Day 1

First mistake: playing unicycle basketball the night before. Unicycle basketball has a lot in common with Russian roulette. It is a bit of an adrenaline rush, but you know someone is going to get hurt soon. Lots of unplanned dismounts. On one of which, I landed hard on my knee.

Second mistake: slept in and wasn't ready. By the time I got everything ready and got to my ride start point, it was 10am. I was hoping to take it slow, but half the day was already gone. In truth, at this point I hadn't really committed to making a qualifying attempt. My plan was to do a practice ride, and if at 20 miles or so, I still felt good, then I would go for it.

My uni is a 10 year old coker (coker is the name of the 36" tire) with all original parts, including the the tire and tube. I don't have a spare tire, so I hope it lasts. Correction: I did recently replace the seat with a castoff from a fellow local coker rider, so the uni wasn't totally original. Anyway I start my ride, get about 100 yards when I realize my knee hurts from last night's fall. But it doesn't hurt much, so I keep going hoping it will work itself out.

The ride goes pretty well. The day turned out pretty good even though a chance of rain was predicted. It was a bit gusty. I didn't think much of it until someone I passed commented that I must have guts to "ride in this wind". Looking on the positive, I figure "this wind" gave me some wiggle room for my subjective score if I needed it.

One of the reasons for the late start was that I gave my unicycle a tuneup, tightening some bolts that I hadn't touched in years. I had been having some trouble with my left crank-arm coming loose. The tuneup paid off, my uni rode better than it had in years. In retrospect though, I really should have also tightened the other (right) crank-arm. I was about 5 miles from my car (which had the needed tool) when the crank-arm started coming loose. Fortunately I made it to the car and did a quick tightening.

I started out the day riding about at about 10 mph. By the end of the day I was only doing 7.5 mph. I kept cursing my fancy GPS. I swear it lies. I know I went farther and faster than it claimed. I finished just at sunset. Arizona sunsets are usually darn nice. This one wasn't spectacular, but it was very pretty with the sun setting over the Tempe Town Lake and the Salt River (which had water in it, a rarity for Arizona).

As I write this, I am a bit nervous. My first fear is that I calculated something wrong and still needed some more points. Nope, it checks to 125 (even without the wind factor). That means I don't have to jump back on my uni and take a spin around the block to make the 125 points requirement. But I am still very nervous about tomorrow. My legs are sore now, how will they be in the morning? Can I do this again? And the chance of rain is higher for tomorrow. The rain modifier is nice, but I would rather not get wet. If you are reading this, then I made it, and my above prose will not suffer from my delete key.

Day 2

The weatherman predicted rain, and we got it pretty hard. But by morning the rains had stopped. Other than puddles, I could hardly have asked for a better day.

Day 2 of my ride really started almost as soon as day 1's ride ended. I had no idea how sore I would be or if my legs could take a second day of this. For that reason I kept drinking fluids, stretching my leg muscles as well as giving them massages. All of these things are supposed to stop the buildup of lactic acid or something which in turn means less pain. I don't know if it worked, but my leg muscles didn't feel too bad.

Unfortunately, none of that decreases the fact that my knee hurt. My knee probably needed a week's rest from the uni basketball injury, not a 50+ mile ride. The knee didn't hurt much if I didn't put much pressure on it. Normal riding was fine. Uphills, downhills, mounting and dismounts were, however, painful. It also hurt to ride very fast. But I did get an earlier start (8:30am) so I resigned myself to taking it slow with lots of rest stops.

For those who aren't aware of the glamorous world of unicycle riding, let me share a few incidents of the day's ride. Twice I had cars full of young women scream "I love you" out their car windows. Also on my route two more gals were doing a swimsuit (bikini) photo shoot. They stopped long enough to cheer me on. Speaking of cheering, in another area I passed another photo shoot, this one of the local university's (Go Arizona State!) cheerleaders and "Sparky" our mascot.

The route I took both today and yesterday is a long section of city parks that have good interconnecting bike trails. The route was basically around Tempe Town Lake and up Indian Bend Wash. Let me explain those terms for anyone not used to the desert where I live. The "lake" is really a section of the Salt River. The river rarely flows, but they cleverly put a dam both upstream and downstream so that we have a "lake". Pretty cool, really. There are always people sculling and/or rowing crews training on the lake. A "wash" is what we call a dry creek bed. These things can be dangerous after a rain, (this rain wasn't that large). Again the city got clever and turned it into one long park with a bike route. The nice part about this is that for the most part I never had to worry much about road traffic.

The highlight of both days was lunch. Athena (my wife) came to bring me lunch and offer encouragement. The joys of a picnic by the lake with someone you like is (as the credit card ad says) priceless. The low point was that I really wasn't ready for this yet. I don't know how much of my problems were caused by the knee injury. Regardless, I know my seat got way too sore. The legs did well, but because of the knee I went much slower and took more breaks than I had anticipated.

By the end of the second day, I was certainly "one tired guy" (to use that great line). I didn't really notice it too much but it showed by the fact that once toward the end of the day, it took me 6 attempts to mount my unicycle. But I did get up on my first attempt for the last stretch, and was still riding at about 8mph, which was my cruising speed all day long.

Day two ended much as the first day did, with a beautiful sunset over the lake and still flowing Salt River. It really was a fitting end. I got to ride off into the sunset -- well almost.