stalling!

Current progress

I’m now able to land U-turns at least in some of the wider points in my underground parking lot. I still can’t land tight turns on narrower stretches, but progress has been visible, albeit a bit slow. Hopefully, I’ll be able to land tighter turns soon (enough). Looking forward to sharing a video soon.