Inspiring! Makes me want to have another go at the trail - almost. (Have to psych myself up.)
Keep posting!
Congrats on getting outside!
I hear ya about the fatigue. However, I promise you this: at your fitness level you will progress fast. As soon as your legs get used to what your brain wants them to do, riding down the street will be as easy as (maybe easier than) walking. Five to ten hours max. Enjoy! Enjoy!
Damn straight! I can only ride for about a block before my legs are too shaky and tired. I think once I sort-out the left crank nut loosening issue (which might be now) then I’ll be able to ride some more. Honestly I can fool around in the big yacht club carpark for about 2 hours, but in terms of being on the seat I only really manage to stay on for about a minute at a time before I have to stop and recover for a few seconds.
In terms of freemounting it’s really a no-issue for me anymore using my left leg, but OMG the right leg is IMPOSSIBLE. I’ll put it this way. Even resting my right foot on the right pedal in anticipation of attempting some dodgy mount has me almost falling over… and I haven’t even left the ground yet :S . Honestly it seems to be that you just need to pick whichever side is most comfortable to you and then just keep working at it until it feels perfectly comfortable (then try the other foot to see how far you have honestly come and be impressed at how difficult it is).
I think perhaps a good exercise would be to put the foot on the pedal and put the seat in the groin, and either with or without a hand holding the seat/handle/bumber just do little hops on the other leg to get comfortable with that position. Once that’s comfortable and you feel control and the uni doesn’t have a mind of it’s own (due to incorrect balances with weight and pressures etc) then it’s just a case of hopping that touch harder and putting the other foot on the pedal and bringing the wheel back behind you a tiny bit and going. But then again, my freemount is basically a cut-down idle… being that I can mount to a small idle and ride off (haven’t spent enough time riding to a stop/idle yet to nail that)
August : I tried wd40, and then locktite, but now I have pinched one of those split-washers from my dad and have it on the thread before the nut on my crank that keeps coming-off. It’s one of those small metal rings with a (as the name says) split in it so it’s not a complete circle and can compress / squish a little. I think split-washer is the correct name. google. Will have to wait for this rain to dry-out a bit before i can go and see if i can make it down the road before the nut undoes itself but I have high hopes for this washer eliminating my loosening crank issue which seems to be 10x worse than what you described yours as. Here’s hoping, and if you’ve found a solution yet what have you done?
Okay, a little toot of the horn here: today I did a left-footed freemount! Which is to say the opposite of what I normally do. I usually start with my left foot on the rear pedal and jump with my right. Today I put my right foot on the rear pedal and yadda, yadda. nubcake is right, it feels completely foreign - however, your brain already has a sense of what it needs to do for balance during a freemount, so I think that’s why the progress was much quicker than starting from scratch. Got about 5 out of 15.
Tried to do a sort of rolling mount, but that ended up in a spectacular Evel Knievel-type crash. No injuries; thank goodness for pads and helmets!
Other than that, I’ve been practicing turning, circles, and figure-8s. I want to get better at weaving/slalom riding, but I have trouble shifting my center of gravity from one side to the other. Turning on a unicycle is like shooting pool, except that you’re riding the cue ball.
Blot: Congrats, and I like the cue ball analogy. It is still amazing to me that anyone can balance on one wheel, and when I ride it still blows my own mind that I am doing it. I compare it to riding a double U-joint; one U-joint where your butt joins the seat and the other where the wheel contacts the ground. Yeah, let’s all balance on that for fun!
I got out today again for some riding. I’m glad I wasn’t sore from yesterday. The weather is beautiful. A balmy 45F and all week coming it will be between 45 and 55. So I’ll be able to get out every day for a ride, although, technically, I’d say I am still out for a practice rather than a ride.
Being an accountant at heart I had to measure the distance between the light poles on the strip of road where I am practicing and found it is approximately 200 feet. So yesterday and today I was able to do 3 or 4 600 foot runs until I’d UPD from exhaustion, though there were a lot of 50 foot runs too! I’m pleased but I’m anxious for some real improvement. I am still flailing a lot. If a Navy person saw me they’d probably pick out some semaphore obscenities. I am aiming to add one more light pole every few days. It is fun with all the sidewalk cracks, the occasional concrete slabs that shifted due to the ice, and the driveway dips that I can finally handle most of the time.
I haven’t been able to convince anyone to come out and video me. I couldn’t even bribe my 19 year old son with a promise of a pizza! I don’t get it…doesn’t everybody love unicycling!
edit: typos
Freemounting
I’ve been riding my 24" yesterday and today but I want to start riding my 29". I can only freemount my 20" about 75% of the time and haven’t tried on the 24" for more than 10 minutes. Do you think I can go right to learning to freemount the 29" once I learn to ride it outdoors with some ability(so far it’s only done 20 foot rides in the basement). Or would it be best to learn to freemount the 24" then the 29"?
