Learning Journal

elpuebloUNIdo · May 1, 2015, 8:13am

I find the “Centipede’s Dilemma” thought-provoking but also problematic. It seems that the moral of the story could be “thinking will ruin your life” or “ignorance is bliss”. I agree that over-thinking technique, in the moment, can result in “analysis-paralysis”. But, as I mentioned in an earlier post, at some point in the learning process, we need to think deeply about technique.

We assume that the centipede knew how to walk before it ever stopped to consider it. The same is not true of unicycling. Most people were old enough, when they started riding the unicycle, to be able to think about unicycling abstractly.

Another problem with the story: We assume that the walking technique of the centipede was perfectly fine, prior to its consideration of it. The same is not true of unicycling. Most of us are aware of our current limitations and we are trying to improve. Often times, the process of improvement means that, temporarily, we seem to be riding ‘worse’. Sort of like the centipede.

Wondering how the story ends? The centipede, after much reflection, gains self-awareness about the movement of its legs; it buys a unicycle and learns to ride. The toad sees the centipede riding and exclaims “Where’s your other wheel?”

This raised her doubts to such a pitch,
She fell exhausted in the ditch
Not knowing how to ride

UPD · May 1, 2015, 8:34am

Nice ending!

UPD · May 1, 2015, 8:46am

That reminds me…

Admittingly Im not much of a long distance runner, and road bicycling is not really my thing…

I have realised I have found my compensation, my 36er riding!

Yeah baby!!! 36er all the way!!

UPD · May 3, 2015, 11:45am

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Cool, this bar’s beginning to really work for me,
…wait , more like I work for it, first:D

LargeEddie · May 3, 2015, 1:06pm

Wow, UPD, they are low! It’s all about finding what works for you. It’s good to hear that they’re working out this time.

During my ride yesterday I did pretty well at keeping both hands on the bars for minutes at a time. Keeping a light grip and letting them rock side to side a little, instead of trying to lock them to my upper body, seemed to help a lot.

I’ve also been thinking there might be sort of a “servo” effect to going faster–that if we’re trying to go quickly and smoothly we should avoid putting downward pressure on a rising pedal, and it might be that going faster, thus pedaling against more resistance, makes it easier to keep your front-back balance only using more or less pressure on the front pedal. There have been comments about being able to ride faster up a slight hill than on level ground and I’ve noticed that myself. Maybe when we go faster level ground is more like a hill, never having to “check up” and brake the wheel because it got too far forward.

I guess it could also be that, with more momentum, road bumps cause less disturbance and need smaller corrections. And with practice, as we should get better at anticipating bumps and not over-correcting then having to counter-correct, so that’s bound to figure in too.

One way or another, yesterday felt like another pretty good step.

UPD · May 3, 2015, 10:56pm

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Today’s spectacular 20.2 mile ride. Totally awesome, totally windy with windgusts od 20-25mph. The Mother Nature had less of a b**ch slap on me today, well it did…but I was able to take it better today.
Totally loved it!

Yes indeed it is working well for me. I love em now, Im glad I didnt sell them. Much reduced crotch burn!

Same as my intial reaction when I saw somebody’s on here that had them hung low. My thinking was 'how do you reach them without losing balance?

You realize (just as onetrackmind had concluded previously) we do not ride with the seat post completely vertical. We infact sit slightly leaning foward and the seatpost is raked back at an angle.

So, today, with my road riding I was able to exaggerate that angle even greater. Thus, with the seatpost/saddle raked back and the my back angled foward, the KH bar was in perfect reach. Now I totally understand why a curved saddle is totally exaggerated angled up and painful.
Then thats where the handlebar comes into play. You just dont gently touch it. You rest some of your weight on it, by applying downwards pressure, sometimes with one arm, sometimes both arms. You can vary the degree and angle of the lean fowards.

So if done properly, this is why you dont face plant. When we go to pedal, the thrust forces the seatpost back actually. When you ride fast, with high cadence, that can be alot of force. So the posture of up more vertical doesnt make sense and does not counterbalance not nearly as well as a fowards lean thus lower to center of gravity, as the butt and the post is raked at an angle back.

So, you can thrust with much greater candence, because you will be counterbalanced with the lean. And at the same time, you can put pressure on the bar further more to fall forwards, increasing speed, and at the same time relieve the much needed crotch burn. Yeah, I realized this KH fusion is good for short rides, but too much angle for long rides. Perhaps I need to try the ‘Zero’.

