That’s witchcraft!
Torches and pitchforks!!
Who has “most hours” learning? What’s average “attempted hrs”?
I think it’s great all the “naturals” can claim how quickly they learned. However, for the majority of us we would be highly discouraged.
If the average is say 15hrs, and I still could not ride after 15 hrs. I would start to feel like somethings wrong, and maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
So, if I heard that someone took 70 hrs before learning, that WOULD inspire me to keep going. Right?
Also, would also be curious to hear from “Quitters”. Although, they probably wouldn’t be on this site. Contradiction, right? How many hours did they try before they gave up? What is the “average attempt hours” before giving up.
I think many people who have given up might be encouraged to keep trying for a few more hours might finally get it.
hrs to learn to ride? Does that include the 90% quitters?
I’ve always thought the 15hr to learn to ride never made sense to me.
First, I doubt that number(a big chunk of data is missing: people who have quit. So the numbers reflect only the successful…and of course it’s cool to brag about your 1 minute learning time, right?).
So the accurate assessment is like this:
Give 100 people a unicycle. Then here’s a “possible” result.
10 out of those people learned to ride with average time of 15 hrs.
90 of those people quit.
So the conclusion would be only 1 in 10 people can ride after 15hr
So how misleading to just say 15hrs?
See what I mean?
Anyways, sorry to get technical.
I know I should just think? I can ride who cares about quitters.
But this fascinates me, because I want more people to learn and ride.
I think non-riders face a tremendous mental intimidation obstacle.
More unicycle riders = better world!
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How long does it take to learn riding?
For starters, I think you forgot one step. If you give 100 ppl a unicycle, at least 90 shug it off and never even touch it. You could call that quitting after 0 hours, maybe.
More to the point, I disagree with that bottom line. I dare to guess that most of the ppl who quit, don’t do that because they could “technically” not learn, but because they don’t have enough perseverance/determination. I guess they could learn in (say) 15 hours if they continued trying for that long.
BTW, the 15 hours is just a ballpark figure. Actual learning time needed depends on age, wheelsize, sex, quality of instruction and more. There is some research published here.
learning time?
Hi, I’ll Weigh in. At the age of eight I learned by holding the open garage door to balance, then let go to try riding down a paved drive. At the end of that same day I could ride down the drive to the gravel road in front of the house, the road took me another week to ride any distance on. So I guess that 15 hours is within reason for someone co ordinated and persistant enough to gane the skill.
Unicyclists need a special kind of perseverance / determination. They don’t have the benefit of a large percent of the population proving to them that it can be done. There is no pressure to conform, because unicycling is a fringe activity. Learning to unicycle borders on insanity; doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Beginners need to manage the fear of unexpected, sudden falls. Unicycling typically seems impossible or inscrutable to the beginner; they must be willing to venture into the unknown.
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Totally agreed. It’s no instant gratification. Quite the opposite because it’s not exactly rewarding when you learn. It’s only when you start to be able to go for more than half a dozen meters (10ft in non metric?) that you start to leave the realm of frustration…
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People don’t like putting themselves out of their comfort zone.
Even more so with an audience.
Most people get their endorphin hit from a text with useless information, or a response to a embellished facebook post, etc…
So how many hours till you could ride… still applies to those that actually learned to ride.
Not the quitters, not the posers, and not the accumulators.
I would say 1 in a 100 has the potential to be a unicyclist with their 10-20 hours of counterintuitive activity learning.
My elder son rode right across my front lawn after about twenty minutes in the saddle. I posted about it here.
The three people I taught averaged an hour to be able to ride ten metres.
I will also weigh in on this zombie thread:
This is true. A factor in learning to ride one has to include a pretty strong desire to figure it out. A large percentage of the population either assumes “they could never”, or puts it on their personal list of “stuff I choose not to invest my time in”. Like me and a Rubiks Cube. 
In fact, most people (in most countries) never even try, for one of the above reasons.
Absolutely! Other factors are size, determination, previous skills the rider has learned, natural aptitude for learning skills, and the quality of the unicycle.
Yes, the unicycle matters, and I can say this with authority because I originally “learned” on a POS unicycle with a hard plastic tire, no ball bearings, tricycle cranks and other severe impediments to being a good learning model. Notice I didn’t mention the seat. That can also be a factor!
Most unicycles you can find nowadays are fine for learning; fortunately the tricycle-type ones like what I learned on are mostly rust by now. I hope.
Also true. Except for in Japan, where unicycles are now in the majority of elementary schools. For Japanese people that went to one of those schools, it was a piece of playground equipment that lots of kids would play with and lots of them would learn to ride them. After a generation of that, it changes the public perception of unicycling. It’s not impossible! On the downside, for the vast majority of Japanese unicyclists, it’s something you only do in elementary school, then you stop.
