This is me learning how to ride a 24" cranky ultimate wheel.
Even though I’m OK on a disc type UW, for me this was another thing altogether. 4 days ago it was like learning to unicycle all over again, holding onto something for dear life, barely able to hoist myself onto it. I hadn’t worked out what to wear or how to position my legs to even get steady enough to just climb on without the wheel pushing hard sideways into my leg at a painful angle. Keep in mind how much more of an angle this type of wheel can tip. Once I figured out a way, then I found I could only do 1 half of a rev, I could only get the top pedal down to ground before jumping off.
My big dream for the first 2 days was to even get a few “runs” where I got 1 full rev. Well, you know how it goes with anything unicycling, if you stick with it and remember to breathe, little bits of progress build on each other. Eventually got a few revs each run, maybe 20% of the time, but hey, enough to confirm for me this is a possibility. Eventually building to runs like in this video, more than 10 revs!!!
But this just a humble beginning. My goal, my reason for switching to cranky UW, is to learn how to ride UW without the wheel touching my legs at all. So I took off the training wheels so to speak, or at least adjusted them more out of the way. I was cheating still a fair bit on the disc type. I was able to keep it off my legs enough to do some simple riding and tricks, backwards and idle even. But I was burning holes through pants and socks. I was constantly reminded I was cheating as regards my true goal.
On a disc type UW, for me at least, there isn’t enough play for my mind to feel out and home in on what it should really be doing to keep the wheel straight. All too soon on a disc type UW my legs (the training wheels) save the wheel, and I wasn’t learning further balance beyond a certain point, at least not as quickly as I hoped. On a disc UW, once in a long while, when I really focused on it, I would have those magic revs where it didn’t hit my legs at all. On this cranky UW, I temporarily hit that on almost every run past a certain length, it’s almost unavoidable, otherwise it gets too out of control. So, at least for now, cranky it is!
Thanks for reading!