Above, Unicycle Dave encounters a giant lobster on his Vancouver, BC to St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador uni ride across Canada a few years back.
"I grew up in St. John’s, NL, and was walking around with some friends one day when a man (who I’d later learn was a magician named Pete in the local circus, Wonderbolt) rode (wobbled?) by on a unicycle. I thought it was awesome and I asked him where he’d got it - he told me, and I got one for my birthday that December. In the spring the snow had melted enough for me to practice (and succeed at) riding across my parents’ driveway, and I spent most of my summer learning new tricks, inspired by what people were posting online.
A few of my friends got into it too, but I was ultimately the most obsessed. I started hanging out on the unicyclist.com forums, and that’s what eventually lead me to the world of touring unicycling, RTL, and Unicon, of which I have not missed one since 2008 in Denmark. In particular though I’ve very much been a solitary rider for a lot of my life, since there aren’t a ton of other touring unicyclists, let alone in St. John’s (a few folks ride though! just not as far as I’d usually like to.)"
“Once I learned that you could get big, fast wheels, and once I saw that people were doing things like riding across the Alps (specifically, Andy Cotter / Nathan Hoover and the Alps Uni Tour were an inspiration), I got one as soon as I could afford it and rode the distance from North Sydney to Halifax, with some definite pains of inexperience. GPS on phones was not a thing at the time, I really have no business reading maps while riding down the highway, and definitely made a few wrong turns, failed to apply enough sunscreen, and maybe the worst mistake of all, rode the distance not wearing bike shorts, but cut-off jean shorts. I had a great time though!”
“That trip ended up being a qualifying ride for the Mediterranean Unicycle Tour in 2007, which was one of the best vacations of my life. I’m still loosely in touch with a lot of the folks who did that ride, we had a fantastic time and it was pretty formative. Around that time I had also graduated to doing a bit of performing with Wonderbolt myself, doing a flaming-helmet unicycle jump rope act, and some street performing on the side using a 7ft unicycle.”
"I hadn’t yet attended a Unicon (though I didn’t realize the dates of RTL and Unicon Denmark were so close!) so I hadn’t done any racing against others yet - I still haven’t done a whole lot of it, just the distance events at the intervening Unicons.
Having done the trip to Halifax and MUT though, the RTL distance was somewhat daunting but not crazy, especially when you break it up between the team members. We met on the unicyclist.com forums, and mostly were tied together by being Canadians all looking for a team to join. We were pretty geographically diverse, from BC, AB, Sask, and NL. I jokingly suggested the name Manly Legs and it stuck. My mom still tells stories of her coworkers ignoring their work to follow the trackers as they inched across Nova Scotia."
“None of us was crazy fast, and while the Schlumpf hub was out at the time it was very new (I now have two!) and out of all our price ranges, so we weren’t really destined to win the thing, but participating was awesome.”
Team MANLY LEGS finished RTL in 14th spot ~4 hours and 47 minutes behind the first place finishers over the 5 day, eight hundred km race.