Fear not, Uni Lateral, I’m not even riding my 26er yet. I might be hanging onto the security of the 20" longer than I should but staying low and slow still feels right for me right now. It’s not as though I’ve mastered this one already, and I trust that skills I learn on it will transfer.
I figure I can stand to wait a couple of years before even thinking about a 36er, knowing how much better my skills and riding instincts are sure to be if I’m still riding then. A man’s got to know his limitations, as the saying goes.
Don’t rush it. I rode with Jyngles who started about the same time I did, and didn’t ride through the winter, and he was quite skilled on his 20 inch.
My daughter can ride the 36 and 29 better then I can. I think that is because she rode a 20 inch for a couple years first. She can turn really well. I can’t. You will learn more riding a small wheel that will translate to the larger wheel.
Amazing. I never thought of using it on a smaller wheel! I like the slow motion!
Tried the Coker seat, not that great. It does “grip” better, but is uncomfortable. Then I put air in the tire and that solved the problem. It was way too low. Problem solved.
I managed to get a few more successful free mounts in. Still not that great. It needs to come easier. Mentally it is just hard to throw myself over the front. I end up stopping short.
“anyone beyond school age seen riding a unicycle was suspicious, possibly dangerous, best left alone.”
That’s got to be a signature for someone…
Just a note for those guys having mounting probs on their 36s, try lowering the seat a bit, 10-15mm. I have found that made a big difference for me. Then I put the seat back up and the problem sort of went away, first thing in the morning is a dead loss for me
“Maybe I should get a pair of rubber shorts to really grip the seat!” Umm yes Jigywigy, I think Mikefule was talking about latex a short while ago too…
I remember learning to free mount my 36r. I would come home from a four hour cycle having spent only 30minutes in the saddle. This frustration went on for weeks until I discovered the rolling mount. I took my 36er on to the grass and with fear and trembling launched myself into a rolling mount. I promptly sailed over the unicycle, my butt missed the saddle completely and I landed safely with my feet on the ground with the unicycle behind me. Hey!! that wasn’t too bad, I thought.
So I tried a few more times and before long I was mounting with relative ease.
When doing a rolling mount, walk close to the unicycle, keep a straight posture and launch upwards without too much forward motion.
Doing a rolling mount saves sooo much energy and you don’t end up with a sore calf and a broken heart. Lol!!
Hello Everyone! Another OD here trying to learn to ride a Uni. My wife thinks I crazy. My Kids think it is kewl but ask if I am OK every time I fall off.
I read through the first 11 pages of this thread and found it to be so inspiring that I started my own thread to log my progress.
Today is Day 0 with my new 24. Mounting by the basketball pole is comfortable going forward is scary. I think I am trying to go too slow.
I love all the posts here and it helps to know I am not the only crazy over 40 person who has decided that this is a good idea at this time in life.
Welcome Chigins.
It’s a lot of fun and you will be riding sooner than you think. I’m 45 and I started a few weeks ago. I’m already practicing on easy trails. As long as you don’t quit you will be riding soon. Basketball and tennis courts are great places to practice. Get on to the trails asap when you can pedal a couple of laps around the courts. It’ll happen. Visualization and imagination when off the uni helped me progress faster than if I just practiced riding. You will have good and bad practice days. Be patient and don’t quit. It’ll all come together and it will be fun.
As previously mentioned, most of my recent practices have mainly consisted of trying to master the 36r freemount. I originally started with a 2-step rolling mount, worked back to a 1-step, and today was able to successfully do a static mount. I figured that since my success rate has risen to about 50%, and that a large number of failures resulted from poor foot placement on the pedals, the static mount would eliminate at least one of the variables. The dominant foot would always be in the correct position, so I only have to worry about the other foot and general balance. So I worked at it, and once I got the first one, I got two more in pretty short order. I was pretty happy about that! So I think I will work on that as my “standard” mounting technique.
Welcome, Chigins! There are a lot of us older guys going at this – it’s great. As far as being over 40 goes, I consider you a youngster! Keep at it, and post some pictures or videos when you get a chance.
I have been having more and more success with the wheel assist mount, but not enough. It also doesn’t look that gracefull.
So today I decided to try the rolling mount again. The first time I tried it a gave up after only a few attempts. I wasn’t getting any lift and just thought I wasn’t coordinated enough to go from a walk into a jump with one leg. It seemed as unrealistic and risky to me as a suicide mount. So today I took unibokk’s advice and found some grass at a nearby soccer field. After a few attempts I was up on the seat. I worked at it over and over again until I was landing it everytime. Not rolling forward, but getting up on the seat.
