Day 5

We have a short hallway in our house, so I thought, "Instead of sitting in a doorway, maybe I could use the hallway walls for support." So I did. I wobbled back and forth for several minutes, still feeling for balance. More wobbling, more balancing. I decided to try to pedal a stroke or two.

This proved to be unwise. Just past the small hallway, we have a small cabinet that holds CDs and whatnot. For the festive holiday season, Jenny had decorated the top of the cabinet as a "snowman convention," complete with a soft, squishy snowman, a snowman serving plate on a stand, various small snowmen bobbles, and the Swarovski crystal snowman and snowwoman that I'd given her on two different Christmases. When my unicycle decided to shoot out in front of me (I thought I heard an evil laugh, but I can't be sure), the tire nicked the edge of the cabinet just outside the hallway, and I heard things fall to the floor. Fortunately, the Swarovski snowpeople decided to just lie down and wait out the earthquake, and the only breakable snowman that fell to the floor miraculously stayed in one piece.

First lesson of the day: take it outside.

So I took it outside. I used a patio chair in the backyard for support. This particular chair isn't nearly as big as a door jamb, so it took some getting used to. My left shin took a lot of abuse, as I held onto the chair, stepped on the right pedal, and didn't get my left foot up and onto the left pedal quickly enough, allowing the pedal to hit my shin. But eventually I'd get on. And every time I tried to move at all, I'd start to fall over. At one point, I did fall over, and landed on my left side.

Second lesson of the day: don't carry a cell phone and a Swiss army knife in your pants pocket when doing something where falling over is likely. They're hard. When jammed into flesh, they don't compact. Fortunately, they both still work. Even more fortunately, my left thigh still works as well, though somewhat painfully at the moment.

I went into the garage and hacked off another inch or two of the seat post, since I still felt uncomfortable. I've since raised the seat back up a bit, based on advice from other unicyclists, and based on the fact that being lower felt better until I started to pedal, then it felt worse. I also grabbed a couple of pieces of PVC pipe that I had lying around to use as poles. They only helped marginally; I've since given up on that idea.

By this time, I'd registered on unicyclist.com and posted about my new toy and my experiences so far. I got many encouraging replies, and many good tips on learning. Two of the most important tips seem to be: 1. ride until you fall, not until you think you're going to fall, which just gets you used to bailing out instead of learning how to correct; and 2. keep your weight on the seat, not on the pedals.