Not a whole lot of time in the last week to commit to the unicycling adventure. It has progressed outside now as my hallway proves to be a bit too confined a spot to practice in. With the progression to outside, I’ve now also donned the helmet and wrist pads.
Watching more YouTube videos, it appears that the accepted way of getting off a unicycle is backwards. Forwards apparently is no good and honestly, I’m inclined to agree with that. Unfortunately, I did also discover how not to get off last night and made use of my wrist guards.
Thank goodness for the 90′s rollerblading craze that led me to actually owning a pair of wrist guards.
So after a few stalled attempts at getting on to the unicycle, I’ve finally been able to devote some time to it. It’s… uhhh… tricky.
Before I got on, there was some prep work to do…
- I initially put the uni together on the floor in C’s lounge room on Christmas day using my fingers and whatever dinky tools came in the box. Not my finest piece of workmanship, so upon getting the uni home, I stripped the entire thing and rebuilt it properly. There’ll be no stuck pedals on my watch thank-you-very-much.
- Next up, I took a Dremel to the seatpost. Despite measuring in at around 180cm tall, the stock seatpost is quite long and getting it low enough has the bottom of the post perilously close to the tyre. Cutting back the post also means that C should be able to ride this thing.
- Finally, I hit YouTube for my fill of ‘How To-’ videos. I love how some of these guys make it look SO easy – “Just put your foot up, balance a bit and soon you’ll be able to do this *hop* *hop* *hop*”. Riiiiight. Along the way I discovered some bloke called Kris Holm who is an absolute lunatic.
So armed with a well built uni and more head knowledge than I knew what to do with, I wedged myself between the hallway wall and a chair and hopped on.
It’s tricky…
Very tricky…
In my first 30 minutes or so, I did manage to build up to balancing on the spot for about 5 seconds. All that time I wasted learning fixie tricks has obviously paid off because I actually felt reasonably comfortable on it. Sure it’s not EASY, but I wasn’t nearly as wobbly as I expected I was going to be.
There were however a couple of learnings….
- Falling forwards = bad. Falling backwards = good
- Sit up or you’ll mash the… errrrrr… “goods”
- Hands on walls are secure, but they don’t really do anything for helping you learn to balance. Flail them around!
- Tape your seat to protect from crash damage
- It’s REALLY hard work when you’re learning. My abs are pretty sore now, although I’m hoping that it gets easier as I get more comfortable.
Hopefully I get to spend a bit more time on it tonight…
I have a new toy to play with, courtesy of C.
What is it?
Oooh a tyre
Starting to take shape
Ta-da!
Classy headbadge
Anyway, it’s a 24″ unicycle from unicycle.com. The assembly instructions were nice and clear (not that I really needed them), and it seems like a very solid unit. It also comes with a classy whitewalled Kenda tyre. Nice to see some real bike brands!
Despite being just a smidge under 6 foot tall, I needed to chop off a bit of the seatpost to make it work for me, but that probably also means that some of my friends can try it too.
Let’s hope I don’t hurt myself too badly learning to ride this thing.
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