Dude, you’re a professional unicyclist?
Yikes! Maybe Standup Gliding is easier than coasting, but I never thought of it that way. Because when I learned coasting, Standup Gliding basically didn’t exist, and I never got around to learning it back in my Freestyle days. The difficulty of coasting has much to do with the distance that’s required. Pretty much any gliding trick is easier to maintain once you get going in it…
Interesting but easy enough to figure out. Audiences are amazingly consistent in which skills impress them and which ones don’t. Coasting? Not at all. Kick-Up Mount? Always a winner.
Hah! Though I think you are referring primarily to street performers. The “must, actually” is a very necessary part of converting a crowd of random passers-by into paying customers. For other types of performance, when the audience chose to be there (and usually has something to sit on), the requirements of success are more flexible. Having said that, there aren’t many things more fun that pretending you’re going to fall into your audience from your giraffe. 
Some tricks get milked, but others can be strung together into an artistic routine which, if designed for an audience, can stand on its own.
And just because you can pull a rabbit out of your ass doesn’t mean you can do it while idling a 6-footer!
That’s interesting for me, who learned to ride without any outside help (and on a crap unicycle). Those later skills took less time, but were also accompanied by some level of outside assistance or advice.
The comparisons to learning musical instruments are difficult because once you learn to play a handful of notes on an instrument, adding songs is mostly a matter of applying enough time to memorize the notes and movements required. It’s not like you are learning a “new” trick. But there is also a big difference between stringing notes together and playing beautifully. Same as struggling through a trick without falling off, compared to executing it artfully as part of a larger performance.
I agree. And my carbon fiber Muni sounds like a plastic pipe. the Blue Man Group could probably make it sound cool, but it doesn’t compare well to metal. 
Absolutely. Like juggling on the uni, it takes quite a while longer to learn to control it while idling than while riding along. Idling is definitely more work.
No, one gig does not make a professional, not even in this economy!
That’s good to know. Once, when I suddenly had a large audience of small children pressing their noses against the sides of the basketball cage where I was practicing, I tried idling -a skill I was very proud to have just learned at that time- and they immediately got bored. When I rode around in a circle, though, they went apeshit.
Yeah, and getting out of breath is no good if you’re supposed to sing. Normally I wouldn’t notice the difference in exertion between idling and riding, but in that situation it suddenly became a big difference.
I think you will have a hard time comparing how difficult it is to learn something compared to some other activity. For those select few who possess, the predisposition riding seems natural while others excel at chess or playing music (or at silly wand waving). So how can you judge difficulty objectively?
Statistically speaking riding a skateboard or playing guitar would be easier than riding a unicycle since there are a lot more top skateboarders or top guitarists than top unicyclists. I think that the time spent in training to reach the top is not that different. Nevertheless i wonder how many people would learn to play a guitar if they would be ridiculed constantly while playing. So what factors are taken into account when judging talent and difficulty to overcome while learning for people who are not that talented?
We can’t objectively, but I think I said that in my original post multiple times. But I can sure compare how learning unicycling felt to me compared to learning other things. If someone really wanted to make a survey, this is what I would use as data. But, if you read my post, you will also know what difficulty I think there is with that, which is that learning how to unicycle FEELS frustrating, and thereby feels hard to learn, whereas if you look on time spend to learn, it doesn’t take that much. Edit: just re read that. We cannot judge how hard it seems objectively either, but I think I can safely say that most people with the exceptions of kids, think learning to unicycle takes more time than it really does.
There are way more factors to that than how difficult it is. People don’t get exposed to unicycling as much as people get exposed to skateboarding, Bmx or playing the guitar. There is an established professional skateboarding scene, it is very simple for someone starting skateboarding to see: “If I get really good and sell myself well, I can make a living out of this.” In unicycling, that is a lot harder. There are very few top triangle players out there, does that make playing the triangle hard?
None. I made this thread to get more info about peoples learning experience, because it is something that interests me personally, and I think it is an interesting disussion to have.
I promised I would be back to this to add new stuff to this disussion, so here it comes:
This time, it is about your personality. Do you think it takes a special kind of personality to start learning unicycling and sticking with it? Would you (adressed to anyone that unicycles) consider yourself a person that is more patient and endurant than average? Do you think you are attracted to hobbys that require a lot of practice to start, but give you a big feeling of achievement when learned?
As an example, as I mentioned, I picked up speedcubing, which is kind of similar. While it only takes a few hours to learn how to solve the cube, to learn F2L and 2step PLL and OLL (which is the very basics of what most fast speedcubers use) , it takes many more, and the practicing itself is not exciting. The learning takes a lot of time, just like unicycling, but it also feels good when it becomes easy.
