Only two of us rode with the club, though we did see ‘Coker Guy’ ride zip by on his 36 inch unicycle on the way to the ride. This year we were much better prepared. In the last year my brother and I both found deals on used unicycles, so instead of riding 26 inch wheels, I rode my 29 inch wheel and my brother rode his 36 inch wheel.

Cranks

Unlike on a bicycle where changing gears is just a matter of using different cogs, on a unicycle ‘gear’ is set only by the ratio of wheel radius to crank length. (Well, if you are rich, you could buy a Schlumpf hub.) I usually ride off-road on my 29 inch wheel with 165 mm cranks. A week before the Chilly Challenge, I swapped my 165 mm cranks for 125 mm cranks. This moved my gain ratio from 2.2 to 2.9. For comparison, I usually mountain bike at a gain ratio of 4, and the lowest gain ratio on my road bike is 3.3. The higher gain ratio theoretically makes it easier to ride faster on the road, but it also takes getting used to. To maintain the same riding posture, shortening the cranks by 40 mm means also raising the seat by 40 mm, which has a large effect on balance, particularly on cambers. The shorter cranks also mean you are moving your feet in smaller circles, slightly changing the muscles being used. With these changes, it took me two hours of riding to get mostly used to the shorter cranks.

The shorter cranks also make it even easier to out-spin my comfort level. Sitting so much higher also sligtly lowers my comfort level, especially on a day with strong winds. With 125 mm cranks on a 29 inch wheel, I fairly frequently think, ‘woah, I’m riding fast,’ then UPD. Since my brother was riding a 36 inch wheel with 150 mm cranks (giving him a gain ratio of 3.0) the limit on our speed was the point where I felt I was spinning to fast for a road ride. Fortunately, riding the Chilly Challenge helped me become much more comfortable with short cranks.

The ride

January 1 was a warm and dry day, but very windy. The winds were constant at around 25 mph, with much faster gusts. Because of the wind, this was by far the smallest group for the Chilly Challenge in the years I’ve ridden it; I’ve seen more riders on much colder years when it was wet out. Because the people who showed up this year were mostly serious club riders, we weren’t able to keep up on our unicycles as far as we did last year, so we took some shortcuts—and a long-cut—meeting the bike club at the site of the Polar Bear Plunge. The Polar Bears started a earlier than usual, so we arrived just as they were leaving the river. Since it was so warm out, I’d thought of joining the Polar Bears this year—it doesn’t seem so intimidating after the water on the HUFF course this year—but decided unicycling would be more fun. After the Polar Bear stop, we rode back to the starting point by a route slightly longer than the official short route. Even though we rode longer and farther than last year, the extra unicycling practice and better suited unicycles made it feel like a shorter ride.

After the ride is the traditional chili dinner at the park. There was a good variety if chilis to sample, but even the ones marked ‘Spicy’ were very mild. They tasted pretty good though.

Now that the Chilly Challenge and HUFF are over, I’m looking forward to the start of winter even more than I already was. Will winter ever come this year?

Why is this important? The current law uses a subjective definition of safe passing separation. What a cyclist feels is a safe distance isn’t necessarily the same as what a driver or police officer feels is a safe distance. Drivers often believe the safe distance is much less than it is, and make dangerous passes. Since the safe distance is no less than three feet, and many people don’t realize this, we need the minimum separation to be explicit in the motor vehicle code.

You can help promote this important safety law by filling out this survey from Bicycle Indiana, and by writing your state representatives. And while you are at it and if you live in Allen County, fill out the City of Fort Wayne Trail Survey.

With or without an explicit legal definition, remember to only make safe passes:

Notice the steps of the safe pass:

1. Begin to move over well before reaching the cyclist.
2. Pass at a safe distance. Keep a minimum of three feet between the closest points of the car and the bicyclist. At high speeds and with large vehicles the minimum safe separation is larger. Don’t forget about your mirrors.
3. Move back into the lane well after passing the cyclist. Don’t forget to leave room for your trailer.

Flying Unicycles.

