Unicycle articles (but wait there's more...)

This is from the "'Mammoth times' (http://tinyurl.com/4z3gua)". (Scroll
down for pic and caption.) It's a kind of "teaser" photo, and the
actual writeup comes out in their newspaper and online next Thursday,
9/25/08.

28682


+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Filename: unicycle.jpg |
|Download: http://www.unicyclist.com/attachment/28682 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

--
MuniAddict

'UniGeezer.com' (http://unigeezer.com/)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MuniAddict's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/12920
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

Whered you get the shirt Terry?


--
Michaelgoround
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michaelgoround's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/17218
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

Michaelgoround wrote:
Whered you get the shirt Terry?

CMW '06.


--
MuniAddict

'UniGeezer.com' (http://unigeezer.com/)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MuniAddict's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/12920
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

MuniAddict wrote:
CMW '06.


Tight I'm gonna have to get a shirt like that made for me, I really
like it. Nice pic BTW. To bad they didn't do much besides that.


--
Michaelgoround
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michaelgoround's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/17218
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

Michaelgoround wrote:
Tight I'm gonna have to get a shirt like that made for me, I really like
it. Nice pic BTW. To bad they didn't do much besides that.

Well that's just a "teaser" pic. The actual full article comes out next
Thursday, 9/25/08 in both newspaper and online. Plus, I have a
full-page write up coming in the Orange County register about a week
after that! There will be at least 4-5 large color photos and writeup
covering an entire page top to bottom! That should be cool I mentioned
this website so hopefully it will be in there too!


--
MuniAddict

'UniGeezer.com' (http://unigeezer.com/)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MuniAddict's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/12920
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

UNICYCLE: TEEN COMMUTES AROUND AREA ON ONE WHEEL
MELISSA NAVAS; The Oregonian
18 September 2008
The Oregonian
© 2008 Oregonian Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

SUMMARY: Once-lonely unicyclists find more folks riding the
contraptions,

commuting, mountain unicycling, even playing polo atop them

Teen commutes

around area

on one wheel

It's a whole new uni-verse

MELISSA NAVAS

A fierce polo game is being waged at Alberta Park, the click-clack of
mallets echoing as players smack a red, golf-sized ball. Through the
trees, the setting summer sun spotlights hundreds of bugs swarming over
the fenced-in tennis court.

This is no everyday polo game, and the 25 players aren't on horses.

They ride unicycles. Yes, those one-wheeled circus contraptions.

Passers-by stare and point --a common reaction, the players say. One
observer lets his dog walk him as he slows to watch the game.

Inside the court, the unicycle polo players swear, purposefully try to
tip one another over and ram full-speed into the fence. Unicycles are
everyday modes of transportation for this group of riders.

In a city that caters to bicycles, unicyclists are carving out their
path. They ride to suit-and-tie jobs, mountain unicycle, participate in
events such as Bridge Pedal and spend hours mastering new tricks.

An emerging sport is upon us.

* I had only seen a unicycle up close one or two times but never hopped
on one. I already know it's going to be tough. And here I am in a
restricting work shirt and shin-exposing capris, sure that I'm dressed
wrong. Now's as good a time as any, though.

* Across town in West Slope, Madison Johnston plugs in daily to a world
of unicyclists. It can be a lonely sport, so he wants to bring riders
together any way he can.

The 17-year-old practically lives on www.unicyclist.com, a forum that
allows him to chat with nearly 18,000 members worldwide. And, boy, does
he chat. He's known as "Ducttape" and has the fourth-most posts,
according to the Web site.

His unicycle obsession began four years ago while he flipped through a
book. He saw a photo of stilts and thought it would be fun to build a
pair. After balancing those, he searched for the next challenge.

"Unicycling seemed like the next step," Johnston says.

One riding friend is Philip Walborn, 19, of Salem who only recently
taught himself from Web sites.

"When you ride by yourself, which happens a lot," Walborn says, "it can
get kind of boring."

Johnston likes to get around town by unicycle. He commutes to school in
Northeast Portland and to get to a Boy Scout camp this summer, he split
riding and taking the MAX to Hillsboro. He's also developed a list of
responses to people's predictable remarks.

"Where's the other wheel?"

I could only afford the first half, the other is on layaway.

Other times people just hum the circus song.

"It gets old after a while," Johnston says. "I can almost always have a
reply to it. It tends to be a good conversation starter."

* Portland resident Kathy Thielen, who first rode as a child, tells me
to tilt the unicycle toward my body 45-degrees so the seat is between
my legs. Local riders call her Bear Claw, after a unicycle accident
left gnarly gashes on her shin. One pedal is nearly horizontal as I
thrust myself onto the unicycle. To make it upright, I push the pedal
forward until the other one rounds to the top and I rest my other foot
on it. Here's where the balance game begins.

* As a sport, unicycling is a baby.

Like skateboarding or snowboarding, people view it skeptically, says
Kris Holm, an experienced mountain unicyclist in Vancouver, B.C., who
founded his own line of unicycles and gear in 1998.

