Unicycle

A couple of weeks ago my nephews were here and one of them rides the unicycle: He was able to easily ride the thing down our long, steep and narrow driveway. This is something I had never been able to do; although I never really gave it a serious try. My view of it was that I would have to increase my riding skills by a very large amount to have a hope of doing this trick. I never thought it was impossible, just that the effort required was more than I wanted to invest in such an accomplishment.

I gave it a try when my nephew was here, but didn't make it. Now a couple of weeks later we were waiting in the front for BBQ guests to arrive and so I figured I would kill some time by riding the unicycle. I made it down the driveway on the 2nd try!

The thing which makes steep hills hard on a unicycle is that you control the device via three contact points; The seat is one and the two pedals are the other two. If you push sufficiently hard on one pedal, you will lift yourself off the seat and then have no control over the unicycle. This problem could be solved with straps on the pedals--or across the seat, but either of these 'solutions' would result in almost certain injury. One could hold onto the seat when on a steep hill, but this would require a lot of practice since I currently need to wave my arms around, a lot, just to ride on level ground.