Hello, I'm new to unicycling and I'm still alive

Off-topic
1

Hello everybody,

I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and start learning unicycling. I’ve been an avid cyclist for 30 years. I ride about 10,000 miles a year, and I’ve ridden everything from fixies to velomobiles - everything with two wheels or more that is. But the one thing I’ve never tried, that I’ve always told myself I needed to learn, was unicycling. I have this idea that one can’t call oneself a true cyclist without knowing how to ride a bike with any number of wheels, including 1. Silly notion eh?

The other day, I figured it was high time I got started on the unicycling thing. I’m not getting any younger, and if I have to trash myself as part of the learning process, now is the time while I still can heal fast. So I went to my LBS and picked up a cheap nondescript 24" unicycle that I don’t mind ruining to learn the skill.

This morning at 9am, I stepped on the pedal, leaning against the wall on my patio and I didn’t fall (I fell later though :)). By 9:30, I was able to ride the length of the house and turn around repeatedly, touching the wall lightly for balance. I tried parting ways with the wall and going my own way - and I feel I’m not too far from being able to to that - but at that point I was feeling pretty wasted, so I called it a day. Compared to the few beginners videos I’ve seen on Youtube, I figure I didn’t do too badly, so I’m mighty pleased with myself.

I’m not trying to learn unicycling to do superhero tricks. I just want to become good enough to buy me a big-wheel unicycle some day - and possibly design a geared unicycle of some kind - to commute to work and tour with during my vacations. Obviously it’s not gonna happen overnight, as I have plenty of learning to do first, but that’s my plan and I’m patient.

So, hopefully we’ll meet on the road and ride together some day!

2

Welcome Fastolfe! It sounds like you have a good attitude about it and you’re off to a great start. Stay safe, keep up the good work, and keep us posted on how it goes.

3

Same here! Been unicycling for 3 months though, a few weeks back I finally got my 36er. I’m riding it and am trying to get good enough to commute. IMO, it’s hard to commute with a unicycle especially if you have to deal with lots of varied stops from lights, stop signs, cars and pedestrians, but we’ll see how it is in another month. I still have issues attaining good speed without losing my footing on the pedals. I sorta feels like once I get around 12-13 mph, my foot wants to fly off the pedals.

Anyhow, post up your progress, it would be nice to hear.

The attention you get riding a unicycle is a drive to ride one. The view from a big wheel is pretty great, I can see over cars and down the block.

4

Most of us didn’t die when we learnt either.

seriously though it sounds like you are making great progress. It seems to take most people about 10 hours of practice to be able to ride so you are well ahead of the curve.

It took me a week of lunch breaks to learn to ride.

Welcome to the forums!

5

Thanks guys. The staying alive bit was in jest of course :slight_smile: I do expect to stay alive and well, despite my insisting on ramming a saddle atop a single wheel in my crotch.

I did a half hour session this morning. I reasoned that if I wanted to let go of the wall, I needed to steer and move forward to correct sideways leaning - just like on a bike really. Since my ass is doing the steering on a unicycle, I figured I’d get better control if I planted it firmly in the saddle - unlike a bike.

Since it’s all in the mind, I decided to consider I’m done mastering the fore/aft balancing and ignore it (call me cocky) and concentrate on turning instead. I decided to imagine the wheel in front of me with handlebars, like I’m used to, and picture it pointing where I’d want a bicycle wheel to point towards… and suddeny my butt started steering. Yeah!

So, I’m off the wall. I can do 3 or 4 wheel revolutions until I lean sideways too much for my poor balancing abilities and I quickly dismount. Trouble is, I keep wanting to correct the leaning: the way you do that when you do a trackstand with a fixie is, you turn hard and accelerate hard to “chase” the center of gravity so to speak. When you do that on a unicycle, it flies off from under you and you take a tumble. Ouch… I need to get me hand protections and a helmet, because it really hurts.

I’ll try again this afternoon with a higher tire pressure, to help my ass turn the wheel quicker. Also, I feel very much that, like a bicycle, forward speed is the key here: the more momentum I have, the more I can correct my trajectory. The trick is convincing my unwilling reptilian brain that gaining speed is a good idea I suppose.

