Friday: Just rode the 24" Sun around the neighborhood for a while. I improved quite a bit on that uni, hitting a few free mounts (although still mostly backing up to the curb to mount) and also climbing the hill from the bottom of the street up to home for the first time on that one. I still wasn’t feeling a lot of love for those 6" cranks on pavement though. That got me thinking about taking off the beach cruiser tire and putting on one with enough bite for some light trail riding.
Saturday: Didn’t ride, legs and back needed a day off.
Sunday: Drove out to The riding game! of my unicycle at a working waterwheel. That challenge had been unmet since Sanne.Kj posted it in April of 2012. That’s my first time in that game, which seems a little less exciting, or whatever you might call it, than it was for the motorcycle groups where it started, since I didn’t ride the unicycle to or at the place where I took the picture. It’s on a busy highway so I really couldn’t have. But whatever, it added its little share to the fun.
I also stopped by a couple of bike shops to see what kind of knobby 24" tires I could score locally. The reputation for poor tire choice in ISO507-land seems well earned, but I did come home with a couple of kid’s bike replacement tires, a Cheng Shin C-174 and a Kenda K831. Both are on the narrow side but they certainly weren’t pricey. I swapped the Kenda onto the Sun, the more aggressive of the two, and took it over to the Arboretum to ride the pine bark mulch walking paths for a while before it got dark. And considering it was the first time on that tire, the first time off-road on that uni, and the first time on a trail on a 24", it went OK. Not great but I had a few rides that might have been in the hundreds of feet. The paths aren’t especially wide and have sharp-cornered curbstones along either side, and that keeps me fairly cautious.
The new tire seemed to work well too, traction never a problem. I did sometimes start twisting from side to side with each pedal stroke, and I wondered if a wider tire might help to resist that. And I don’t know how that would play out, whether I’m learning more by having to resist that on my own, or if a more stable tire that let me ride a longer distance each time before I had to dismount would allow more experience and practice.
It’s all really just a premise for getting off the sofa and away from the computer anyway. I’m still getting better and my legs are getting fitter, that’s the main thing.