Good discovery for me today, as I post on the learning journal, but Im sure for you much experienced guys that had made sense to you long time ago;)

Alucard · May 4, 2015, 2:45pm

Gosh, reading all that info sure does make you think. I never thought of it like that before.
I know for a fact that I ride much faster going uphill than I dare ride when on the flat. Maybe I should give it a try and not be such a wuss

Lovely pics UPD

UPD · May 4, 2015, 4:10pm

Thanks, lovely pics comes naturally from the gorgeous San Francisco Bay, that I have discovered recently only through unicycling.
…come to think of it, where was I all these years, of not getting to know and enjoy my own backyard; and its all free too!
Everybody that I passed by was ever so pleasant, even some tough looking group of fishermen. One of the guys says to his fishing buddies “whoah, look, check that out, that’s some serious skill there”.
…haha, and yet he hasnt even seen me fishing, and only thinks of me purely as a unicycist!

I did get chance to climb and descend a hill too, second time actually. Piece of cake this time around, on the same big wheel. I guess my skills must of improved with all that soreness, rubbed raw, of saddle time;)

LargeEddie · May 4, 2015, 4:48pm

Glad you made sense of any of it. There are some tortured sentence structures in there, I guess from trying write after a 2+ hr unicycle ride. Even more so than my usual writing…

Nothing brave or gutsy about it, I promise! it’s all been on nice level pavement. It’s a fair amount of effort to keep the pace toward my upper limit where there seems to be a better chance to make it work. But a “mistake” is just a little bounce that I’m trying to avoid, when I use back pressure to make a correction, never anything close to a UPD.

Not that speed is the end-all, but spinning along steadily feels nicer than making a lot of jerky stop/go corrections, besides being less work at the same speed.

UPD · May 4, 2015, 9:51pm

So it turns out, I had my 145mm laying around from the 29er. Took it and installed it on my Oregon today. It feels good, especially with the lean forwards. After 15 minutes of it I began to get a hang of it. Now I just have to get a good long muni ride to have it locked into muscle memory. Another awesome discovery, though, didnt know why I waited so long;)

UPD · May 6, 2015, 9:34pm

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Ok, got my 145s up and running on my 26"/Duro. Very nice! Again, took 10 mins. to adjust. I didnt change the seat height, when I changed the crank sizes, but that was ok, i dont mind riding a little low.

I did probably a 4-5 mile quick loop on the gravel trail. Again leaned alot forwards and had really stable, smooth and fast cadence. It was beautiful.
Then I climbed that same hill in the background. I remembered the first time, maybe 7 months ago, i had a hard time. Then it got easier as I practice with my 165s.

Though, today, I looped that hill six times, really good thigh workout. On the 4th, 5th and 6th loop I was doing full sprints uphills. Downhills, I was zipping down with hardly any back pedal pressure, certainly no brakes needed. My Duros felt fast and featherweight today with the speedy lean uphills and downhills.

Not sure if it were the 145s, the lean, my increased balance from practicing hands behind back, or just simply my thighs had gotten a lot stronger from the 36er,
or possibly a little bit of all;)

Ok, these 145s are staying put…

elpuebloUNIdo · May 11, 2015, 7:56pm

150/20

In the spirit of crank-size experimentation, I put 150s on my 20" and took it for a ride the other day. The first couple minutes, riding on my street, felt awful…

There is a gate across the street from my house which opens into an undeveloped hillside/high-tension-power-line-corridor. It’s a mUni paradise. There are berms of dirt left behind from where a bulldozer maintained the utility access dirt road. I was able to ride over those berms like never before, with the 150s. Started feeling better…

I made my way down the hill and into an adjacent neighborhood. On the soft grass of a park, I practiced a mount (don’t know the name) where I jump onto the top of the tire with both feet, then jump onto the pedals (sometimes with some intermediate hopping on the wheel). Having the wide stance of the pedals, due to the 150s, helped with the landing, I think.

Then, a man standing in his driveway got my attention. He was standing there with his son. His son apparently didn’t believe that he’d unicycled in the past. I asked him if he had an allen wrench. He asked why, and I told him I was going to lower the seat so he could try it.

I watched him attempt to ride. At the beginning, he only got about one revolution in, but what was amazing was the fact that his static mount was flawless. After all those years, he could still perfectly static mount. Luckily, after a couple minutes, he demonstrated a couple 30-feet rides.

I am thinking that the 150mm cranks helped the man static mount, because he had such a ridiculous amount of leverage.

Then I rode up, backwards, a hill which, in the early days, was hard to ride up forward. I UPD’d several times, but I was able to handle the grade of the hill with the longer cranks.