So, stay tuned as I keep staying alive on my unicycle :slight_smile:

6

So, back at it this afternoon, and I figured out the steering.

On a bicycle, when the rider pushes the handlebar left or right, the rest of the bike behind the steering column - with the rear wheel on the ground - acts as a torque arm, soaking up the reaction force from the steering input. On a unicycle, it’s the rotational inertia of the rider’s upper body.

So, twist your body in a jerk, and you’ll overcome the contact patch’s resistance against turning, the unicycle will turn one way, and your upper body the other way. Twist your body slowly and you’ll re-center your upper body for the next turning action. Either that or turn the unicycle when the wheel rotates quickly (because it’s easier to turn) and “recover” upper body range of motion when stalling (when the wheel becomes harder to turn).

With that in mind, clearly my tire was too “sticky” this morning, as I had a hard time getting it to start turning. So I pumped it all the way up this afternoon, and it became the other way round: the unicycle just wouldn’t resist turning at all, resulting in me twisting my body more and more to turn, but being unable to recenter it and eventually running out of twisting range and having to dismount.

After a few round of inflation/deflation, I found the tire’s sweet spot. Then to increase my upper body’s inertia, I set off with my arms in front of me, as if I was riding towards a very fat woman I wanted to hug. I pictured the woman at the spot I intended to reach, trying to keep her “image” between my arms, and… I left the wall and rode. Yeah :slight_smile: I think I managed a good 20 yards on my own without help from the wall a few times, and at least a 100 yards with help from the wall. No fall, no drama, just a bit of sweat from being so wound-up.

So, I’m roughly 2 hours total into this and it’s going swell. It’s a lot less frustrating than I expected it to be. I’m really happy!

7

LOL!

I’ve never thought of that training technique. Please make a video tutorial of that :stuck_out_tongue:

Feel free to include visual props.

Great job on the learning, unicycling is fun because it’s challenging and unique.
The learning phase is the most exciting is what I think.

8

I love when analytical minds get into unicycling. I hope you realize and appreciate that you’re learning about 10x faster than the average person. That’s very good progress. Try to remember that your arms are counterweights, and if you keep them extended with “good muscle tone” as Kris Holm says, you can use them to correct movement fairly easily with a quick controlled swing of the arm.

You can accelerate out of turns to regain balance, but it requires a lot more than it does on a bike. You must try to turn your upper body more perpendicular to the ground as you do, otherwise you tip over. As you’ve learned, a lot of the unicycling power and control comes from the hip and thigh area.

Good work!

9

Thanks. Yes, I like to try making sense of something before trying it out. Even in my reasoning is flawed, at least it forces me to try other things and get what I’m after faster.

So, the weather has kept me off the saddle for 3 days - maybe learning to unicycle in the dead of winter isn’t such a great idea…But I figured it’d give my brain time to integrate my newly acquired skills more deeply. And indeed, it did: this morning the sun came out, and on my way back from the Sunday flee market, I spotted a patch of sunlit tarmac on a supermarket parking lot that seemed free of black ice, with a nice long wall. Parked the car, got the unicycle out, started off along the wall, no problem at all.

Then I thought, to hell with the wall, and I pushed off. Not much trouble either, but I still seemed to have trouble knowing when I should start turning to compensate sideways leaning. I know it’s not about “knowing” really, it’s in the guts, but it seemed by the time I realized things were going badly, it was too late to do anything about it.

So I tried another approach: since the tire’s rubber’s resistance to turning has hysteresis (static friction that needs overcoming), the best way to remove that particular problem would be to make it turn all the time. Keep moving to achieve precision in a system that has hysteresis - classic dithering problem.

Moreover, the resistance to turning decreases when the tire rolls, and increases when it stalls, and I also need the tire to resist turning to be able to realign my upper body after a turn.

So instead of trying to pedal round to achieve smooth wheel motion, like on a bicycle, and instead of trying to hold a line and turn when needed, I decided to “take steps” - i.e. purposedly do dud pedalling, pushing hard on the pedals when the cranks are horizontal, and apply no power at the dead spots - and make a sharp turn at each “step”.

