October 2021, and I’ve posted about it elsewhere here - in a hurry to mount a 36er while evening was falling, I started a rolling mount. The pedal was coming around faster than usual, and I was going to meet it higher than sensible, but I jumped a little higher to as an adjustment… and when the pedal made contact with my foot, my knee popped. I rolled off the uni to the side. My left patellar tendon tore, and my knee was instantly useless.
I kinda knew what happened (recognized the sound/feel of the tear). Turned my KH Percussions into a makeshift splint, and used the uni as a crutch to limp back to the car, then drove myself to the hospital.
The patellar tendon is the one that connects from your kneecap down to your shin. Without it, my kneecap was, um, floating a little higher than normal…
They had to open up my knee about 6" and sew the tendon back together. The surgeon said it was “very humpty dumpty” and that I’d “done a good job of it”, but that it should be a “full recovery”. Which is more or less true. There’s scar tissue in there that I feel, and a lot of the nerves in my knee were severed during the surgery so there’s a lot that I don’t feel, but it’s fully functional. I’ve got better than 95% of my original (hyper-)mobility back, and it’s well within the range of “normal function”.
So of course, I started riding again as soon as I could, around September 2022. And on my first day of re-mounting the 36er (learning a static mount 'cause I’m never rolling mounting it again), I had a terrible mount attempt where I didn’t quite catch my balance and wobbled right up to the edge of a path. I bailed too late, and landed partway down an embankment… spraining my ankle.
Anyway, all that is in the past at this point. I decided to take all of last year off for the ankle to heal well, and I’m glad to say I’m back at it. Haven’t pulled the 36er out of storage yet but the 24 and 29 are getting some good use while I rebuild all the muscles and do a good deal of practicing mounting and dismounting.
In the truest of unicyclist spirits, I’m thinking about buying a 32 (solving my “problem” by buying more unicycles!) and spending time on it after I’m feeling good on the 29 again, before I re-tame the 36er.
- UniT