Now I was convinced that the wheel was being slowed downed by the grass and it would fly out from under me once I got on pavement. I moved to the pavement and had the same result. It takes less effort than the wheel assist! Everytime I was landing comfortably on the seat. I managed to get a few rolls forward, but not one complete success yet. But I am so close. Now I know why it is one of the methods I see most often. It works beautifully. Thanks unibokk.
Also, welcome Chiggins. You will enjoy it. Just don’t give up.
That’s one of the tricky things. Going faster is more stable because the wheel helps to keep itself upright, but you have to get across that gulf from being stopped to going fast somehow. And going fast tires out your legs really quickly. I haven’t had a teacher or anyone to help me learn in person but it might be that having someone to hold onto while you built up speed would make this easier.
Keeping in mind that I’m still a beginner, I think riding slowly yet steadily is something to work toward. Being able to ride at all comes first. I think most of us went through a stage of having a fence or wall to creep along. I’m still using mine, although mainly for practicing riding backwards lately. It helps to be able to pedal through several crank cycles not having to worry about left-right balance for a while, just working on the front-back part, which is the weird thing compared to bicycle riding.
Give it time, that’s the main thing. The more time you spend on the saddle, working the cranks and feeling your balance, the quicker you’ll learn. But unless you have some crazy physical abilities (which you’d probably know about by now if you did) you won’t get there in a day or two, so look for little signs of progress and enjoy the journey.
Most definitely! Reading about other folks’ experiences, particularly from people of more or less average physical ability like myself, made me believe I could do it and helped me to be reasonable about what I should expect to be able to do.
One thing about reading through these topics is though that we can buzz through four or five months of someone’s life pretty quickly. Seeing them progress from being a rank beginner to rocking muni on a 29er in an hour of two of reading, it’s easy to overlook how much blood, sweat, and tears came in between.
So, its been just about 2 years since my wife brought a unicycle home from the dump and I gave it a try. From there it has been a string of failures:
I committed to being able to ride the length of my 50 foot flat driveway in 3 weeks. I failed, it took me closer to 8 weeks
I vowed to be able to reliably free mount in a month; it took 2.
I would ride around the house before the snow came - it snowed 2 months
earlier than usual, and even when December came the frost lumps in the yard made it nearly impossible.
I’d be able to idle and/or static stand w/in a year, I still cant. (I really haven’t tried that hard)
I thought I’d have no problem at all riding wheelies on my b*ke after I learned how to unicycle. It has not helped at all.
-I’d never need more than one unicycle, I now have 5.
About the only timely success I’ve had was a week ago - I managed to ride 26 miles on my uni before I hit 52, or half my age. I had decided to do this when a chubby, out of shape co worker absolutely stunned me by successfully running a marathon; I promised him I’d use him as motivation to do the same on a unicycle. I hope to ride my age before I hit 53, but obviously unicycling has prepared me for failure - don’t bet on it.
In spite of all the failures, I now can ride most places I want to for pretty much as long as I want; I can pretty much hop right on any one my of my unis and go and do so all the time. I had no idea that I would find this such a challenging, rewarding, and entertaining sport. Muni is huge fun, there is challenging terrain almost anywhere I travel. And when I do travel there is always room for a unicycle in the trunk.
I impress strangers, win the admiration of friends and family, and yet I’m a beginning rider in the unicycling world. This is not a bad thing at all: there are so many things to still learn that unicycling will never lose its challenge. I cant possibly imagine being able to do 3’ hops, rails, and wheel walking but I’m going to try, and I know if I really apply myself I’ll succeed.
To those who are just starting, or who aren’t where they want to be - success is pretty much inevitable, as long as you don’t give up. Don’t let missed goals or bruised body parts or egos hold you back. And, to those more experienced who share their knowledge and wisdom on this forum - thanks. You save me a lot of time figuring things out on my own and provide inspiration when you share your successes.
Thanks so much for suggesting the rolling mount. I must have landed 30 or more tonight and have neither a sore calf or a broken heart. One time when I tried it, I ended up exactly balanced right on the seat, not leaning forward at all. It was interesting, because my muscle memory took over – I always do a rollback mount on my 24" – and I pulled the non-dominant pedal back into half an idle and pedaled forward. It felt kind of weird to do this rolling mount forward, then rollback. Not especially efficient. It made me laugh. And luckily, we got it on video, including one where I did a double idle before taking off.
