I’d made a 19 km route earlier this week, but hadn’t ridden this full stretch before, even on a bicycle, so it was exploration of a completely new route, while also making it my longest ever unicycling ride. For these longer rides, one needs to mentally prepare for the hours in the saddle and not the actual distance, as 19 km doesn’t sound like a lot at all, for instance on a bike. However, this distance corresponds to around 3 hours of saddle time, and that’s what I’d prepared for. I’d taken a lot of water in my hydration bag, and drank most of it. It was close to 2200 hrs when I finished, and the sun had already gone down, so it was dusk. The energy levels seem to drop with the light, and finishing in the dusk was a bit of a challenge, but I kept at it and was very happy when I made it back home, a shade under three hours after I’d started the ride. I know know that I can push on for three hours or more, and will continue to increase the distances gradually, and just by a little each time, so I get used to spending more and more time in the saddle.

I worked on a few routes suitable for unicycle rides today, and I came across a ccouple of improvements for my 13k ride, as I did so. With the changes, I eliminated a segment where I would have to share a relatively narrow stretch of the road with the occasional bus and even the odd truck. With the change, I would be entirely on cycle tracks, except for the intersections, and this was very good. The distance though dropped from 13 km to 11 km, but I’m not too unhappy about it. I came up also with a 19km variation of the same route, with a few additional segments, but since it was past 1700 hrs by the time I was ready with the route, I decided to do the shorter ride instead (11km), as I didn’t want to be out far too long.

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.

I’d done a 30 km bike ride with Shruti in which we’d ridden to Ekängen, and looped back to the city via Rystad. The route was very nice, and included a really nice long bike path which was almost completely uninterrupted by intersections for several kilometers, and that had made me realize that it was ideal for unicycling. On May 27, I decided to do an out-and-back ride along the same route, turning back at or around the 5km mark, to get a 10k ride.

Today, I spent a hour practicing freemounts on the 36-er. WHile I’d learned to freemount the 36-er, I’d not had the fitness to practice it much, as it needs a lot of hopping up and down, which can be tiring. When I wanted to practicing riding longer distance, I actually wanted to avoid the energy drain from all the hopping on and off, and so tried riding with a ski-pole, but now, I wanted to focus my practice on freemounts, so I could ditch the pole for good.