I have learned a lot of technique by putting longer cranks on my 20". There is a very steep, paved walkway in the vicinity of my neighborhood. I first rode up it with 165s on my 20". I subsequently rode up the same hill using 150mm and 138mm cranks. I think that progression made learning to climb easier than if I had just started with the 138mm cranks.

I took the 20" out today, still with the 150mm cranks on it. I practiced transitioning from one-footed idling into one-footed forward riding. I succeeded, several times, riding forward a single revolution, and succeeded with both the left and right foot. Baby steps, but exciting ones, nevertheless! The thing I liked about the 150mm cranks, for this exercise, was that I was able to increase the size of the backwards part of my idle (without losing control), allowing me to gain adequate forward momentum necessary to cross the 12:00 position on the pedal while attempting to ride forward, one-footed.

I like to think of longer cranks as a kind of crutch, something to give me support when I am learning a new technique and am grossly inefficient at performing it. Later on, shorter cranks feel more comfortable, but the longer cranks are there to get me over the learning hump.

UPD · May 12, 2015, 7:38pm

Thats cool how you even considered to attempt and acomplished to put on 150s and 165s on a 20, and discovered something new.
Wish I had some longer square tapered laying around…

UPD · May 22, 2015, 11:19pm

Ok, really liking these 165s for the really steep stuff, especially after all of this week’s cadence training. Had my Duro on my Oregon and climbed 99% of the inclines.
Did a 3hr ride today, really nice with cool overcast skies. It took me an hour and a half for my body to warm up, but when it did I was on an unstoppable roll.
For those who know the Alum Rock area, I rode through the trail alongside the creek. Climbed up Eagle Rock, came down to climb back up Todd Quick trail, went through the cow gate out of Alum Rock Park boundary, entered into the Open Space Authority’ and into the Boccardo Trail with some awesome switchbacks.

Woohooo, my Oregon is a climbing machine.
Some bicyclists wonder how I get up it…
I tell them with a whole lot of huffing and puffing my way up, pedal by pedal. But what an adrenaline rush!
One bicyclist wonders how I get down. I tell him, i certainly do get down, and a whole lot easier then up, thats for sure!
Cant wait for the arrival of my lightweight Knards though…

It was also a quite a pleasant suprise to run into 4 unicyclists just beginning their ride on their 36ers , as I was finished and was heading back for work.

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Vertigo · May 23, 2015, 5:27pm

Changing cranks

Finally change my cranks without paying someone to do it.

Here’s Unibokk’s video -> changing cranks is easy.

Had a hard time finding this post again.

Vertigo · May 23, 2015, 5:43pm

Handle bars

I’ve been trying to learn how to ride with handle bars. It’s so hard … at least for me. I’ve tried four times now. I can mount and dismount with little trouble but if there’s any camber in the road I can’t hang on to the bars and riding becomes a chore. Funny how I had the patience to learn to unicycle but I’m loosing it with the handle bars. Oh well :(.

Now there’s two things on my unicycle bucket list that takes more patience than I might have, idling and handle bars.

On a bright note, I’ve been unicycling a year now and have gotten much farther than I would have ever imagined.

LanceB · May 23, 2015, 5:47pm

No question the bars take some getting used to, but for big wheel road riding I think it’s worth it. I still haven’t gotten used to having both hands on the bars, most of the time it’s just my left. I use both when I concentrate, but it takes a long time (for me) to make it “second nature.”
Good luck! You’re doing great!

elpuebloUNIdo · May 24, 2015, 10:06am

As with any other difficult technique, finding a way to “scaffold” your way to success…may work. Here are some suggestions (advice, I’m full of it) of things you might try on a unicycle with ‘no’ handlebars; they might help you once you reinstall the bars:

Get comfortable putting one hand on the plastic seat-bumper/front-handle. Alternate with the other hand. As you become more comfortable doing this, apply some downward force with the hand holding the seat. This will diminish, slightly, the amount of steering you’re doing with your butt, and put a bit more control into your hand.
Practice sitting more on the back of your seat, using the one hand which is holding the seat–to push you backwards, so you don’t slip back into the crook of the seat. Maximizing the distance between your hand on the seat and your sit bones–emulates more closely the experience of having handle bars, and it increases the leverage in your hand.
If you normally use your outstretched hands to achieve balance, try holding your hands closing to your center of gravity, then stick your elbows out for balance. I am able to keep both hands on the handle bars on rough terrain and during brief standstills–because my outstretched elbows are helping with balance.
If you have a 20": Put on some longer cranks. 160s on my 20" helped me learn a bunch of stuff. Practice SIF still stands and mounts. I would avoid trying it one handed, as you can really mess your arms up, and go directly to two hands on the seat. You will have to figure out what an appropriate crutch is for this practice. Perhaps fixing the wheel between two chocks might work, so it doesn’t roll back and forth. The goal, here, is to train your hands to feel when the unicycle is leaning to one side or the other, so they will respond quickly to that.

