Speed Stats

On my Coker, the fastest I've ever gone, according to my cycle computer, is 21 mph. That seemed really really fast. It was a speed I could only maintain for a short time because the hill was leveling out and because I was holding back a bit -- it's never good to go as fast as you can because then you can't speed up for a second if you suddenly lean a bit too far forward. The nice thing about a Coker is that the heavy wheel creates its own special 'flywheel' effect that keeps you pretty balanced. In other words, it wasn't too much work to get the uni up to the speed or to maintain that speed for a short time.

On my guni with the original hub, I once got it up to 22 mph. That's really really really fast. The difference is that on a guni, you create a wheel with a large 'effective' size but your pedals (and therefore your feet) are still pretty low to the ground. The bad news is that if you suddenly lurch forward (like if you hit a dip or a bump in the road), your feet have less time to get into position, and you have a pretty good chance of having a hard fall. In fact, I had a weird spill like that three years ago while testing Greg Harper's fixed-gear unicycle (a 24" uni that rode like a 36") called "uni.5." I was riding uni.5 uphill one day when I suddenly lost balance and leaned too far forward. Normally I'd have run out the UPD, but this time I found myself toppling to the ground. If that happened to me on the 29" guni (that rides like a 45" unicycle), I could find myself in a heap pretty fast.

With the new hub, I've only put in a relatively small number of miles: 40. With more practice on the guni, I should be hitting 20 mph on a downhill again soon. More importantly, I can maintain a higher rate on the guni than on the 36" Coker...at least on downhills and flats. Uphill or on bumpy roads, or riding in pedestrian or car traffic, the Coker wins easily.

The other thing I've noticed is that the guni feels like it has a lot of drag. That's because it's harder to get that wheel going due to the inertia of the higher gear. It's easy (but fairly slow) to ride it as a 29" uni in 1-to-1 gear, but when I shift into high gear, it's like swimming with flippers on: You can go really fast, but you have to put in a lot of muscle to do so.