This is not going to pose a question. Rather, I think that being forced off the road by snow and ice makes me take to the keyboard, as the only way I can still engage in unicycling for the moment. I have been thinking about falls lately, because I took a couple of nasty spills and I wanted to understand why they happened, and how to deal with such situations in the future. All this deals strictly with road riding because that is what I do.
So far I have identified three main causes of falls and upsets (an āupsetā being my term for a dismount where you just walk or run it out, without getting knocked off you feet. I know some people use āUPDā but I am not a fan of acronyms, when avoidable.) In no particular order, the three causes are overspeeding, terrain, and exhaustion. Exhaustion I think is self-explanatory, in that I find that sometimes I keep on riding to the point that I am so tired that either my strength or my concentration fails.
Terrain problems generally come up in low light, around dusk, when I can no longer see clearly the bumps in the road, and one of them throws me. Both of these causes have relatively obvious solutions. The last one is trickier. By āoverspeedā I mean that condition when we get going so fast that we can no longer apply sufficient control to keep from falling forward off the cycle. The reason I say that this situation is trickier is because I see it a bit like falling into a trap, the trap of speed when things are going very well indeed, and strength and confidence come together so that you are really rolling along very nicely, and then you end up just beyond the point of control.
For those who sail, it is a bit like flying a hull in a catamaran just a bit too much, so that the rudder loses its bite and the wind flips you over. I know I said that this was not going to be a question, but the fact is that I am curious, how do others deal with this āoverspeedā condition?