 I learned to ride my first unicycle when I was 9 years old. After going to the Ringling Bros and Barnum Bailey Circus and seeing unicyclist’s doing their act, I immediately said to myself, “I can do that” and turned to my mother and said, “I need a unicycle“. The problem was when I finally convinced her to buy me one, I had to convince myself that I would be able to learn to ride it. It was the middle of winter, so I went down to the laundry room and spent hours and days trying to sit on the thing. After many hours later, I finally started to get the hang of it. By now it was warmer outside so I started working off of the basketball pole in the driveway. Determined not to give up, many hours and days later I was up and riding through the neighborhood. Now the real fun began, I taught my brother Jason and five other friends how to ride by removing all the pain and trial and error from my experience. Suddenly, we were all playing every sport possible on our unicycles (even though we didn’t like the sport off the uni) hockey, basketball, frisbee and having a catch with the football or baseball (very fun). From that point on every where I went, I brought my unicycle, the best of which was sleep away camp. Not only was sleep away camp my best experience ever, unicycling around the camp was the most fun of all. During the school year, I was able to convince my mother to let Jason, my friend Jeff and I to ride our unicycles approximately four miles each way to school. If only unicycling in college was as cool then as it is now, I never would have taken the break. Ten years ago when I was unfortunately reminded about the importance of good health, I was diagnosed with crohn’s disease and if I didn’t find a way to keep it at bay, I would've wound up with another Surgery (intestinal resection) and more unhappy day’s ahead. So, my wife Renie listened to me say one day that I would love to ride a unicycle again and be able to ride with my dog for exercise. Renie quickly got to work and found a unicycle for me. I jumped right on like I never got off, rode away and realized that this is the most fun I could have while exercising. After making unicycling part of my regular exercise routine, I was able to get rid of the 21 pills I was taking daily to keep the disease at bay. That put my mind to work, why aren’t there more unicyclist’s in the country? I found a few reasons, for 1, No one ever thought they posessed the ability to learn to ride a unicycle, and 2, no one knew of a place to buy or learn how to ride one, and 3, there wasn't a training device similar to a bicycle with training wheels to help get a new rider accustomed with the basics of riding a unicycle. So, I came up with the patent pending Uni-Trainer (unicycle training device), After running actual focus groups I found that with the proper training device and instruction, the learning curve could be reduced from 10-20hrs to 3-6 hrs. |
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