Between moving to larger wheels and lots of extra practice, we are riding the trails at a higher average speed than last summer. This means fewer UPDs, but also more impressive looking UPDs. Last summer just about every little root threw me off the unicycle. I’d fall off, but would be able to reach behind me and catch my unicycle before it hit ground. The past few rides I’ve noticed that I am less likely to catch my muni. Instead of just landing on my feet, I frequently end up jogging down the trail, while my unicycle bounces along behind me. And it’s not just me: my brother has also had some spectacular UPDs. So far, the farthest we have seen a unicycle fly was last Saturday when we were exploring a new trail and his unicycle took off down a steep hill and made it quite a way down the trail before stopping.

I guess we’ll just have to ride fast enough to keep up with the flying unicycles…

I know that there are some other riders in town, and I’m trying to get regular group rides going. If you want to ride with us, check out the Fort Wayne Unicyclists group on the Unicyclist Community.

It’s amazing how smoothly the large tire rolls over bumps. Once you get it spinning, it wants to keep going. It will take a while to get used to sitting so high off the ground though.

This spring, I decided to learn to unicycle. And not just riding on smooth streets to say that I can unicycle, but riding the local mountain bike trails on one wheel. After about two and a half months of practice, I was good enough that it was worth driving to a park with good trails for a ride. I’d constantly ‘trip’ over roots, but there were enough smooth sections for it to be fun. I went back a few times, and each time I’d make it past some section that I missed the previous ride. Then something strange happened: one day I just couldn’t ride any more. I had unplanned dismounts (UPDs) in places I could fairly consistently clear an previous rides. In addition to the normal UPDs, I had a couple crashes, the last of which twisted my ankle enough that I had to take it easy for a couple weeks to give it a chance to recover. After that day, I couldn’t really ride for a month. Not that I didn’t try. I’d ride down a smooth street, and randomly fall off my unicycle. This continued for the entire month of August. Then September began, and I decided I was starting to recover my unicycling abilities enough that it was worth a trip back to the park with mountain bike trails. For the first twenty minutes, I could barely ride. Then all of a sudden, I could ride again. I began clearing sections I hadn’t made before. I even rode good parts of the intermediate trails instead of sticking to the beginner trail. Today I went back again and was able to ride even more sections that had previously caused me to UPD, and some I hadn’t even tried before.

The second example is solving physics and math problems. Some days, I’ll look at a new problem for a couple hours without any real progress. On other days, I could look at the same problem and solve it nearly as quickly as I can write the answer. This is particularly frustrating when I know I’ve solved similar problems easily in the past, but just don’t see the solution that day.

Notice this pass consists of:

1. A dangerously late and close pass with partial lane change,
2. followed by completely changing lanes, well after the cyclist.

Since the driver stays in the far lane for a while, it is clear that they had space to move over early and make a safe pass, but for some reason, chose not to. To make it worse, the driver often seems to forget the extra width of their dual rear axle and trailer. Instead of nearly hitting the cyclist, the driver could have easily made a safe pass:

Notice the steps of the safe pass:

1. Begin to move over well before reaching the cyclist.
2. Pass at a safe distance. Keep a minimum of three feet between the closest points of the car or truck and the bicyclist. On fast roads with large vehicles, the minimum safe distance may be larger.
3. Move back into the lane well after passing the cyclist. Don’t forget to leave room for your trailer.

I’ve driven some of the narrower roads in the area while pulling a large trailer with a full size pickup truck many times, so I know that—even in a large vehicle—it is easy to pass cyclists without endangering them. So, I’m not sure why this type of pass is common. It isn’t the typical dangerous driver intentionally buzzing a cyclist; it doesn’t seem fit the usual explanation of driving aggressively to feel faster. The Indiana pass could possibly be mostly done by drivers who like doing slipstream passes, where they close dangerously close to the car they are passing before moving over, trying to draft a little. Beside the normal danger of a drafting pass on open roads, it is ineffective when a car is passing a bike, because the car is almost entirely outside the cyclist’s slipstream. It seems more likely that the Indiana pass is the result of inattention, poor depth perception, and general unawareness. I don’t know what combination of these is the cause, but hopefully this post will contribute a little to stopping the Indiana pass. Remember to keep enough space between yourself and the other cars and cyclists that when the person in front of you makes an emergency stop, you will be able to avoid hitting them.

