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.

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.