Bingo! That did the trick! I started snaking on the parking lot, and suddenly I could time my pedal strokes to retard my next turn more or less, to achieve the amount of correction I needed at each “step”, and even make a violent turn to make a really hard correction: since I’m more or less in shape at each stall, I don’t have to correct my trajectory more than one wheel revolution’s worth of error, which is much easier than trying to compensate for error that’s been building up for 2 or 3 wheel revolutions.

So, I don’t look very dignified when I ride, wiggling my butt and flaying my arms like a deranged monkey at each pedal stroke, but I can pretty much keep going on my own on the parking lot without help from the wall. I still need it to start, but I’ll see about free-mounting later.

Now my immediate problem is that I can keep going, but I’m not really in control of where I’m going: when I start thinking I’d like to go somewhere, I Iose all my marbles and I have to dismount. I guess the free-riding-without-falling bit, which I’ve now mastered, needs to become completely automatic, to make room in my brain for other things to concentrate on. I suppose that’s what practice is all about :slight_smile:

If the weather stays clear, I’ll see about shooting a video this afternoon.

10

Here’s the video: http://dai.ly/x1aw8df

11

Wow, that’s really good…you’re learning very quickly. It was that hip swinging motion that got me riding without falling…you’ve discovered it ten times quicker than me though!
Now you just need to keep at it and your brain will catch up…the swinging becomes less pronounced and thus less effort is required to ride.
I didn’t worry to much about the arms and still don’t. I waved them around a lot at the start but, slowly, over time, I’ve noticed that I don’t use them as much…at least I don’t on the flat. As soon as I get off road I start waving them about a bit more :smiley:
You’re doing great…keep up the good work.

UL

12

Well done, that’s pretty impressive!

I liked your other video… Why am I not surprised that unicyclists like Brompton bikes? :slight_smile:

13

Okay, back at it this morning. I got tired ot having to find a wall to ride next to, and I decided I was decent enough (ahem…) to mount the unicycle with the help of a simple signpost. So I went ride on the local cycle path. Not much trouble there - although I did manage to backpedal the unicycle into my crotch and squash my plums. Ouch!

After a while, I got tired of having to return to the signpost after riding 50 yards to start again. Also, my vacation is almost almost at an end: I’ll have to go back to work on Wednesday, and I plan on practicing for 30 minutes every day during my lunch break on the parking lot at work, where there isn’t anything vertical to lean against.

So I decided to learn free-mounting while I still had the choice of where to learn it. After all, my brain is already busy learning all the rest, so I might as well pile this on top of it. Also, since the key to free-mounting is to follow through and get pedaling immediately after mounting, that’ll prevent me into falling into the bad habit of mounting with a support, then pause, then go. Without vertical support, no pause.

So I tried. The hardest part is trying without anything around for comfort. It’s entirely psychological. I tried 20 times then I did it. Then another 20 fails, then success again.

So I’m not good at it, but at least I know it’s doable enough to be a practical exercise during my lunch break at work. I’m not good at free-mounting, and I’m not good at riding, but at least now I’m free to use any flat surface to train, and I bet on getting better at both at the same time. Surely any free-mounting skill I acquire can’t hurt my learning to stay upright after mounting.

But for now, my immedate problem is that my right quadriceps is very sore. I’m right-footed, and that’s the leg I fall on most of the time when I fall off the unicycle. I’m not sure how to learn to how to use my left leg more, since being left- or right-footed isn’t really something you can choose - unless you lose a leg I suppose…

Thanks!

I’m not sure what’s common between unicycles and Bromptons. Maybe that heel strikes are painful on both machines? :slight_smile:

14

try using a curb to mount

I learned to unicycle using a curb to mount, there used to be a book called “the unicycle book” by a author named jack wiley it had lots of tips on riding a unicycle, I never used a signpost or a wall, it will just throw you off anyway.

you will have a dominant turning direction too, the most comfortable direction you will lean to turn, the less comfortable direction you will tend to twist more to turn. over time you will have to learn to lean on the twist side and twist on the lean side to master some advanced riding.

when I am exhausted and riding my 700c uni I still use a curb to mount. it really makes life easier when you get a opening in traffic and need to remount. I have never ridden a 36er but I can tell you that the big wheel really gives the sensation of floating when you ride around, I never understood why people take up hobbies like jogging that ruin your knees when you can get way better exercise riding unicycles,.