Learning to unicycle + awesome videos

Just thought it would be helpful to give a quick review of my time learning to unicycle.  I decided to learn in 2009, and in all, it originally took about 1 or 2 weeks, depending how you count, and I found it most helpful to practice for 20 minutes per day.  Any amount of time longer than that was unproductive, as the muscles and balancing required for this sport were so different than anything I'd done, and so I lost control a bit after that long.  So in summary: short, sweet, don't change things, and repeat.

Also, it's a great skill to learn, to keep your brain in learning mode and agile, and I think that this guy's assessments of the benefits of juggling carry over to unicycling quite well:

1. brain growth
2. body comfort
3. stress relief
4. focus retention
5. coordination boosting
6. being interesting
7. improved learning
8. unboring meditation

I'm not completely sold on the meditation, but most of the others hold!  Read more here.


New Hobby for HB

Wherein I display to the world, for accountability, my desire to learn to ride a unicycle, with very little external input.  I practiced for about 20 minutes per day, and let my muscles take their time in learning the new motions.

Unicycle: Days 6 & 7

Day 6 is when I started actually riding without holding onto things - traveling up to 30 feet or so (I had limited space).  Day 7 is when I switched shoes - bad idea.  Keep all variables constant in the beginning!

Unicycle: Days 8 & 9

Practie makes perfect!  Trying to ride on new surfaces - bumpy walkways, around buildings, etc.  First time to circumnavigate the block, with multiple dismounts (falls).

Unicycle: Day 10

Inventing challenges!  I decided to go to the school down the street and use their wide-open spaces.  Rode around the basketball court a few times without falling!

Day 15: Let's go to the park

Practiced riding up and down smooth paths, and continued to realize that riding on grass is difficult with a small wheel!

Unicycle progress tracker

Again, when learning, try to keep the equipment setup as unchanged as possible!

Day 17: Hittin' the (unicycle) gym

Wherein I continued to create new challenges for myself, to practice turning both directions, such as on a slalom course, shown here.  Basically just trying to improve my riding control.

What's next?

Not sure!  I haven't ever learned to ride backwards for any real distance, nor have I learned to "hover" in place, by riding forward & backward quickly.  Another option is to give up the pavement and learn to ride more 'diverse' terrain.  Enjoy!

Three awesome youtube videos about unicycling:

Impressive:

Inspiring:

Hilarious:

My posts, in reverse order, for some reason:
http://www.whereisholden.com/search?q=unicycle&max-results=20&by-date=true

Back of the napkin: should gyms be human powered?

Just wanted to draw out a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation for folks, to investigate whether workout facilities / gyms should be 'human powered' by means of treadmills, bicycles / spin machines, or other equipment.  Imagine this waaay better drawn and appearing on XKCD or TheOatmeal.  :-)

First things first, I should say that I LOVE BICYCLE RIDING!  It's fun, healthy, encourages community bonding, basically free, reduces pollution, and it looks beautiful.

Now, on to the calculation.  How much power does a human create, roughly?  Well, a pro cyclist like Lance might make something in the neighborhood of 450 Watts.  An average adult cyclist who would go to a gym to work out might make something like 100 Watts.  (And a child might make 50 Watts, to use round numbers.)

Assume for ease of calculation that a stationary bike rider in the gym can create 100 Watts.

As a base unit, assume that they pedal for 1 hour; this would create 100 Wh (100 Watt-hours).

But electricity is normally measured in kWh (kiloWatt-hours), so we'll need 10 hours of riding, either one person for 10 hours, or 10 people on the same bike for 1 hour, etc., which yields 1 kWh of power generation.

So now let's step back to the bigger picture and find out what this same amount of energy (1 kWh) of electricity costs.  Depending where you are, and what fuel sources are used, it will generally cost between $0.08 and $0.15, so we'll use the nice and round number of $0.10.  (The latest power bill at my apartment in Pasadena shows 9.1 cents / kWh.)

So at the end of the day we're given the option to buy the electricity for 10 cents, or to have someone ride a bicycle for 10 hours straight.

Your choice: pedal a stationary bike for 10 hours, or fish a dime out of your pocket.

