02009 New Year's Resolution #28: Add to My Circus Arts Repertoire

A few years ago, I received a unicycle as a birthday present from Libbets. She knew that I juggle and I guess she figured this would get me that much closer to running off and joining the circus. I don't think that's really going to happen, and I don't have any real aspirations of becoming a clown or any other sort of professional or semi-professional entertainer. I don't even seriously hope to ever be able to juggle while riding on a unicycle. However, I do really want to learn to ride my unicycle. I have not gotten around to putting in the effort yet, but that's going to change, with my 28th New Year's Resolution of 02009:


I resolve that I will learn to ride a unicycle by this time next year.

My goal is to be able to cleanly, confidently, and comfortably mount and dismount without aid of people or other supporting devices; to ride in a controlled manner, turn in either direction, and maintain my balance without feeling like I'm at constant risk of losing my balance. I am not aiming to do any super fancy tricks. I'm not aiming to go up or down stairs, to ride off-road, to do jumps, etc. I just want to be a proficient basic unicyclist.

Another New Adventure

Let's add to the list of "things I know, from experience, to be difficult": Learning how to ride a unicycle.

As my big birthday present this year, I got a brand new unicycle. We assembled it, disassembled it, cut a few inches from the the seat post, and reassembled it so that it's the proper height for me. That was almost 20 days ago.

Since then, I have tried practicing, or practiced trying, or just spent some time on most days trying to make some incremental progress towards being able to ride the thing. As it turns out, it's a fairly exhausting process. While I haven't been timing my sessions, I think it's safe to say that I don't likely manage to put in more than about 10-15 minutes of practice in any given day. I can say with a fair degree of confidence that I am doing better than when I started. I feel even more confident in saying that I'm really not very far along at all.

I'll get there eventually. But for now, it's a slow process and I'm still leading up to whatever I will consider to be my first milestone.

I'm open to advice from anyone who's been through it. I'm also open to words of encouragement from anyone who wishes me well. In the meantime, for anyone who wants to see photos of me riding, you'll just have to wait.

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Oh, and to the gentleman who got my campaign business card today as I was leaving the book store for lunch, you have my apologies for the scotch tape. I didn't have a clean card on me, so I pulled that one from the face of my locker.