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(How about that for the name of a sequel?)

This photo was me and my team at the end of our stage win on Day 4 of the Ride The Lobster race.  We were a scratch team having not met before arriving in Nova Scotia, and with a range of ability from Chuck (left), a scary unicycling machine and probably the fastest rider around at the moment; me (right), fairly fast but not quite up there with the best racers; and Geoff (centre) who was a good solid rider but new to big-wheeling with less spinning experience than many people here.  Saying this, we got within sight of a win on Day 2, after running in the lead for a while.  That pushed us to give everything to go like the clappers on Day 4 (Day 3 was a time-trial day) and get a stage win.  Wrestling back and forth with the other top teams - Geman Speeders, NZUNI, Personal Rollercoaster and Texicali (the eventual top four teams overall) was awesome, and somehow we got to the front somewhere mid-way through the day, and pedalled like crazy to keep hold of the lead.  In the end we kept a couple of minutes over the excellent riders of the Germans and New Zealanders - so we were pretty chuffed. :)

In the end we finished up holding 5th place, which was very cool (top five teams are represented above out of order - this was the very start of Day 2 - from left: Vince LeMay, Ken Looi, Me, Corbin Dunn and Jan Logermann).  It was an incredible and humbling experience all week to meet and ride with so many top riders, and to get blasted past by some amazingly strong athletes.  I got to meet many of the big names which I have been inspired by from a distance for years, and ride alongside the likes of Kris Holm, Ken Looi, Tony Melton, Nathan and Beau Hoover and many others.

Riding unicycles may be enough to make it a unique sport, you might think.   But really it is the spectacular sporting attitudes and comradere to be found at the highest level of competition.  Especially the Criterium - a ’round the block’ street race of six laps in the closed streets of Truro - which allowed for closer proximity to the other riders than we got on the long-distance team days.  It was the most highly charged buzz I’ve ever known around unicycling, and at the end of the faster of the three races, with all the other competitors, we just wanted to hug and hand-shake everyone else racing for such an awesome ten minutes of racing.  There’s nothing like starting 35 fast unicyclists in a bunch and letting them pelt around four tight corners and four short straights, leaning hard over on the corners and straining for acceleration up the straights.  That’s something to get the juices flowing.  Woooo!

There are far too many annecdotes and amusing stories to bore you with, so I’ll spare you them, but suffice it to say it was a week of such excitement, fun, friendship, challenge, hills, torrential rain, fame, humility, endless trees, open roads, sunshine, encouragement,  randomness, lobster, bananas, international accent-swapping and unicycle-swapping as I’ve ever known.  Definitely one week I’ll never want to forget.

Then I went to New York City.  More later…

This is the long-distance unicycle road race in Canada that I am going to.  100 unicyclists, five days of racing. Nova Scotia.  It’s going to be fun :)

You can watch the live GPS updates which the event should be producing via magical internet things on maps, from  Monday to Friday next week (16th - 20th June): www.ridethelobster.com/race/results.php

This is the official logo for the 15th Unicycling World Championships and Convention in New Zealand in 2010 (the spiky bit is a fern - the national symbol of NZ). It was also my first dabble in Illustrator, and it won me a free place at the convention. Woo!

Woo - I have done all of the essays, assignments, project work, revision, exams and last-minute cramming required to say: I’ve finished my degree!

As with most things with such a build up (like at least a couple of years thinking ‘OK, it would be silly to quit, it’ll be alright really, just get it done however frustrating it is’) it was a bit of an anti-climax.  Oh well, it is quite nice all the same.

I don’t have the crushing realisation that I will be leaving Aberystwyth for good though - because I’m not!  I’m going to be working here doing website things with a company called One Bright Space based in the Technium on the Marina.

Before that though, I have an action-packed summer of unicycling:

• Ride The Lobster - A five-day long distance road race (think Tour de France for unicyclists) with 100 of the world’s top distance riders.  I’m on team #78 called “Smile” (I was hoping to get sponsored by the ethical internet bank of the same name, but that didn’t quite happen).
  After the week of racing I’m going to make the most of my transatlantic flight* and go on a train adventure down to New York City and be a tourist for a week.
• Luxembourg to Liechtenstein - A 500 mile cycle tour between the two smallest European countries which begin with the letter ‘L’, hostelling and camping with some good friends old and new.
• UNICON 14 - Copenhagen, Denmark: the World unicycle convention and championships which happen every two years.  I’d describe it as the Olympics of unicycling - all the disciplines of one-wheeling from synchronised freestyle dance routines to trials stunts to track racing to off-road and long-distance racing (that’s what I’m entering, and hoping to bag a bit of bling, if I’m lucky).

I’ve been fortunate enough to be awarded a travel bursary from the University’s ‘Tithe and Capitular’ fund which will cover the transport for the two big competitions.

* Hello, yes - I know I’m a ‘greenie’ type who can happily tell you about how damaging climate change is and how flying contributes so much to it.  It really is serious, and we - the rich - contribute way, way more than our fair share to the problem; especially unjust as we are not the ones whose houses easily collapse in flooding or whose subsistance-level farms grow less and less. So…

A return flight to North America will emit about 1.3 tonnes of CO2 per person (me).  I think I will ‘offset’ this by paying a trifling £11.14 to ClimateCare who invest in carbon reduction projects.  But really that’s a far less convincing thing than actually not polluting in the first place.  For excuses I could say that because I don’t drive a car around (12000 miles/year in a small car emits about 3 tonnes), or eat much meat, I already have a ‘footprint’ of only a couple of tonnes, compared to the UK average of 10.

That really doesn’t ‘allow’ me to go and pollute more than I can avoid, but at least it makes me feel a bit better about it.  My logic is that this is the biggest unicyle racing event ever done, and it is a wonderful thing to have people from across the world getting together for something like this - it’s not just a random urge for an exotic holiday, honest.