Holm says Portland is perfect for unicycling because of the area's
rugged landscapes and the weird image it likes to cultivate.

"The challenge is not the sport or the differences of the sport, it's
the perception of it," Holm says. Unicycling would flourish anyplace
where people accept something new, he adds.

Oregon's terrain helps.

"The gorge is incredible riding," he says. "It's sort of got the right
combination."

Part of a unicycle's appeal is that it's simple, Holm says.

"I'm really attracted to the unicycle because I'm kind of a minimalist
with the sport," Holm says. "I like the idea that I can do more with
less."

* Imagine a dotted line dividing your body at the waist. While on the
unicycle, my upper body wants to go one way while the lower part drifts
the opposite direction. My fingers clench the fence next to me for
balance as I mostly stay in place. Trying to pedal forward only makes
it worse; that's when the whole thing feels like it will fly out from
under me.

* One Christmas when Ben Schoenberg was 10, his wish list included a
unicycle. He got one. "A toy version with spindly, little crank arms
and quite difficult to ride," he recalls.

He rode around his Southeast Portland neighborhood and remembers not
knowing any other riders. But things changed, he said, when he enrolled
at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the early 1990s.

He found a juggling club and began hanging out in a gymnasium with
students who did freestyle riding with stunts and tricks.

Today, he runs Serious Juggling, a small, Northeast Portland storefront
stocked with mostly juggling equipment and unicycles. The unicycle's
ease makes it appealing, Schoenberg says.

"There's a simplicity to it, an economy of parts that have a certain
aesthetic to it. If I take one to the bank or post office I can even
cycle over, pick it up with one hand and open the door with another."

In 1994, he started a mail-order business that included selling
unicycles. Three years later, he opened his first shop. Through the
years he's seen unicycle's popularity grow among all age and types,
including physical education teachers who add balance training on
unicycles to classes. And with unicycle DVDs and video sharing of
tricks on YouTube, "you have a generation of young unicyclists
improving and one-upping each other."

* It's been about 10 minutes, and I've moved inches. Maybe four. Though
I'm comfortable on bikes, this floaty feeling isn't the same. One slight
jilt of my arms or hips changes the direction of the unicycle, and I
can't figure out how to control it. I hop off and promise Bear Claw
I'll ride longer next time, because there will be one.

* It took a personal ad for Lauren Pedersen to find the unicycler she
had spotted. She wanted to learn how to ride one. He invited her to
unicycle polo to test one out and in July, she bought her first
unicycle.

"One day I'll get good, and eventually I'll have a fleet of them,"
Pedersen says, "like all of the bicycles at my house."

It's a Thursday polo game, and Pedersen is ready to practice. Amid the
click-clack of mallets, she avoids bodies and unicycles crushing each
other, and stays aboard. She clasps the fence as she wheels around the
court.

Riders compliment her newbie progress. She tilts off using her leg to
prevent her from falling.

Everyone should try it, she says.

"Just jump on it and try it out, and try it again when you fall down,"
Pedersen says. "That's pretty much it."

Melissa Navas: 503-294-5959;


--
JJuggle

Raphael Lasar - Matawan, NJ

On a steel horse I ride.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
JJuggle's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/24
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com

'Flying high under I-5 at the new mountain bike park'
(http://tinyurl.com/3s3ftr)
By Mike McQuaide

Special to The Seattle Times

Bellingham, where I live, is the home of Galbraith Mountain,
Northwest-renowned for its too-many-to-count miles and miles of
winding, twisting single-track bike trails. Simply put: To mountain
bikers, Galbraith is arguably the be-all and end-all of Western
Washington fat-tire riding.

So it was with a bit of patronizing condescension that I headed south
to the grand opening of Seattle's I-5 Colonnade mountain bike skills
park (all two acres of it, huh), which bills itself as the first ever
urban mountain-bike park. I was like someone whose usual Sunday ritual
is mass at Chartres Cathedral who decides to visit a tiny chapel in the
country. "Oh how quaint; let's go see the little bike park."

Was I ever in for a surprise. Colonnade blew my mind!

First of all, the location is pretty freaky — it's directly beneath
Interstate 5 between Eastlake and Capitol Hill. (And thus, mostly
protected from Seattle's yearlong rainy season.) Second, the variety of
riding that one can do here is staggering.

...

"It's incredible to have something like this in the city," says *Dan
Heaton, a 26-year-old mountain unicyclist*, taking a break from
unicycling the log-lined cobblestones of the Limestone Loop. (Heaton is
the mountain unicyclist currently featured in a Columbia Sportswear TV
commercial.)

...


--
UniBrier

Steve

Hop Drop & Roll

“If something is to hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just
stick that guitar in the closet next to your
shortwave radio, your karate outfit and your unicycle and we'll go
inside and watch TV.” – Homer
------------------------------------------------------------------------
UniBrier's Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/1404
View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/22148


Posted Via Usenet.com Premium Usenet Newsgroup Services
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usenet.com