hi i was wondering what is it that keeps unicyclers from going faster is it the thought of falling or technique
thanks
In my non-expert opinion:
20% fear, 20% technique (other than weight-on-seat), 60% too little weight on seat.
umm idk what kinda of unicycling we talking: flatland, street, muni, trials?
100% skill. No i really don’t know. If you start to fall forward then you pedal faster and it brings you back and you can stop. If you start to fall forward you slow down and it picks you up. If you are inexperienced and try to go fast then you will most likely fall backwards.
As seems to be more and more the case here, people are asking questions about “unicycling” when they usually seem to be focused on one specific type, that they aren’t disclosing.
In your case, I would assume it’s road riding on 36" or geared unicycles. On any other size, you can ride up to the maximum ability of your legs to pedal fast. With practice you’ll learn what this is, and be able to increase it. With even more practice, you’ll learn how much buffer you need to not fall on your face. These are the things you learn if you do unicycling racing, which is mostly done on 24" wheels (old photo below).
But it gets a little different when the unicycles get faster. I am no longer in my 20s and 30s, when I dominated the track, and I’m also on the far side of a broken collarbone from unicycling. Even without that, I have different feelings about going maximum speed when it’s above a speed I can run out of. On the 24", even at world-record pace you can still run out of a forward dismount. This is no longer the case on a 36" or geared unicycle at high speed. In Ride The Lobster I learned to ride comfortably at speeds faster than I can run, but I wasn’t comfortable with pushing it beyond certain limits.
At that point, I would consider it a mix of fear and technique. I know I could work on the technique, and with that I would improve my confidence, but at the same time I know it would increase the odds of a catastrophic crash. And when the race is 800 km long I decided to strive for a very consistent speed, something that wouldn’t potentially get me injured and screw things up for my whole team.