Why do we learn to ride anyway? These days, it might because you’re interested in a specific type of unicycling. Starting in the late 90s, some people learned to ride one specifically so they could ride it offroad. Others these days learn so they can do Street and Flatland-style riding, like they’ve seen in YouTube videos. But a generation ago, it had less of a range of associated activities. You could ride in the neighborhood, ride in a parade, do shows, but not a lot of other stuff beyond that. So why did we learn?
For myself, I learned because it always looked like something interesting and difficult to do. I didn’t have plans for what I would do after I learned; that was an end in itself. But then I was having so much fun doing it, and learning more skills (like freemounting the 6’ Giraffe), I seeked out the local unicycle club, and got pulled down the rabbit hole of the larger world of unicycling…
Also true, and something that probably inhibits a lot of people from spending quality time learning. But everyone who does try is intentionally putting themselves out of their comfort zone, and if they don’t give up, farther and farther out. Most unicyclists must be people who like to challenge themselves.
Of course. Everyone else gets infinity. There’s no useful result until you learn to ride.
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I’m not sure what the definition of being ‘able to ride a unicycle’ is. Would it be something like, able to ride on a flat surface for 100’? Maybe, ride as far as you want before tiring out? Is there a standard definition for it? Just curious as I haven’t come across one yet.
Yay! Zombie threads!
I learned at the age of 13 on a 20" unicycle that was about 3 inches too short (I had the 200mm neck rather than the 300mm, I guess – it was a Schwinn).
The first day, I managed 3 revolutions; that was my goal, and I mostly did it in my bedroom, which is fairly large, tho I think I was also in the building’s basement for a lot of that time.
The 2nd day, I managed 10 revs, which was my Day 2 goal.
By day 3, I could ride pretty well and could almost pass level 1 (tho I didn’t know about the levels). I think I could freemount, and I could definitely turn pretty well.
Each day, I worked at it for 3 hours, so I’ve always known that my learn-time was 9 hours, tho when I finally got the right sized neck, it was MUCH easier. I probably could have learned faster had I started with it.
I taught all of my kids to ride before they turned 8 (two were going on 8, and the other was going on 7). It took them AGES to learn, probably because they didn’t have much in the way of core muscle strength or control. When I taught myself uni’ing at 13, I’d already been pogo sticking for years.
I have a new student who just got his unicycle 2 days ago, so I asked him to keep track of how much time he spends. I hope he can learn in under 9 hours.
Then you must have had one of the “original generation” Schwinns; there was nothing metric about those! I think the seat post choices were 9" and 17". And yeah, the 9" on a 20" was fairly low.
Part of my ‘learning to ride’ saga includes a one-time ride on a 24" unicycle, where I went maybe 100 meters on my one and only attempt. I wonder how long it would have taken me to learn if I’d had one of those! It would have at least eliminated the 3-year gap in my learning, after the POS Troxel broke and I couldn’t make it rideable.
Another factor in that is motivation level. Certainly they were all motivated, because they did learn. But what percentage of that motivation was “because dad wants me to”? It’s hard to know. But well done in any case; I think in most families with parents who ride, while some of the kids often learn, it’s relatively rare for them all to take an interest. I’m sure having your own unicycle club helps.
If it’s anything like juggling, probably a few years and counting for me.
One thing I have noticed about almost every post on this forum by people claiming to have learned or taught someone to ride in a couple of hours or less is that there was no clinging to a wall or fence.
I learned to ride six years ago, when I was already solidly middle-aged. On weekends, a generous character from the neighborhood who sometimes showed up in a nearby park with pogo sticks and hula hoops would sometimes place a rickety Torker CX20 between two steel barricades for anyone to try out. I had sat in this semi-official unicycle learning station two or three times over the course of a year or so and didn’t learn a thing. No one else who sat there ever learned to ride either, at least not that I saw.
But I had already learned to walk on a slackline by repeatedly getting on and falling off, and had noticed that no other method would ever work, so one day I quietly removed the unicycle from the unicycle learning station and went over to a pole on a nearby volleyball court. I used the pole to mount, and then tried to ride away from it. Within a half hour or so, I was occasionally managing to go for flailing rides of 5 or 10 meters across the concrete.
I really like that statement… I’m about one week in to my learning, and I’m sure the neighborhood thinks I’m insane… and yes, I keep trying over and over. The odd time I get a different result (I think the furthest I’ve made it is 43’ so far). That being said, the kids on the street are always there to cheer me on when I go more than a couple revolutions. I think it’s only other adults who must think I’m crazy.
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