Well, it’s been quiet in here for a while so here’s a little bit of nothing.
BurnerDave: How’s it going for you? Regarding practice vs. riding vs. semaphore - hey, it all spells fun to me. Of course I have no idea about whether to practice mounting the 24 before the 29 - I only have the one uni. I’m curious to know myself but someone else - paging augustdreamt, paging augustdreamt - will have to answer.
As for me, well, I finally bit the bullet and rode off a drop. Okay, it was like 12 cm but I managed to stay upright and on the saddle. Whoopee. I also got my first pedal bite today which is really lame because I have plastic pedals - no pins!
Hello there,
Wow, finally got to the end of this thread 
So I know everything about your adventures on the unicycle, let me tell you my story…
Last month, I ordered myself a qu-ax 24" standard from municycle. I don’t even know exactly why, it’s kind of fuzzy in my mind, but it started something really big… I was hooked. I think like you, augustdreams, I needed something physical to put my mind of the things it’s on (mostly life I guess 
).
Then I got a bit more into it, logged into the forums (the french ones, as everywhere, filled with teenagers, and these, where we can find people of all ages) and viewed the videos of street/trial/flatland/muni… So I decided to get a Nimbus ISIS Trials 20. Not that I ever intended to beat Ryan Atkins 1m18 hop record or Xavier Collos flatland skills, but it was a perfect all around uni to learn (20" has been much easier to get than the 24") that would allow me to get the basics but would be solid enough to last.
I’ve received it 3 weeks ago and 2 days later I was riding my first 20 meters (60ft)
From then on, I’ve been progressing steadily : next day I was riding more than 50 meters (300ft) and doing my firsts successful freemounts (static ones). Today I’m riding on uneven ground (the sidewalks in Brussels are everything but flat), downhill, uphill, on grass.
In the beginning, after a few meters, I couldn’t feel my legs any more than you did, augustdreams, and it’s been getting better and better everyday as I learn to put more weight on the saddle when I need to rest, and more importantly as I learn to pedal evenly (with so many advantages : better energy management, more stability, more fluidity… I feel that’s the secret to ride for long.) Pedaling evenly is quite difficult on the bumpy sidewalks of my neighbourhood, but I think this is a good training ground because it makes me learn so much about equilibrium…
Of course, one of the things that struck me most when I started to be able to ride a few meter and forget the fear of launching myself and pedaling faster, is that, boy, is a 20" wheel sloooooow !
That’s when I understood I wouldn’t use that 20" uni to achieve my initial goal of transportation, and neither would I use the 24" : while it certainly was faster, I just felt it wasn’t enough for the road…
After a lot of forum reads, a few videos (augustdream’s being 2 of them), a lot of daydreaming and quite a bit of market study, I came to the conclusion I needed a 29er for the uses I really wanted from a uni : commuting locally (not going further than 10kms away from home) and doing some cross country in the forest familly bike trails (nothing like Kris Holm’s muni rides ).
The choice of the uni was difficult, as I didn’t want to spend a fortune just to regret not having spent even more for some options (I dream a lot about what I don’t have - but not about other’s possessions, it’s all about the objects)… I initially wanted a Nimbus 29er, but I thought the rim would be maybe a bit weak in the long term if doing XC… I also wanted to try the KH Fusion Freeride saddle as I was convinced by the shape… and the KH Twin cranks (125/150) as I knew beginning with the 29 and doing XC would be nice with 150’s, where distance riding would be better with 125’s… So all in all, an upgraded Nimbus would be almost the same price as a KH, but never as perfectly integrated…
So I jumped in, convinced myself I would eat only spagettis for a few weeks, and ordered myself a KH 29 at Municycle.de.
It arrived today… in less than 12h from Germany… oh… ohhhhh… It’s just a beautiful thing ! The quality shines from everywhere on that uni… I’m deeply in love 
After building it (beautiful craftmanship!), switching the Kenda Nevegal tire for the Big Apple 2.3", I had to take it for a ride…
My legs were done (have riden a few kms on my 20" today), my knees were hurting (too much tension while switching the weight from the legs to the saddle and recovering the equilibrium), but I just couldn’t let it stand shiny in the appartment all night without even being riden on his first night 
A few conclusions :
- not as difficult to freemount as I thought, but it need more energy ;
- leading me to the obvious and logical : that wheel has momentum !