I find myself attracted to things that challenge me more than things that are easy. If it wasn’t like that, I probably wouldn’t be unicycling or doing any sports at all.
I was definitely attracted to unicycling by the often repeated idea that ‘all it takes is persistence’. If I had thought it required any special ability or talent, I would have assumed that counted me out. But as I think I said at the start of my learning thread, insane levels of persistence in the pursuit of crazy objectives is practically my superpower, and I’m keen to accrue all the possible rewards that might garner me.
I learned to ride a unicycle about 11 years ago. Before that I had never even given it a thought and knew nothing more than the average person knows about unicycles. I didn’t know mountain unicycling even existed. I thought idling was the usual way to ride and that riding down the street for any distance at all would be much harder than idling. I also had no idea that people did unicycle tricks. Idling or coasting, or most of the tricks for that matter wouldn’t have impressed me any more at the time than basic riding because I wouldn’t have known the difference. The fact that someone could ride it at all would have impressed me the most, and being able to ride in a straight line down the street would have amazed me because I just didn’t know they were ridden that way. I honestly thought riding down the street the way you would on a bicycle was the most difficult thing you could do on a unicycle. It sounds stupid now but that was my perception of it. I imagine most people (non-riders) have similar misconceptions.
Yay - I can only do one of those tricks, and whilst I’m sure it’s been mentioned before, I’ve clearly missed it. Nice to have an audience friendly trick in the bag - I’ll have to work at it a bit more to make it consistent. Consistent enough to be able to do it whilst holding a trumpet that is, because my experience of impressing people whilst riding, the most impressive thing I’ve ever done is play my trumpet whilst riding (and IMHO playing a trumpet is far tougher on the breathing than riding - though for me at least idling whilst playing is currently impossible not because of the exertion, but because it’s not automatic enough to do without thinking and I need my thoughts for playing!)
As you say it’s not that hard to work out what people enjoy watching - whilst I’m impressed by super hard trials/street/freestyle tricks because I know how hard they are, they’re not always that exciting to watch, and just a simple 180 hop twist is enough to get jaws dropping. Though to come back to the trumpet, combining something else with riding seems to tick all the boxes, hence why juggling on a uni is so common for entertainers and street/freestyle routines rather less so!
Well I’m going to go out on a limb here and claim to have fairly decent innate ability at balance sports. For example right now I’m doing quite a lot of inline/roller skating and those I’m going out with seem impressed at the speed with which I’m picking up new skills. However whilst I play a musical instrument (which is more than most people do) my innate level of musical ability is rather less. Yet as I’ve commented above I consider the initial stages of riding a unicycle to be far harder then the initial stages of playing a musical instrument - or at least it takes a lot longer to get anywhere at all with a uni. You’ll also find the average time taken for each matches quite well with my experiences.
I don’t think the time taken to master something and become an expert is markedly different for any of these things we’re discussing. Not least because the very best have spent all their free time on their chosen activity and there are only so many hours in the day - so to look at it an other way, an expert skateboarder is where you get spending all your time skateboarding and an expert guitar player is where you get if you spend all your time playing guitar (of course these people also have significant natural ability at their chosen activity). We’re busy discussing one of the main reasons for fewer expert unicyclists - apart from the reasons already mentioned, the entry requirements are so high as to put off even a lot of people who might go on to be experts if they tried properly. Which is all down to the length of time before you get anywhere, rather than being ridiculed - is being ridiculed even that big an issue?
Well, i ride to work on a unicycle every day and my riding improved a lot over the years because of it. I guess that if ridicule was an issue for me i would be on a mountainbike wearing spandex :-).
Nevertheless it is a factor that makes it harder to learn…
I completely agree with the original poster, and others, that unicycling isn’t especially hard compared to other activities - it just has that frustrating initial phase where you can’t do anything. I even made a similar post in another thread, about the “Lunacycle” maybe helping with the learning curve.
I also think that as a small, relatively disorganized activity, we don’t see people reaching the level of expertise that people reach in other sports and activities - e.g. street unicyclists don’t have the competitions and coaching that, say, gymnasts do. So our standard for landing a trick is basically that you didn’t fall down. In gymnastics, you better land that trick perfectly, no correction hop, after keeping a perfect position in the air, knees straight, toes together and pointed, etc. etc. etc.
And the same thing applies to musicians - hitting the notes is just the bare minimum - and pretty much every other large, competitive activity. I don’t think unicycling is harder than, say, tennis, but that’s not why we don’t have the equivalent of a Roger Federer. It’s because you just can’t get world-class good on your own, or in a local club.
