Hi everyone, unicycling newbie here.
I did my first successful ride about a week ago. Successful meaning I managed to ride about 20 - 30 yards before falling.
Here are the questions.
I’m having a hard time turning. I seem to be able to turn left but not right. Everytime I try to turn to the right, I seem to fall. Any suggestions?
Also, I’m still a pretty shakey rider but I attempted free mounting last night and I freemounted on my 2nd try. I can now do it maybe once every 5-10 tries, but I still can’t ride a decent distance. I always thought learning to freemount was going to be a huge challenge but it took much less time to learn than it did to learn how to ride 20 yards.
In case anyone is wondering, it took me about 16-20 hours to get to my first successful ride.
I have a friend who rides a freestyle bike and it’s really helpful to have someone out there w/ you to motivate you as well as to spot errors.
My guess is that you freemount with your left foot back and are left foot dominant. If so, turning to the left is a natural thing for you to do because you can torque the seatpost around and still get controlled power from your left leg while your right leg relaxes a little. Going the other way is awkward because you are trying to do it with your right leg providing most of the controlled power. This is a universal problem whose solution is more practice. I don’t know if it helps to try to notice which leg is doing more or less work as you turn…that would probably make you fall anyway. I think everyone has this problem to a certain degree. You will later find out how difficult it is for you to freemount with the wrong foot, idle with the wrong foot down, one-foot ride with the wrong foot, and incorrectly respond to a post with the wrong foot in your mouth.
>I’m having a hard time turning. I seem to be able to turn left but not
>right. Everytime I try to turn to the right, I seem to fall. Any
>suggestions?
If you can ride straight (maybe wobbly straight) I imagine you can
also turn very gradually to the right. Try to find a place where you
can ride a wide bend to the right. Maybe a curved road, or a parking
lot. Push to smaller bends. What also may be helpful: lean into the
bend. You will tend to fall in that direction so you’ll HAVE to steer
there.
Alternatively, remember that a 270 deg bend to the left takes you to
the right.
Klaas Bil
“To trigger/fool/saturate/overload Echelon, the following has been picked automagically from a database:”
“CISE, counterintelligence, SHADOW”
I think practice is what I need.