Day 3

Several years ago, I got some money for my birthday, and I bought something I'd been wanting to get for quite a while: a set of rollers for my bike, so that I could ride inside in inclement weather (what can I say, I'm not an extreme cyclist, if it's below 70 and cloudy I'd rather be inside). So I got a set of Performance rollers.

Setting up the rollers in a doorway is also a tip for learning how to use rollers, but I figured, "I can ride a bike," so I just set them up in the living room. The first time I got on, I said, "Oh, this is--" and promptly fell over.

I decided to try sitting on my unicycle on my rollers, so that I could actually turn the pedals. In a doorway, thank you very much. So I did. It still felt very weird, but I was starting to see how it might be possible to actually ride the thing. Someday. Maybe in 2007. During the 10-15 minutes that I was sitting on the thing, I think I had my hands off of the door jamb for a total of about 3.2 seconds. But what 3.2 seconds! The balance! The freedom! The possibility of falling over! Hands back on the jamb.

The seat felt too high, but the seat-post was as far down as it would go, so I called my brother-in-law to ask him if I should get a shorter seat post, or if it wouldn't damage the integrity of the seat post if I just hacked off a couple of inches. He didn't think that would be a problem, so out came the hacksaw. I knew I'd still be able to raise the seat back up to the original height, since I was only taking off a couple of inches.