For the last couple of days, I’ve been practicing riding in real-world conditions, on the 36-er, in a bid to get more confidence while riding outside, and also get mentally prepared and acclimatized to the challenges of commuting on a unicycle, which has been my goal for a while. While it’s nice to practice on a vacant parking lot or a basketball court while getting started out, it’s important to get used to the real-world conditions as soon as possible. Dealing with imperfect roads, handling surface transitions (dirt to asphalt, asphalt to cobblestone, etc), dealing with changeable winds, biking around obstactles etc are all a part of the real-world experience, and the sooner we get good at it, the better.

I rode TABR in 2017; in 2018, I joined the ranks of the keen dot-watchers, the likes of Ron Nelson and Tony “Grmaa-pa” Shawley in absorbing the TABR action. My fellow TABR veterans from 2017 such as David Gates and Peter Andersen were riding again, and I was also keenly tracking some other riders I’d found interesting, such as Nishanth Iyengar and Louis-Eric Simard. I’d see how many hours each logged on their saddle per day, the stop options that were available to them on their route, and most importantly, the amount of climbing they had to do on the path ahead. For the last, i.e. calculating the climbing work ahead of the riders, I wrote a python script called elevprofiler.py which is available on my git repo here. Using this tool, and the official ridewithgps track for TABR 2018, I was able to get the amount of climbing in meters, when I keyed in the start and end points on the track.

One tip to many riders new to riding on 36-er unicycles is to switch to cranks longer than the stock cranks, which on a 36-er like the Nimbus Nightfox, is 138 mm. I’d ordered 150 mm cranks which had been delivered along with my 36-er, back in 2016, but after some initial practice, I’d returned to the shorter cranks, as they were the better choice back then as I was trying to learn to free-mount. Free-mouting with the longer cranks was harder as I had to step just a tad higher, to successfully get my foot atop the longer crank, and I wasn’t very comfortable with that.

Earlier this week, I practiced for a bit on my 36-er, practicing both assisted mounts and riding around, as it’d been a while since I’d ridden it.

[2020/05/21]