Descending down a steep grade is one of those things which are super cool do do on a unicycle, but can seem terrifying before one learns to be able to do it. Ever since I’ve learned to ride a unicycle, few things have left me more scared than the prospect of descending, with even the gentlest of grades causing me plenty of anxiety. When I decided to buy a 29-er earlier this year, I was sure that it would have to be disc-brake equipped, and that I’d use that to learn to be able to take on steeper descents.

My unicycling goals

In 2020, I unicycled 468 kilometers. In 2021 thus far, I’ve covered 457 kilometers, logging 263 of them this month. The 29-er has clearly been my unicycle of choice, logging 246 of the 263 kilometers I’ve unicycled this month. Since I started riding outdoors in 2020, this month has been the fourth time I’ve unicycled 100 kilometers or more, and the first time I’ve ridden 250+ kilometers in a month. I’d hoped to use the last day of the month to get in some more miles, but the incessant rain put paid to that. Per Strava, I’ve also recorded rides on 23 of the 31 days in March, averaging 11 kilometers per outing, which too is nice. I hope to continue to consistently log in more miles and I’m looking forward to riding more on the 36-er too.

In this post, I thought I’d write about routes around Linköping, which are suitable for unicycling. I try consciously to avoid traffic (both vehicular and human!), so I can enjoy my rides in peace, and I pick routes with a strong bias towards asphalt, as I lack experience of off-road riding. In the future perhaps, as I gain more experience, I’ll expand upon this post with non-asphalt options. Another point of consideration for me while designing routes is that I don’t generally design one-way routes, so this means that the distance will have to include both the onward and return legs. Since my current average speed is quite low, the time-cues for rides would perhaps be only relevant to myself so I’ll mention both time and distance for the routes.

I like to setup routes of different lengths so I can simply set off and ride them when I like/can, without having to waste time planning the route on the day of the ride. I’d setup a 30 km ride on komoot last year, and had even ridden it with my wife, on a bicycle, but the intention had always been to do the ride on a unicycle, but I’d not believed that I was ready, after earlier attempts to do 20 km rides had left me totally drained.

A bicylist learns to ride a bicycle using the handlebars, and can after getting reasonably proficient, start to ride it without using the handlebars. For a unicyclist, it is exactly the opposite.

When I started riding outdoors in 2019, I could barely ride a couple of laps around the basketball field before my calf muscles screamed murder. Since then, I’ve not only been able to steadily increase the distances, but I’ve also learned to ride on different types of surfaces. I’ve now ridden on asphalt, firm soil, sand, snow, gravel-covered asphalt, and cobblestone. The ability to ride on different kinds of surfaces gives one more confidence, and the ability to change from one surface to the other without having to dismount and remount is a great advantage, particularly if one wishes to commute on a unicycle.

I bought another unicycle! It’s a URC Roadrunner 29-er, with a hydraulic disc brake. Weighing in at 6.8 kilograms, this steel uni is no lightweight, but feels very well balanced and responsive.

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.

In one of my earlier posts, I’d touched upon my experiments with dieting, when I started with intermittent fasting back in September of 2018. I’d then measured myself at 74.8 kilograms. When I started this year, I was at 66 kilograms, my journey involving a lot of fluctuations. Today, I recorded my lowest weight in several years, at 61.2 kilograms, clocking a net loss of 13.6 kilograms. It’s taken me close to two years to close in on this, but in the process, I’ve also learned a lot more about myself, and also the challenges involved in the whole process of weight loss itself.

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.

I rode my first 20k ride yesterday. The route was something that I didn’t have to spend any time planning, as it was just a ride to Vreta kloster and back, a ride I’ve done scores of times on a bicycle, a bunch of times even accompanied by my wife, and I knew that the surface was perfect. Since I’ve gradually built up the distances on my unicycle rides, I knew that I was capable of lasting the three hours or so it would take me to ride the 20 km, and so off I went, though it was a little late. Though the light is really good now, I prefer to leave before 1800, or at any rate 1900, but it was past 1930, and I wanted to try and focus a bit on my pace too, so I could finish as soon as I could. My current average speed is around 7.5 km/h, which makes for 40 minutes, every 5 kilometers. My aim was to try and keep my pace as even as I could, at or above that average, and I found that I managed pretty well. I rode some really long sections without any unplanned dismounts (UPDs) and I’m really happy about it. I now am really beginning to enjoy riding longer distances, without any breaks. I was able to steadily chug up the Bergsbacken climb, and on my return leg, I was able to negotiate the descent too, without incident.

Now that I’m getting more comfortable with riding straight and long, and mounting the unicycle, I started training today, to be able to ride faster. While learning, I’ve consciously tried to keep the speed of the wheel in check, to prevent it from accelerating to a speed I wasn’t comfortable with, and now, I need to consciously reprogram my brain to override this self-imposed limit. This affects the way I ride downhill too; at the moment, even if there is the smallest hint of a downward slope, I end up using a lot of back-pressure, to bring the speed all the way down to around 6-7 km/h, but I’m now trying to allow myself to increase the minimum speed from the existing 6 km/h to around 10 km/h, even while going downhill. Like other things on a unicycle, this too involves some mental rewiring and redefining of internal safeguards, so it’ll perhaps take some time, but like other skills I’ve learnt, I’ll perhaps suddenly be able to ride faster than I’ve been able to do so before. Today’s ride was a 9 km out and back ride, where I rode onto Bergsvägen, till the turnoff to Sättuna, before turning back. I tried consciously to pedal more forcefully and to piston down with the other foot just as soon as the driving foot was done, to ensure that I didn’t end up having any unintended breaking action. I found that I was able to push harder and with greater confidence up climbs, than one flats and descents, clearly reiterating that it’s not about power delivery itself, but about rewiring the limits in the brain, and to pedal freely and without hesitation.

