Normally you would just practice the events that are being offered. This
works well with track races, artistic events, basketball and hockey.
It's harder to do for Trials and MUni, which are going to be very
different from year to year.
For Trials, probably the best thing you can do is build your own
obstacles and practice on them. Work on increasing your jump height, gap
width, and ability to ride skinnies, both level and slanted.
For MUni, ride rough terrain, fast. Expect a cross country race to be in
the range of roughly 1.5 - 3 miles. See how fast you can cover that
distance on various trails. Remember, dismounts will slow you down, so
the highest possible speed is not necessarily the answer.
For Uphill racing, practice riding up hills of various length and
steepness. We don't know what the course will be yet. For last year's
NAUCC, we didn't know until the day of the event.
For Downhill, same thing. Course is unknown, and details may change.
In addition, bug the organizers to provide course information when it
becomes available. I think they finally have a location for this year,
but I don't think the trails will be worked out until the snow melts.
Next year is an even bigger question mark, as I don't know for sure if
it will be in Illinois (Unicycle Uni-Versity) or elsewhere. Expect
Illinois to be relatively flat.
Plus, consider the political angle. MUni and Trials are growing fast,
but they are not *required* events at USA or IUF competitions. This
needs to change, or at least the list of required events needs to be
reduced to make time. Everybody make a lot of noise about this so you
get heard, and a change in the rules gets addressed. MUni and Trials are
going to surpass track and artistic in numbers of participants, if they
haven't already.
--
johnfoss - Home of the Garage Page
John Foss, the Uni-Cyclone
"jfoss" at "unicycling.com"
www.unicycling.com
"Hey, could I have some of that spinach? I need to get this pork rind
taste out of my mouth." -- Ryan Atkins to Kris Holm, on the way back
from Moab after sampling some of my pork rinds. They grossed out the
whole van!
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