It was cool with the idling, too, because I didn’t really think about it, I just let the muscle memory take over and stop being so timid about idling. I have a feeling that my idling will get consistent in short order if I can continue to shed the timidity and just go for it. It felt so cool to idle the 36" and it was super cool to see it on video after.
Yes, it does work beautifully. It helps to see other people trying something and succeeding, it gives me hope that it might just work for me. Thanks, Jigywigy, and to the other encouraging posters, including Lance.
So here’s a 38-second video of some of the successful attempts. I often mute the audio and add music, but my family’s encouraging comments were too precious to take out.
I forgot to mention I was greatly aided by Terry’s excellent tutorial on how to build muscle memory for mounting a 36". I only practiced with his method twice before today’s success.
I haven’t had much to report in the personal journal department lately, but I’m still going to the city Arboretum for my riding practice and still finding plenty to do there.
We had a big thunderstorm mid-afternoon and the non-paved areas were still soggy in the evening, so I stuck to riding through the puddles on the paved walkways. I did manage to cross a wooden bridge but not the wooden bridge; this one was of similar size and length but with a less steep approach angle and not such bumpy transitions between surfaces. Still it’s an achievement, and I’ll get the best of its meaner big brother eventually.
I also worked for a while on free mounting with my feet reversed, left-footed instead of right-footed, or right instead of left depending on how you look at it. I think one of my legs might be less skilled than the other but I’m not sure which one’s the stupid one. I’m hoping that whichever one it is, this will force it to wise up and that will improve other parts of my riding, being able to turn equally well both ways etc.
An odd side effect was that I got confused a couple of times about which way was which. I’d muff several free mount attempts when I wasn’t trying to work on anything new, and only then realize that I was trying to do it the way that I don’t know how to do it yet. Not knowing my left from my right, not good… It wasn’t a great night for free mounting generally, but it went better later on when I remembered how little movement it actually takes to mount a 20" uni when I’m doing it right. Less to do, less to go wrong…
Toward the end, I had a mini-epiphany about getting my weight onto the saddle and off of the pedals. I had been thinking that I was cheating out of fear of falling backwards and leaning pretty far forward. But it just dawned on me that a unicycle’s frame isn’t raked back at a 73° angle the way a bicycle’s seatpost is. On a bike, I think about staying back to keep my weight off the handlebars and on the saddle. But it seems like I need the unicycle to be pretty much dead upright. Otherwise there’s nothing to hold it up if I did put my weight there, and I probably wasn’t close to that.
When I felt like I was right at the forward limit of balance, about to get pitched off it to the front, I finally felt most of the weight come off of the pedals and I could spin the wheel more freely. This was near the end of a one-hour session and my legs were already pretty well burnt, so I can’t report any record-length rides because of it. But I thought I’d mention it and see if it sounds like anything to anyone, and I’ll see if it makes a difference in my riding endurance next time out.
Great posts guys
I too think I am going to have a love/hate relationship with my 36"
I took my 36" away with me last week and pushed it around for miles trying to find a slope on which to freemount
I’m going to have to seriously try the roll back mount, but it looks scary.
I’ve tried the wheel grab mount but I’m no good at that either.
I don’t want to bother the guys at UDC anymore than I have done already so can anyone tell me how much I can safely cut off my oracle frame ? I think I may have a better chance with my 165 cranks.
On a plus side, as one of you guys have already said, The 36” makes the 29” a lot easier to ride.
Last weekend I met up with Jojoxie and we rode about 18 miles on our 29”s. It’s great unicycling with someone else, you kinda feel you want to try your best. When you come off, instead of walking along you get back on and catch up
I also noticed a lot more positive comments from people.
Well, keep plodding on…
I should have mentioned that it was split into two rides. The first was along the cycle path from Landullas to Colwyn bay and the second was later that evening between Prestatyn and Rhyl. The last stretch of the ride was in near darkness and I had an advantage in that I knew the path. Jojoxie did very well to stay on and go over all the ‘joins’ in the prom.
off topic…
Here’s the vid from my second day of 36’’ ownership. I was freemounting pretty good from a slope. Now that seems like a lifetime ago and I’ve lost my mojo
I’m hoping I’ll find it again somewhere…
I might be hanging onto the security of the 20" longer than I should but staying low and slow still feels right for me right now. It’s not as though I’ve mastered this one already, and I trust that skills I learn on it will transfer.
It wasn’t a great night for free mounting generally, but it went better later on when I remembered how little movement it actually takes to mount a 20" uni when I’m doing it right. Less to do, less to go wrong…