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.

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.

Yesterday, the weather was perfect for an outdoor ride; 14°C and only a light breeze, so I took the 36-er for a ride. I’m now trying to find bike paths with few or no pedestrians and other cycles so I can gain more confidence riding longer distances, so I’d decided to hit Tornbyvägen and try and ride onto Bergsvägen. Bergsvägen is super nice, with long stretches unbroken by crossings or intersections, and with the exception of the odd fully kitted out bicyclist on a road-bike perhaps doing a high speed ride around Lake Roxen, it has few people on it. Tornbyvägen too has relatively long and straight stretches, interrupted only by a few traffic lights, where the bike path crosses the main streets.

This post is to document the various milestones I achieve/plan on achieving, on a unicycle. When I complete these, I’ll strike them out and update with the date I completed them.

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.

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]

The process of learning to unicycle can be split into several milestone moments, moments when you realize you’ve leveled up. These moments also give you an opportunity to evaluate your own progress, and help to plan the future course. During my own journey, I identified these steps

Did some more unicycling in the last couple of days. In a first, I tried unicycling on grass and gravel, and the transition was interesting. Riding on the gravel, I could feel the tire interacting with every pebble and stick that I rolled on. The tire also grips so much more, due to it sinking a bit more into soft gravel, when compared to unyielding concrete, so I found myself being hyper-aware of the contours on the surface, and also how the unicycle responded to each one of my inputs. The whole session was very satisfying, and made me want to try and learn something new, like idling on a unicycle.

The weekend was quite warm, with temperatures staying above freezing for the most part. Most of the snow had melted away, and most of the water too had evaporated, leaving clean asphalt. I’d been thinking of going out to do some unicycling for a couple of weeks now, but the weather conditions hadn’t been favorable; this weekend though was looking just perfect.

This summer has been exceedingly warm; warmer perhaps than even the super-warm summer of 2014, and today was a pretty muggy day. I’d not ventured out all day, and at half past five, I was a bit miffed at having spent all day indoors. I topped up my hydration pouch, slung on my backpack, and set off with my 36-er, to try and practice for a bit. Unicycling gets a lot of attention, and before long, I was surrounded by kids in the neighborhood, asking me questions and cheering me on enthusiastically.

While I’ve been making steady progress with my 36-er, I hadn’t shot a video of my riding or mounting it, till today. Today though, as I was practicing, I saw a couple of people seated on a bench, looking at me, and even shooting a video, as I attempted to freemount and ride away.

It’s been slightly over a couple of weeks since the last update, where I’d realized I was able to mount the 36-er, but was still unable to roll away on it. For the first time in a while, I spent the weekend (28 Jun - 1st Jul) biking, riding to Örebro, and participating in a 200 BRM, my first BRM this season. The ride didn’t go to plan, but I wrapped up the weekend by enjoying a strong ride back to Linköping. On the unicycle front, I began to detect a strong reluctance to get on the 36-er. Each time I wanted to try it, I found myself subconsciously steering towards the 20” uni instead. When you analyse it for a bit, the reason becomes quite clear; on the smaller wheel, I’m so much better, and each time I ride it, I come back with more confidence and the realization that my skills are getting better, and I can also ride till my legs scream. On the 36-er though, progress is still slow, and all I could do was to hop on, and then step off. Sure, I was stepping off more gracefully now, and was now almost always able to catch the unicycle before it dropped to the ground (which feels nice), but that was about it.

After quite a bit of a hiatus, I spent some time on my unicycles again. I spent about half an hour, trying to free-mount and ride out on the 36-er; the anxiety of the big wheel is definitely history now. I’m now able to confidently hop onto the wheel, but I’m still unable to mount and get the huge wheel to overcome inertia and move ahead. I’ve done this in the past, but by dumb luck, and I need to be able to do it again now, but as a part of an easily reproducible chain of actions. I’m getting there, but it didn’t happen today. After a while, I switched the small wheel and for the first few minutes, I was struggling with it, with the opposite problem: the small wheel gets into motion too easily! Since I’d been laboring to get the big wheel moving, my actions caused the small wheel to just escape from under me! After a few moments though, I got it under control and was able to enjoy the next thirty minutes or so riding and even climbing a few grades. I wrapped by by going down the same grade, and it was nice to note my now increased control and the ease with which I balance and turn. Riding a unicycle is something I’m definitely on my way to internalizing, and it feels great.

Unicycling is a lot of fun when things go right, but it can be very, very, frustrating too; it’s very much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For starters, it appears to be similar to bicycling, and if you bike a lot, you might even be forgiven if you think you’ll find it easy to pick up unicycling, but nothing can be farther from the truth. A unicycle has a saddle and a saddlepost, much like a bicycle, and even has two pedals, but that’s where the similarity ends. I thought a unicycle might be similar to a fixed gear bike, and it is so, to some degree, but it still requires a completely different set of skills which you need to master, and you’ll need to overcome these challenges on your way to learn to unicycle.