This ain’t no Mikefule story, but here goes.
I’ve been doing quite a bit work on the house lately leaving almost no time to play with my one wheeled toys. It seems what little time I do have to ride has been spoiled by Mother Nature in the way of rain. All my favorite trails have turned into mud bogs and chance to Muni has been non-existent for quite a while.
This evening after work the rain let up for a while so I decided to give the 28’r another try! So once again, I cleared the computer, jumped on it and headed off. I’m really starting to feel comfortable on it now and pretty much nailing the freemounts every time. I headed down through the puddles in the street to see where my wandering ride would take me. I had a couple UPD’s before I made the first mile and was starting to get frustrated but continued on.
After remounting for the 3rd time at 1.2 miles things started to fall into place. About 3 miles into the ride the rain started lightly coming down as I plodded onward through the neighborhoods.
My next dismount was at a traffic light and as I waited for the light to change, I checked my mileage and was excited to see the computer was registering just over 6 miles. That means I managed to ride 5 miles without a single dismount!
At this point, I was soaking wet and decided I had put in enough saddle time for tonight and headed back for the house.
My evevning ride ended up being 7.3 miles with a top speed of 10.3 and an average of 7.6 mph. I know these numbers aren’t quite as impressive as Mike’s coker #'s , but for a 50 year old whose been riding less than six months they were good enough for me. If the weather holds up, I’m hoping to do a 10-15 mile ride this weekend.
Watch out Mike, my 20 miler’s no longer outta sight
Sounds like a good ride, and 5 miles without a UPD is good by any standards, because there’s always a random element that can fetch the most experienced rider off at any point in a ride.
For comparison, I have a friend who’s your age, who’s be learning for over a year, on a 24, and his freemounting is still around 50%, and his longest ride without a UPD is around a mile. His longest ride with breaks is around 5 miles. He’s fit, and well coordinated (he’s a dancer). By that yardstick, you’re doing brilliantly.
This is what old age + unicycling + few pennies of semiretirement money can leed to.
Motto…“Too much too soon”.
As I have tried to beat my senility with excessive aquisition of unis.
I have landed ,until adviced othervise, with skill recession resulting from jumping on various sizes of unis. Old “personal computer " rebelled and ,for a while ,I could not free mount.
Adviced by you friends I stuck myselve to 26” and ,happy like a bee ,I am free mounting again.
I fear to think what would have happen had I been talented pop singer
with plenty of money…probably disaster.Conclusion. Thank you for getting me out of uni set back.
Through the process of selling and lending, I have narrowed by uni stable down to only 2 (my 24x3 Muni and my 28"r). Switching between the 2 doesn’t seem the be posing any problems at the present time. I’ll have to see what happens when I go back to the 140 mm cranks on the 28" and see if I have to learn to ride it all over again!!!