Caveats:

Now let's remember that we still have to buy the electrical generator (alternator) motor unit, and any sensors and display that get attached to the bicycle, and to hook up the unit to the electric grid.  This could be done as cheaply as $50, but more than likely would cost a bit more.  Again, for round numbers we'll use $100.

So now we have to pay off the parts, and at a rate of $0.10 per day, it will take us 1000 days to pay off.  If we round the length of a year down to a nice and round 333 days, that's 3 years of daily operation, 7 days a week, 10 hours per day.  During that time there's no allowance for maintenance or mechanical failure.  If the bike can operate this way for 3 years, then:

 Congrats!  That very next day, you'll be saving 1 cent for every 1 hour of pedaling.

And this is why we don't power many things with human power anymore.

Extra Assumptions:

1) Here we assume that humans want to pedal for free.  Even if they want 1 cent per hour (Note: this happens to be well below the US minimum wage of 725 cents per hour.), then there is never a payback on the electricity generation.

2) Above, we assume that there is 100% conversion efficiency between their leg output and the electricity generation.  In reality, we could use something between 50 and 70% efficiency.  But for now we'll use 100% conversion.  If we do de-rate to the round number of 50 percent efficiency, then the break-even on the capital cost of equipment is going to be 6 years.

Clip art is awesome, and I found the images used here on the following sites:

Exercise Bike: http://media.heliohosted.com/plugins/Clipart/ClipartStock1/exercise%20bike.png

Hamster Cage: http://images.clipartof.com/small/433555-Royalty-Free-RF-Clipart-Illustration-Of-A-Man-Running-In-A-Wheel-To-Power-A-Generator.jpg

1-hour Clock: http://thumbs.gograph.com/gg60828623.jpg

Electricity Bolt: http://marquezcharter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/electricity-clipart.jpg?d16400

Dime: http://www.clipartguide.com/_thumbs/0060-0507-2816-2019.jpg

Day 34: Free Mount is conquered!

I might be writing out of turn here, but I believe that I can free mount with less than 3 tries at any given time, and so I'm counting that as a win for the time being!

I took a long ride this afternoon after work and went up and down main street, all around the park -- probably totaling about 1.5 miles total!

Random picture of MAS and I flying in a Piper Cherokee, over to Catalina for a hike and snack, courtesy of MA_Air, who sometimes orders Buffalo Burgers over the aviation airwaves, thanks to the helpful tower folks at "Airport in the Sky!"

Because of a business / pleasure trip, I'll be away from the 'cycle for the next 5 days. Curious how things will fall apart in that time, I'm still excited to ride and get better when I return (and I'll try and get some multi-media going for the next update!

A friend's MINI E (fully electric Mini Cooper) car that I'm super excited about. The future is here, folks, and it's totally awesome. Get some electrons -- from anywhere, solar, wind, or plain old coal, and you'll be doing your grand-children a favor!

Day 17: Hittin' the (unicycle) gym!

Today was a pretty successful day, as I was able to free-mount (get on the unicycle) without holding on to a fence 3 times (out of about 50 tries). Very exciting; this brings my total to 5 free mounts!


In addition to trying to free mount, I did some work at the park on my turns. The first drill was a slalom course made from the tether-ball poles:


Second, there are these two concentric circles on the ground -- I have no idea what they're really for, but I practiced riding 'within the lines' in both directions, with limited success:


Here's a video of me riding at the playground!



(and here's another (not me! :)))

Unicycle progress tracker

Alert: Nerdlevel 9 Ahead!

(Click the image)


That was fun, eh?

Unfortunately I still can't turn right very well, but it's no big deal because it's about to be Mega-Nuts Slalom Week!

Day 15: Let's go to the park

My three day weekend started beautifully enough, spending half a day at a surprisingly beautiful man-made park in Costa Mesa. I decided to use the contour hills of the park to practice on my Unicycle!

Riding up and down small inclines isn't a big deal -- but it does get very tough, very quickly as the incline increases. This second movie shows the limit of what I can descend right now.


Third movie is more of the same -- hill descent. :-)

Also, check out this awesome photo of the park where I rode: TeWinkle Park Vertorama:

(Same pic looks BEAUTIFUL here.)