Interesting point, and it raises a point I was thinking about earlier regarding my relative abilities. I kind of have this idea of myself as a pretty good unicyclist and a fairly mediocre musician. In reality I’m actually a far better musician than unicyclist, because I am striving for more than just hitting the notes (and regarding my earlier assessment of my natural abilities, I’ve been playing for 33 years and only riding for 5), and just about good enough to play in a band, whilst the only reason anybody would want to watch me perform on a unicycle is the novelty factor. The disparity is down to where I am compared to the entire population, including people who can’t play or ride - there are less people who can ride a unicycle better than me than who can play a trumpet better than me!
True. But also true is that if a person has foundational skills for an activity, such as skateboarding or skiing before unicycling, or other musical instruments before learning a new one, that gives them a head start in the learning process.
Another factor in learning is “how badly” one wants to succeed. Many people approach the unicycle with fear, and the initial learning process can be discouraging so people may lose motivation. I think that’s why so many people give up and never try it again. This was true for me, in part. The P.O.S. unicycle I was learning on made riding quite difficult, and I gave up many times. But at the same time, I was determined to conquer the thing. I thought, “If those otherwise-normal humans (kids in my neighborhood) can learn it, why can’t I?” And so I persevered.
I think you are comparing success with the learning process. In some ways, because unicycling is so small, it is easier to reach top ranking. As long as you avoid Unicon, where the very top riders gather. But if you go to the USA Nationals, for instance, the bar is quite a bit lower for most events.
You might want to look for a better place to practice. If it’s comments you get while riding down the street, I don’t worry so much about those because I just keep going. But definitely trying to focus on learning tricks with annoying people in the background would be a deterrent, and I have experienced that in my past.
Again this is comparing learning difficulty with overall success compared to others. To be a “top” Triangle player, for instance, you would have to get into the rarefied atmosphere of symphony orchestras and such, where there are extremely high standards (ignoring that you would probably have to be extremely good at a few other percussion instruments as well). To be a professional unicyclist it is a lower bar, since there is a lot less to be compared against. That makes it easier to reach that position, but does not mean it was easier getting there. If you get there at all, making a living at it is still super-hard.
I sort of covered this above, but it doesn’t require a special personality, that will just help you learn faster, or be less likely to quit. For example with the Rubicks, I appreciate the difficulty, but puzzles don’t interest me as much and I’ve never taken the time to learn how to solve a Rubicks Cube. And I’m okay with that. Just like how 99+% of the population is okay with never learning to ride a unicycle, even if they think it’s cool to watch.
For males, there is always an out if you miss your first attempt at a kick-up mount. That is, to feign crotch pain. This can be done appropriately for all audiences, but it’s easy to get it wrong if you have a sensitive group. And of course, holding the trumpet adds a level of difficulty. To learn it better, I recommend trying it will juggling. Torches.
time and skill, linear gains
As for a learning curve the thing that impresses me about unicycling is that you can keep learning new skills for a very long time. The more you try to stretch your skills at the limit the better you get, not by leaps and bounds, but by gradual increments. Every month I’m a little better but not dramatically so. Improvement creeps up on you when you are engaging in ‘deliberate practice’ as they say in the literature. This is neat! No more breakthrough days but over time there is big improvement.
At some point age will put a ceiling on improvement and eventually that ceiling will drop, but so far so good. Not there yet! Terry P is an inspiration for sure.
Maybe I’ll make a graph later…
That depends on what your current skill set is. After I learned to ride I just got on with riding (muni and the like) and never really progressed my skills much. For some reason I recently decided to work on stuff and have had a lot of breakthrough days recently (I think a couple of days ago was the first day this year I didn’t have a significant first at something).
I guess there’s still going to be a point where there are no more skills left you are capable of learning, but there’s such a wide range of things you can do on a unicycle that seems a long way off.
I agree! I Learned to ride about 3.5 years ago. Been riding muni since I could ride over 100 yards. But just riding wasn’t really improving my riding much. I rode with some guys in October in Tucson that inspired me to to practice more skills. What a difference! Many breakthrough days in the last few months. All most every ride. Even my regular xc riding has improved a huge amount since I started focusing on other skills. I though my learning curve had flattened out but I now know that I’m still capable of learning stuff that I’d previously passed off as crazy, even as I’m about to turn 57.
I think we are saying the same thing but I think of breakthrough days differently. Your use of ‘breakthrough’ is probably more standard than mine so I concede the terminological point. The cool thing is there are still improvements that accrue when you are pushing the limits and the sky seems to be the limit. That’s what I referred to as ‘deliberate practice’ which describes working effortfully at something you haven’t mastered yet, requiring concentration, focus, and grit.
