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.

Today, I crossed a milestone of 50+ km of outdoor riding on my 36-er on my ride to Rydskogen and back. When I start the session, it’s a bit hard to make a clean getaway up an incline, but after a few minutes of warming up, it gets a lot easier. Hopefully, with more practice, I’ll find it easier to simply hop on the unicycle and ride off, without stuttering at the start.

Now that I have a few 5 km + rides on my 36-er, I wondered if I should switch to the short cranks, if only to evaluate the difference, and that’s what I did today. The first few moments were hard, as I struggled to get momementum going. The shorter cranks and tighter spinning circle amongst other things mean that I need to do more work to get off to a start, and it gets more challenging if I’m starting up an incline.

Completed another 5km ride, starting from a little walk to the railway station, to cross over to the other side of the tracks in order to begin my ride across the Sky Apartments (Tornet) and go on further. After I got to Engströms bil, I had a choice to either go right and head further along Bergsvägen, or attempt the big climb immediately after heading left. I was a bit apprehensive about this climb, as it’s a short and steep climb and I see many bikers struggling up or even dismounting their bikes to push it up, but I was determined.