craigslist

Re-learning to unicycle

Jason Tucker

May 24, 2009 — 3 min read

Back when I was a kid I did all sorts of things to keep myself entertained, here’s a quick list:

BMX Bikes
Mountain Bikes
Pogo Sticks
Scooters
Rollerblades
Skateboards
Unicycle

Unicycle?? Really? Tell me more? Somehow in my preteens we acquired a unicycle. It was a Schwinn and it was a pain in the.. well, inner legs to be quite honest. The seat HURT and I mean HURT a bunch, I’d have rashes and bruises in my inner thigh near my groin area due to how crappy this seat was made. It was as if they took the back of 2 Schwinn seats and smashed the fronts together to retrofit this seat. I bent the areas that hurt me as much as I could but it still hurt me quite a bit. I learned to ride the thing by holding onto my closed garage door and ride back and forth. Later I learned to free mount and then I got a bit into jumping bit not much. The unicycle was pretty hard to work on and I didn’t have the proper tools or know how to fix it. Changing the tire was a pain in the butt since none of my friends or I knew how to take the wheel off.

Fast forward 15-20 years later and I’m watching the morning news recently and some guy named Terry “UniGeezer” Peterson was on KTLA morning news showing off his impressive skills [Youtube vids] … and modern Unicycle. After seeing the program I was hooked and started researching out the perfect starter unicycle for my height and weight. The one thing that made me happy was that they redid the seat and that the technology was there to make a unicycle more enjoyable to ride. I searched Craigslist and ebay and all sorts of places to see what the correct one would be for me to get back into the swing of things with a unicycle. I knew I wanted a 24″ Torker LX since the seats are good and they are built tough enough for my price point. I didn’t want to spend a fortune on something I may just give up on 10 mins after failing to ride the damn thing. Me being a cheap bastard I looked and looked and looked and had a hard time finding one for under $100 until I found one on Craigslist stating it was a 24″ Torker LX for $65 and the current owner didn’t know how to ride it and gave up. She said they had one other person interested and “if the hippy doesn’t come through we’ll call you and you can buy it from us”. Days went by and nothing, no call or email. I event emailed them to inquire on the status and nothing. Out of the blue I get an email saying if I want it I can come pick it up in Hollywood. So I headed there located the building and had a hell of a time finding parking. Once I arrived the persons mom I was buying from met me at the elevator with the unicycle. I looked it over and and was pretty happy except that I noticed it was a CX and not a LX it also lacked the handle on the seat I wanted too. I tried it out and thought, for $65 bucks its worth buying to mess with. I took it home and gave it a go and MAN did my legs hurt after doing just 30 minutes of riding.

Memorial day weekend I took the unicycle to the park with Jessalyn and we rode around the tennis court. I on the uni and Jess on her scooter. We raced around the tennis court until she was too tired to continue so we went home and she took a nap. I went out front and tried to free mount the unicycle without the assistance of any walls or other objects to help me I gave up after 45 sweaty minutes not able to mount the uni. We had a bday party to attend and Jen suggested I bring the unicycle since the kids grandparents might get a kick out of me attempting to ride the thing. I think I did quite well so we recorded a bit of video showing my progress. I also talked about me picking up unicycling again on the latest GeekFit Podcast.