Unicycle: Day 10

Another excellent day on the concrete today, folks. After a few false starts by starting off over-confident, I drew back, got down to basics, used the wall for a few mins, and then headed out.

I went down the street to the middle school and hopped the fence and started my first experiments in FLATLAND. It's really nice to have such a big area (2 basketball courts, a flat painted map of the USA, and a lunch area) to just roam around in. I did a few speed-runs from end to end of the basketball court, and then tried to make laps. On my third try, I was able to make 4 (yes! FOUR) full circuits of the red line below, using the blue dots as waypoints.



I think next up will be experimenting with the other turning direction, and I'm not too confident in turning to the right. We'll see.

And then there's the whole goal of starting to ride without leaning on a post, tree, or wall -- seems literally impossible, despite what I've seen (click for video).

Unicycle: Days 8 and 9

Day 8 was good, but not great. Went back to using the same old full coverage shoes that I had been learning on, before the flip-flop accident, and that seemed to help. I did something non-traditional at this point, however, and relocated to a new venue! The Balboa Sports Complex in Encino was my classroom for about 20 minutes as I tried riding in the open spaces along pathways, and open tarmac -- complete with tree-root-induced bumps! Longest straight ride was a new record, on smooth surface, of about 50 feet. Mixed success, but new pictures!

(Photos courtesy (again) of MAS. Thanks for dealing with a nervous and skiddish subject!)


Day 9 -- back home in Monrovia, and excited to have a free evening after work. I headed out into the alley (my original stomping (okay, unicycle-stomping) grounds) and found a carport with poles to ride between (about 16 feet apart, and on a slick, smooth concrete surface). Pretty good. Not great, and impossible to turn tight enough for figure 8s, but good enough to ride between them.

Then I decided to get brave! I rode down the length of the alley, and *fully* around the block. Falling multiple times, yes, but still, riding the entire 4 length sides of the block. Really got tired of falling off on bumps in the walkways where tree roots were cracking the cement.

Turning - had partial success rounding the corners -- which is impressive, as they dip for wheelchair access providing a challenging angle to ride on. (At the start of the turn, you're trying to make a right turn on the sidewalk, but the pavement is falling away to the front, and left, making the unicycle turn left, and accelerate -- and immediate reversal of both upon passing the halfway point!)

More to come! Very excited about this!

Unicycle: Days 6 and 7

Well, as they say (more in walking than in riding things, I guess), two steps forward, and one step back.

Day 6 of self-lessons on the unicycle was incredible! I accidentally rode away from the wall that I usually hold on to, and just kinda went with it, and ended up riding about 20 feet! I honestly didn't control direction at all, just marveled that I was successfully riding.

Feeling strong, I decided to go from my apartment's dumpster to the next apartment's dumpster -- about 30 feet. AND. I. SUCCEEDED. FOUR. TIMES. ... And it was really fun! (Okay, I only barely made it each time, and wasn't *fully* controlling direction, but really only had a width of 15 feet to work with, so I'll count that as a win.

Then there's the one step back: Day 7 was a complete bust, I wasn't even able to ride 10 feet next to the wall without touching it. I was, however, dumbly experimenting with flip flops, something I probably won't do again for a while. (And I raised the seat which reeeeeally helped. I'm now at my max seat height, allowing me to give advice to others: if you're taller than 5'10", don't get a 20" CyclePro Unicycle -- it probably will be too small.)

And this is just a random google image that I thought folks would like!

New HoBby for HB

Let this post serve as an accountability tool for my newest endeavor: learning to ride a unicycle! When you check in with me next, inquire about how my self-teaching lessons are going, and ask what my current struggles are!


My end goal isn't to join a circus, although the thought hasn't entirely left my mind.
(The above picture was taken in Wellington, New Zealand, Feb. 3, 2008)

Here's my first unicycle: a 20" wheel, road tire, CyclePro brand. Picked up off Craigslist, sans one part, for $50, up and running for $65.



In the 1 week that I've been riding, I've done 5 lessons, roughly 30 minutes each, and I'm just now starting to let go of the wall that I ride near, for very short distances (less than 5 feet).



(Sorry for the terrible sound. I'm just saying I ride roughly 30 minutes a day for the past week.)


If I get a bit o' feedback, I'll continue posting (better) videos of my progress.