Hi all,
I got my first unicycle last Christmas, found this forum that day or
the next, posted a few times, read a few thousand posts, and learned a
ton from everyone here. By the end of February, I was able to ride
around my quarter-mile-or-so practice loop with only one stop, make
most of the 90-degree turns that I attempted, and often succeeded in
making greater-than-90-degree turns. Then a couple of things
happened.
First, we got into the wettest March on record here in the San
Francisco Bay Area. Here in San Jose, I think we had something like 26
or 27 rainy days in March. Those of you in the Pacific Northwest might
not have been daunted, but I'm a weather weenie, what can I say.
Second, I realized that my lower back problems had gotten considerably
worse since I'd started learning how to ride, and my knees had started
hurting as well. The rainy weather I could wait out, but I decided to
try to figure out my health problems.
Over the past six months, I've been to my doctor, an x-ray lab, a
couple of physical therapists, back to my doctor, a chiropractor, back
to my doctor, back to the x-ray lab, an MRI lab, and back to my doctor.
Fortunately, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with my spine
or hips, other than a little not-unexpected age-related wear and tear.
Unfortunately, I still have back pain. But it's getting better. It
seems that the two most important things that I learned in all of my
various visits were that, 1) core muscle strength is key in back
health, and critical when undertaking an activity like unicycling,
which depends a lot on balance, and 2) yoga can be quite beneficial in
stretching, and in developing said core muscle strength.
I doubt that I'll ever completely lose the back pain, but I'm hopeful
that I can substantially (50% - 90%) decrease it with continue
stretching and strengthening. Since I'm feeling better in general, I
decided to hop back on the unicycle and see what happened.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that, after six months, it only
took me about 10 minutes to get back to being able to ride a decent
distance and make some turns. I got back on a week later and was
pretty much back to where I left off six+ months ago. Woohoo! My plan
is to take the unicycle out no more then twice a week, and for no more
than an hour at a time, in the hopes that I'll be able to move forward
(slowly) without aggravating any medical conditions. If that works
well, hopefully I'll be able to ride more often by next Spring.
I haven't checked back on the board much over the past six months,
since I wasn't riding and didn't want to get too depressed about it,
and since I've also been pretty busy. Now I've got a question or two,
which I'll ask in more specific threads. I just wanted to pop in and
say hi, and that I look forward to learning more from all of you
again.
Cheers,
Rich
--
RichVoice
http://richonaunicycle.blogspot.com
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