My improvements keep coming. I’m riding on uneven ice w/ footprints in it now. I see that as an incremental improvement, not a breakthrough. Others would probably call it a breakthrough. At first grass was hard because of the unevenness of it but now it’s easy. Then a few inches of snow on grass and trails. Then heavier snow. Then uneven and deeper snow. Then snow over ice and mud. Then snow that has melted into frozen footprints making a very bumpy and unforgiving surface. And I’ve usually got a 110lb dog on a leash simultaneously. I see that progression as incremental. You may describe it as a series of breakthroughs. We are talking about the same thing. The important thing is that we are both trying stuff at the limit of our abilities and that’s how we are improving. Breaking through the barriers…
Now when I master hopping straight up curbs I’ll consider that a breakthrough (for me). That one has eluded me so far. Something about gravity, whiteness, and no hops. Must try harder…
Congrats for doing this in your 50s like me. There seems to be something about this age (50s) and unicycling that isn’t coincidental. Maybe we are old enough to not give a poop that we look like clowns out there. I kind of like looking like a clown out there. It makes ppl smile (and a few frown, but f-them conformist losers).
Keep on hopping. That’s one of my new skills since October. Started by hopping down from curbs, then stairs and finally walls and rocks up to 2’ tall. Up is much more difficult and I can only make about an 8" curb so far. Also working on the rolling hop. I can do it in a parking lot but not quite ready to try it in a real world situation. Somewhere in the last few months I learned to jump mount. Not sure how useful that is but I guess it’s just fun to scare the hell out of your nut sack once in a while.
When I started adding and practicing these new skills I noticed other skills I already had seemed to improve with them. I could climb better, roll over rougher terrain easier and was just becoming a better rider overall. Every ride it seems I can now do something I couldn’t do before.
I guess my point is, if I even have one (in your 50’s the mind tends to go off track) is never stop trying to learn new things. Not only do you get the new skill but I think it can improve your other skills as well. Something about a right-brain, left-brain thing.
I’ve rambled enough. I’m going for a ride before it starts to rain.
One of my early goals was to ride all the way down to the end of the street. After a lot of trying, I could never quite make it that far and I was getting frustrated with trying. So I decided since I could “sort of” turn (but not really), I would try something new and just try to ride a complete circle in my driveway. After about a half hour of trying, I made it all the way around in a circle clockwise. I thought I should probably do it counterclockwise as well. About another 15 minutes and I could ride both ways around in a circle. Immediately, I could tell that my goal of riding to the end of the street would be easy now, I could just feel it. I walked right down to the street and did it. Learning to ride the circles each way definitely made a huge improvement in riding straight for me.
I am a public school music teacher. In my current job, I teach 4th and 5th graders (9-11 yr. olds) to play the violin. I teach at seven different schools. Each school has a different environment and socio-economics. The students at some schools are more “ready to learn” than at others.
Learning, whether on the unicycle or on a musical instrument, involves delayed gratification. I’ve read articles discussing how delayed gratification is the keystone of emotional maturity. There’s a famous experiment where kids are given two choices: 1. Have a marshmallow now, or 2. Wait until later and get two marshmallows.
In my experience, the more privileged kids learn faster, particularly when learning involves first a reading exercise, then transferring the reading into actual performance. They are able to wait for the two marshmallows (reading music is superior to rote methods of learning, because it allows the student to play much more repertoire). The lower socio-economic schools, in general, are grabbing for the one marshmallow (they can play, but their reading is not as good). I think the privileged kids are more accustomed to getting their way by showing self-control. They experience good outcomes when they use their language, their manners, their patience. The less-privileged kids, on the other hand, live in in a home environment where reaching for the one marshmallow is the only choice.
Maslow’s hierarchy explains the above phenomenon. The more basic the need, the less we are able to wait. Underprivileged children are more concerned with immediate concerns: food, safety. To meet these needs, children are more likely to act impulsively.
So, in answer to the above question, what type of person is likely to succeed learning to unicycle, I’d pick a rich kid over a poor kid. Harsh, I know. Rich or poor, if I had to pick one thing most threatening to music practice and unicycle-learning, it would be video games.
I have had virtually no luck getting any neighbor kids into unicycling. The exception is a 13 year old neighbor who can ride more than 200 meters on my 20". His success has more to do with being a profoundly good athlete … than with perseverance.
I wish the initial learning curve were not so steep on the unicycle. I think anyone learning to unicycle would find it enjoyable.