- so, much harder to get started, because once you have got your moment of equilibrium just after the freemount, you need to put a lot of strength in your upper pedal to get the wheel started, but not too much else you’ll destabilize yourself and will have to compensate quickly with the other leg… there you notice you NEED grippy pedals else your foot slips and … UPD
Happens especially around the “dead pedals position” (verticality) just in front of a big bump or going uphills. - but, wohooo, once you’re “launched”, what a sensation ! More stable, doesn’t give a d*mn about unequal grounds, road crowns are a thing of the past and…
- it’s faaast ! And I’m not even using 125’s nor pedaling too fast yet, till I get more control (or learn to run faster )
- it’s amazingly light for a 29er ! I’ve had both unis in hand, one in each, and I can’t feel the difference in weight. I don’t have a scale and I don’t mind much, but I’m sure all the innertia is in the wheel size and not the weight of the uni.
Wow, that was a long post… I hope I didn’t give the feeling of bragging too much, you’re the only people I can talk to about my enthousiasm for unis as my familly and friends don’t care much at all (even less understand : why can I never do like everybody else ? ) Actually, that’s probably one of the reason I’ve been interested so much in unis : at least a sport I could get into that is really original, while challenging and fun, and we don’t see much.
That’s why I love to ride in places with children : the look on their face is warming my heart of lonely rider, it’s a kind of “enchantement”, magic feeling… Makes my day everytime
YUP… you’ve discovered the magic of a 29. There’s no going back.
Dave, congrats on finally getting out and seeing the sun! The highs around here lately have stayed within the 60s for the past week or so, and I’m really hoping that they stay that way. I’m sooo glad that spring has finally sprung!
I’ve been doing a lot of off-road riding on the 24" lately, and in the spirit of improving my MUni skills, I finally learned to ride off of curbs. At my best I’ve gone over curbs 8" high (about 20 cm). It’s not a matter of skill so much as it is about gathering the guts to do it and then following through. Even though I’ve done it before, I do still get nervous when approaching a high curb, and any hesitation almost always results in a UPD.
I also spent about five minutes trying to ride UP a curb. It was comical, in a Three Stooges sort of way. I can ride over a curb or log about 3" high; any higher than that, and the wheel simply bounces back and I end up falling forward. According to the threads I’ve read on the subject, it should be possible to ride over an obstacle up to 12" high (!!!) with a 24" wheel. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be that good, but I’d like to do better than 3 inches.
The 165mm cranks that used to feel so awkward and slow are just perfect for me when I’m off-road. I don’t think I’ll be changing them anytime soon.
As far as road riding goes, I did install the T7 on my 29er and took it for a spin the other day. I gladly installed a water bottle cage, a bell, and my bike computer. I haven’t gotten to experiment much with the seat angle now that I’ve got a rail-type seat post (I ordered the KH post to use with the T7), but I will once I’m more used to Babar.
It seems that at this tender stage in my 29er experience, any little change completely throws me off and makes me feel like I don’t know how to ride at all. This time it’s the addition of the T7. It’s not that heavy…but I can feel the difference and I was definitely less stable than my last ride. My ability to ride without flailing seems to have gone out the window for the moment, and I’m still having difficulty finding a good cadence. As with anything else, practice makes perfect, and I’ll be right out there again with my husband running behind me on Sunday.
It sounds hokey, I know, but at this point I can’t much remember what it was like not to be able to freemount all three of my unicycles. I’ll try to put together what I do remember though.
The 20" freestyle uni is easy to mount if that’s all you’ve got to work with. I’ve found that spending a lot of time riding or practicing on a larger wheel has the unfortunate side effect of making the small wheel feel like a toy - twitchy and fragile - when you go back to it. It takes a few minutes to get used to again (for me, at least), especially since my little uni has plastic pedals and my other two have grippy pinned metal pedals.
In my opinion, mounting the 24" is actually easier than mounting the 20", since it is heavier and thus more stable. (My muni is, in fact, heavier than my 29er.) The larger wheel requires a tiny bit more momentum to get going, so I just feel like I have a little extra time to mount comfortably and get my foot exactly where I want it on the pedal. Now, my 24" muni has a 3" wide knobby tire, so your experience may definitely be different from mine if you have a thinner or slicker tire. Since I was already proficient in mounting the 20", I very very quickly acclimated to freemounting the 24". After a few days, my mounting success on both is nearly 100%.
Mounting the 29er was definitely the most difficult to learn. My success rate is probably around 80-85%. The larger wheel requires significantly more momentum than the 20" and in my case, that meant adjusting my pedal position when mounting. While I mount the 20" and 24" with my pedals at around 8 and 2 o’clock, I mount the 29" in the power position, at 3 and 9. I don’t have to much think about it now, but in the beginning I used to really focus on forcing my body weight up and over the axle - being too timid meant that I wasn’t going anywhere even if I landed my foot properly. With my smaller wheels, I might have a second-long stillstand after mounting before I start going, but when I mount the big wheel I pretty much start rolling the moment my foot hits the forward pedal.