For the other two European trips I’m doing this summer I’ve chosen to go by train (figures vary, but it’s at least a third less carbon-tastic than flying the equivalent journeys).  It won’t cost much more, and we’ll see much more of the places we’re going to as well.  Trains are cool.

There we are.  Hopefully that wasn’t too much in the way of liberal hang-wringing for you.

Just the place name is enough to justify visiting it. Eisteddfa Gurig is 17 miles from Aberystwyth on the A44, and is about 420 metres above sea level. Just about high enough to still have the random snow of Sunday morning unmelted by 3pm. I made a quick snowball (not quite as fun when there’s no-one to throw them at), and headed back.

But turn left towards Devil’s Bridge from the A44 and you quickly end up in the wild, hilly and bogglingly beautiful countryside. I’ve unicycled thousands of miles around in Mid-Wales and never been this way… why?! Once I got to Devil’s Bridge there was a hairpin bend left and a small road going steadily uphill. As the previous experiment worked out so well, I tried this new road too. It was a pretty enjoyable hill, and not quite too steep to be painful even with my short 102mm cranks (they’re best for going fast on flats or gentle hills, but I’m determined to make my legs accept them as a ‘go anywhere’ gear size).

At the top of this climb the rather modest reward is The Arch. A very Welsh monument - it seems to be a slate, erm, arch. Like the end of a barn which someone gave up on building when they realised that it is up a hill miles from anywhere. But now it has picnic benches and public toilets, appropriate to its fame.

This is the domain of the sheep. There are lots of little ones frolicking around, which is always nice. A farmer on a quadbike passed me with one of these lambs held under his arm. Quite touching, assuming that it really was a farmer… and not a (fairly unambitious) sheep-rustler.

Mostly downhill from here though. The weather also went downhill though. The snow which I had gone to find on a sunny, fine afternoon started driving into my ears and eyes. It is limited how much fun one can have when one can barely see the road and one’s face is numb. But it’s all good wholesome fresh air.

The sun did come out intermittently though, and I got back, legs a bit like jelly, and in time to not miss the whole evening service at church. 46 miles, 4 hours, 800M climbing. Nice afternoon.

I leave you with this little riddle near Pontrhydygroes.  Eggs. Or No Eggs?

The conspiring factors of having stupid amounts to do on final-year university work and my inability to make myself do it when I should are making me think more than usual about The Big One (my emphasis). How about this for a 20 000 mile jaunt: through Europe, Asia, Australasia, South America, Africa and Europe again to finish.

Popping in on Timbuktu along the way.

On a unicycle. Carrying all I need to survive.

All I need now is a good, wholesome, moral/ethical reason why taking over a year on an extended holiday jolly is somehow a self-sacrifice and does more good to the lives of others than not doing it. That and money, time and supportive people. Oh well.  I’ll write a book about it, with pretty pictures - how’s that?

P.S. True connoisseurs of April Fool’s Day will know that pranks should not be made after noon. So this isn’t one. As on the previous 23 times in my life I didn’t manage to think of anything cunning to do today.

For those not familiar with bike-geek stuff, this is not how a pedal is meant to look.The spiky bit on the top is meant to be bolted to the sole of your shoe. Then you can twist your shoe and it becomes unclipped from the pedal.

But when one of the bolts fails then it becomes impossible to twist the cleat and your shoe is fixed pretty securely to the pedal, however you wiggle it.

Error.

Luckily it was only a few miles away from home.

P.S. Using clip-in (also misleadingly called “clipless”) pedals on a unicycle is ‘a power for the hills’ and generally a pretty cool thing. Why I didn’t try this longer ago I don’t know. But it has risks.

When the news is of ‘Floods! Argh!’ getting wet up to the ankles isn’t much to claim. But then my ankles do start half a metre of the ground riding like this.

Minor Admission: I could only ride a couple of metres like this - it quickly becomes a case of wading at knee-depth with numb feet. But worth going back in to get a decent photo! :)

This should not shock those who know me and know that I like cycling.  But it may shock those who know that my usual number of wheels is one, and that to defect to a ‘normal’ bike is almost heresy.

Don’t panic, I still love unicycling, and have masses of it planned for the next few months.  But I do also have a basic bike which has not been in regular use since I came to Aberystwyth, and now that I have it here I am learning how nice it is to be able to shove a bunch of stuff on the back, to shift down to a granny-gear going up Penglais hill and still be able to breathe at the top, and to cruise down hills however fast you like.  You can’t do those things on one wheel.

Bikes are fun.  There, I said it.

I just saw on the BBC News an article about a road cyclist who has been killed on the A82 in Scotland, near Fort William.

This makes me rather sad. Different things affect people in different ways. Hearing about cyclists being killed in accidents on the road is something which makes me most sad by reading it in the news.

I had never heard of this man before now. He was apparently a very promising racer, having broken Graeme Obree’s 10 mile record time and the won the British time trial Circuit among other titles. He was 34 and had a wife and two young daughters.

There aren’t any details of the accident, beyond that it involved a van. Motor vehicles have their uses, but they do also make the roads they share with cyclists potentially dangerous for the latter (which, of course, is a reason to do more cycling on roads and less driving on them - not to stop cycling on roads). Terrible events like this make that so sad.

The photo above was from our Land’s End to John o’Groats cycle tour in 2005, showing me unicycling on the same A82, near Glencoe south of Fort William. In much of rural Scotland there is only one road going between places, so there is no choice but to cycle on some busy ones.

Edit: I realise that this photo doesn’t illustrate how busy it can be - it was a well-timed Jonathan Greenaway photograph to show pretty things like mountains more than cars.