Notes:

• Check out my page on Safe driving around bicycles, including more on passing.
• The illustrations require a browser with SVG animation support. If the play button is invisible or doesn’t work, please upgrade.

• Put all your weight on the seat. As a bicyclist, I’m used to distributing my weight between the pedals and saddle, but this doesn’t work when first starting to unicycle. If you put too much pressure on the front pedal, the unicycle will shoot ahead of you, so you have to pedal softly and be able to press the rear pedal to control your speed. Putting all your weight on the seat makes it easier to pedal circles and control the unicycle. As you get better, you can put more weight on the pedals.
• Point your feet slightly down. The proper way to pedal a bike is with the pedal axle directly below the ball of your foot, typically holding your foot level. When initially learning to unicycle, I found it easier to point my foot slightly down, and to place the ball of my foot slightly in front of the pedal axle. This helps with learning to pedal smooth circles, which are necessary to get past the point where the cranks are vertical. Getting past this point was the hardest part of learning to ride. I’d feel OK riding while I had a fence or shoulder to grab, but as soon as I was out of range, I’d unintentionally stop one of my pedals at the bottom of the stroke, immediately stopping the unicycle, causing me to fall off. Switching to this awkward pedaling style helped me get past this point. As I get more comfortable on a unicycle, I’m moving back to the more efficient bicycle-style pedaling.
• Wear shinguards. I didn’t really need them, but they helped eliminate my paranoia about bear-trapping (hitting your shin with a pedal). With shinguards, I was relaxed, making learning easier.
• Focus on a distant point. On my bike, I can look anywhere, and still ride in a straight line. But, for the first couple hours of unicycling, I had to really stare at one point in the distance to keep my balance. I still can’t look around as much as I do on a bike, but this is rapidly improving.
• Breathe. Yeah, I know, this is obvious, but I kept forgetting to breathe. When I was first able to ride a little without holding onto something, I kept falling off after riding the same distance. I wasn’t quite sure why, then my brother noticed I was holding my breath. Apparently, I was nervous enough that I was clenching my abs and holding my breath. This limited my distance to what I could ride in one breath. Once I started consciously breathing, I could ride several times as far. Now I don’t think about breathing anymore.
• Wear a helmet. You probably won’t need it, but why take the risk? You already have a good bike helmet, right?

One more thing that helped me learn was having a unicyclist around. My brother has unicycled for six years, and he helped me for the first couple hours of unicycling.

Now, to improve my free-mount success rate and make it over that curb…

When I leave the lab early enough, I occasionally ride with the racing group from the local bike store. The usual route is to take the greenway out of town and do laps around the reservoir. This is a 60 kilometer ride plus 16 km per extra lap. I usually just try to stay with them as long as I can. The last ride I was able to go on, we took an alternate route that goes south 35 km to the nearest hill, then zigzags across it several times before heading back. The whole ride is 110 km or so. About 25 km from the end, my saddle started squeaking. Two kilometers from the end, one of the rails broke.

I’m glad it didn’t break until I was almost back. I upshifted and finished the ride standing. I’m not sure why it broke. The split is just behind the clamp on the seatpost. This is probably the point where a seat rail is most likely to break. The break caused a burr along the end of the saddle clamp. I filed it down, then polished it so that it won’t damage my next saddle. This was the first time I removed the stock seatpost from my Cannondale CAAD8 bicycle. I was surprised at how light the shaft is, but how heavy the clamp is. With the closest hill being 35 km away, a few extra grams doesn’t matter.

Fortunately, I have an identical saddle on my commuter bike that I can put on my road bike, and a different saddle for my commuter. It is odd that it broke, but I’m glad I wasn’t further from home or in traffic.

Links:

• News-Sentinel: Koehlinger Cycling a casualty of slow U.S. economy
• Journal Gazette: Cycling, fitness shop closes Economy ‘part of it’; ‘ambitious’ strategy, loss of deals factors