If and when you get around to reinstalling the handlebars, I suggest starting with a position closer to seat. The Nimbus Shadow handle and the KH t-bar have different issues. I have the KH on my mUni and the Shadow on my 29" road. I experimented with pointing the Shadow bar ends backwards for a closer bar setup. If you are like me, it is going to take a lot of experimentation with your handle bar setup to get more comfortable with it.

My current t-bar setup allows for some experimentation, holding it further out and closer in. I added a second set of bar ends, as you can see in the picture. The brake lever can not be brought forward any more without adding brake-line. The lever is attached loosely, so it can be operated by the right or the left hand. I operate the brake by holding one of the lower bars and twisting my hand inward; this allows me to both maintain a strong hold on the handle and feather the brake correctly. Just like handle bars, brakes take time, patience and experimentation…to get comfortable with them.

Vertigo · May 24, 2015, 10:50am

Thanks elpuebloUNIdo for the tips.

The handle bars are still on the 29er but I’m thinking of taking them off so I can practice holding the seat handle with both hands. Do it some of the time but perhaps I need to do it all the time.

I try not to wave my arms about but do have a tendency to revert to that when the ground has too much camber or is bumpy. Yep I do need to work on balancing from the core. I like the idea of using elbows to balance … if needed.

Long cranks … not sure about that. My longest ones are 150mm. I can’t imagine putting those on a 20". These days I’ve been riding with 127mm on my 29er and 24" on paved roads. At some point I’d like to be on 110mm or 117mm so that I could hopefully go a bit faster.

Thanks for showing your set up. I wish I could try other types to see which ones I might like the most. The ones I have were made by another unicyclist [Thanks :D]. Here’s a photo.

Since this photo I’ve moved the brake out of the way so I wouldn’t accidentally grab it. Also I think the bars are set a little lower.

I like how the bars attach to the seat post unlike the KH T-bar. Not sure why the KH T-bar attaches to the seat. That’s doesn’t seem like a solid set up to me.

Sometimes I wonder how heavy my handle bars are compared to others. Don’t know if that makes a difference.

LargeEddie · May 24, 2015, 2:58pm

I rediscovered this thread about struggles learning handlebars last week:

It took me maybe a month or six weeks to get comfortable with bars, and I figured that was my usual very-slow-but-more-or-less steady progress on any new skill. Actually, for a change, this might be one thing I picked up pretty quickly by comparison. Not that I’m comparing.

Dunno about anyone else but I don’t consider that as cheating. I take both hands off when the road surface gets tricky, or if I need to make a tight turn or fit through a tight space. Sometimes my upper body needs to move freely for quick corrections.

Yay!!

I learned to use bars on the same unicycle with the same bars as Lance and I’m very comfortable with it. I guess that points to how well he put that setup together.

There might also be something to the idea that bars are a bigger advantage on a 36" unicycle, which are heavy and unwieldy with or without bars, and so there’s more reward to using them, even badly. Then that skill can be transferred to smaller wheels. I’m still kicking around the idea of sticking some on my 700c/29" road uni but haven’t done anything about it yet.

Agreed! They aren’t exactly cheap and I was reluctant to buy a set with no idea of whether I’d like it. (Still am.) I took a shot with the Nimbus Shadow handles because they were already on Lance’s Coker and it seemed like he’d worked out and tested a good solution already.

That’s the point of the metal stiffener plate that comes with the T-bar, right? I assume it ties the front seat bumper to the top of the seatpost. There don’t seem to be many (any?) complaints about that at least.

Seatpost or seat tube clamp, front bumper mount, and cradle with integrated seat mount (E.g., Shadow and built into Nightfox frames) seem to be the three major families.

Looking at the picture, I get a feeling there’d be a lot of weight far away from the seat and a high moment of inertia. Just a guess, but that would make it harder to change direction, especially when you take your hands off in some critical situation. It’d be a lot worse than having no handlebars then. Dunno if there’s any way to put a simple cross bar and a pair of light bar ends on your boom to compare it with. It’s too bad that there aren’t more interchangeable options and bits and pieces that can be swapped around without spending a fortune or having rare fabrication skills.

It’s only worth doing if it makes riding better and more fun. No law says you have to have handlebars. Thanks for the update, and good luck with it.