Since I bought my 24” Nimbus II unicycle, I’ve had more options for outdoor riding. The 24” is my default choice when I ride along, accompanying my wife on her evening walks, as it’s way more practical and easier to control at low speed than the 36-er. I’ve been riding the 24” pretty much everyday, and that’s helped me improve my finer control skills. I’ve on occasion even cycled on a bit of snow, but today was different as it had been snowing heavily all day, resulting in a big buildup of snow.

I wished to document the progress while attempting to learn to ride one-footed, like I did with learning to ride backwards, so here it is. This post will be updated to have the latest updates on top, so if you wish to read it in the correct chronology, it’ll be bottom to top.

It took me as many as 17 sessions of about an hour each, before I could learn to ride backwards, details of which are here. Riding backwards and idling are two different skills, and while neither of the two requires the learning of the other, I found that learning to ride backwards can make it easier to learn to idle.

When I’d done a 16 kilometer unicycle ride earlier in the day, I knew that I’d be doing a bike ride with Shruti too, later in the day, so I’d ensured that I’d saved some energy by not riding too long in the hot sun, and that allowed me to enjoy a nice 20 kilometer ride, this time on two wheels, with Shruti, for company.

Today was Midsommar, a national holiday, and a day which is generally celebrated with far more enthusiasm and geity in Sweden than even the Swedish National Day. This year though, there were no official celebrations due to COVID-19. I decided early in the day, that I’d do a ride, and I didn’t want to ride particularly long, but would like to try and push the pace a little bit, so decided to do the shorted version of the route I’d come up with, when I’d made the route to Kaga kyrka. This was a 16 km ride and I estimated that I’d be able to knock it off within two hours, or just over it. It was a little past noon, when I left, so I could be back just in time for my lunch, as per my calculations. The temperature was in the high 20 degrees Celsius, so I took a lot of water with me, in the hydration pouch.