When it comes to switching between wheels, the most common problem I had when switching from small to large was being too timid too really lunge myself over the axle. The most common problem when switching from large to small was, well…just feeling like my 20" was a child’s toy that I was bound to break. After five or ten minutes, your body and mind readjust and you’re set to go.
Dave, I think you should move onto whichever uni you’d prefer. Either one you choose to do first will help you with the second one later. I learned on the 29er first and my learning curve for the 24" was practically nonexistent.
And blot, I feel your pain on the rolling mount. I just can’t seem to wrap my brain around it!
Welcome to the newbie thread! I would love to have a KH 29 (preferably geared) someday. You should post pictures!
I’m actually not sure how I ripped my gloves! At that point in the vid I’d just gotten my hand caught on some thorn bushes. And I am working on getting over that log just for you guys!
Riding on sand has GOT to be hard!
I guess worse than riding on grass ! I did my first lawn today on the 20" (wow, can’t imagine doing it on the 29" for now ) and while it wasn’t so technically difficult (after the first few seconds), it was certainly very demanding on the legs.
As for the mounting diff between the 24 and the 29er, of course it’s subjective, but I didn’t find mounting the 29er was much more difficult than the 24". Like augustdreams, I noticed pedal positions change (although I only rode 30 minutes with the 29" up to now so I haven’t found my sweet spot like she seems to have done), but more importantly, I believe a 29er is almost as different than a 24 compared to a 20". The 20" is really in a class of his own, because like nubcake was saying, you almost just have to sit on it, while on the 24" and 29", you really have to mount both, a bit like horses, putting much more energy in the initial hop. Now jumping 2.5" higher on the 29 isn’t much more effort than the 24…
Well, think about it before investing too much in your Nimbus : an upgraded Nimbus ends being as expensive as a stock KH… If only because all the new pieces you add are from KH
Gives you 2 possibilities to stop “wasting” money : sell the Nimbus and get a KH immediately, or upgrade your Nimbus months after months with KH components exclusively until you get there and finally switch to the KH frame
Here are a few pics of my sleeping beauties (yeah, they’re sleeping… today I can’t feel my legs, can’t even WALK, so let’s not unicycle 
)
Here is the little/older brother, the Nimbus ISIS Trials 20". I changed the pedals to Atomlab Aircorp, they’re so thin and grippy !
And here is my asian elephant (she’s from Taiwan after all) :
Without an angle :
The saddle is very comfy and the rail mount is beautiful. I fitted a rear cycle blinking light for the traffic (I live in the center of Brussels, Belgium : it’s not NYC, but trafficy nonetheless) :
Look at the cranks with twin holes (125/150). The pedals are fitted in the 150 hole of course for now. I received Jim C. Odissey pedals with the KH, they’re very nice, grippy but not too much, and of a good size :
Now the tricky part will be to chose which uni I’ll get out everyday : the 20" is great to learn “tricks” like the list you have in your sig, augustdream, but the 29er is THE one I want to ride
[QUOTE=costo]
I guess worse than riding on grass ! I did my first lawn today on the 20" (wow, can’t imagine doing it on the 29" for now ) and while it wasn’t so technically difficult (after the first few seconds), it was certainly very demanding on the legs.
[QUOTE]
Ugh, grass used to be my sworn enemy. I was never able to ride it without UPDing every two seconds until I got my MUni with the knobby tire.
You’re absolutely right about the cost of upgrading my Nimbus versus the cost of a stock KH29, though. I’ll probably slowly transform it into a KH over time - that way I at least don’t FEEL like I’m spending so much money. It also gives me an excuse to disassemble and reassemble my uni a little bit at a time, which I would like to do for the sake of getting really familiar with the mechanics of my machine.
Your elephant is BEAUTIFUL!!
Oh, the shame! I should have proofread my own work.
Yeah, I couldn’t believe you made that mistake. I got whiplash when I saw it! (ok, I didn’t really catch the missing ‘o’.)
Welcome to the best thread on the forum, Costo!!!
Wow, what great postings these latest ones are!
Augustdreamt, I’d love to see a video of your husband running along side or behind you, recorder in hand! (The making of…).
OK, 3 & 9 o’clock is horizontal. What is 8 & 2 o’clockÉ. Is the 2 the back pedalÉ. Sorry about the É. It should be a question mark. I’m at my girlfriend’s house and she has a French keyboard. The question mark key does this É thing.
I’ll be out riding this weekend after taking a day off with achy thighs!