100-Mile Backcountry Ride on a Unicycle? No Problem<\/a>. For the last five years, the loons up in Fairbanks have been doing the White Mountains 100, “a ultra-marathon endurance race staged in Interior Alaska.” It is open to “skiers, cyclists and runners.” And it’s hard: in addition to the 100 mile course, it involves going up 7,400 feet elevation and then back down. So the people who do it are the kind of people I like to think of as crazy.<\/p>\nBut we need a different word for Elliot Wilson. On his birthday last year, he decided to learn to ride a unicycle. Because who doesn’t think “unicycle” when Fairbanks comes up in conversation? Later, when he got to compete in the White Mountains race, he thought it would be cool to do it on his new unicycle. But at that point, he could not ride it more than a quart mile without falling off. So, to make what is a long story including a trip to India short, he perfected his technique and won the race. Just kidding! He came in 43rd place out of 65 with a time of 19 hours. But that’s still five and a quarter miles per hour, which is a hell of a lot better than I could probably do on a two-wheeled contraption.<\/p>\n
Unlike me, Wilson is a real American. He said, “I set out to do this to prove to myself that one can learn something quickly if one puts their mind to it.” I think that’s nonsense, and not just because he uses three pronouns in the same sentence. In order to agree with that sentence, I’d have to laden it down with so many caveats that it would be unrecognizable. Could I have done what he did? No. Could he have mastered Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics<\/a><\/i> in six months? Maybe, but I’ve never known anyone to do it. Most people (Smart<\/i> people!) find they can’t do it after a lifetime.<\/p>\nBut it’s still awful cool that this strange young man decided to race a unicycle through the frozen mountains for no particular reason. It is very American. And I mean that in the best sense of the word. Because Americans are at their best when they let fly with their weird. America is, above all, the land of freaks and the home of the bizarre. Play ball!<\/p>\n
![\"Elliot](\"http:\/\/franklycurious.com\/media\/1\/20140403-elliotwilson.jpg\" "\\"Elliot")
I’m not one for inspirational stories. In fact, I hate them. It’s really because I grew up in the United States. Now, for most people, this would mean that I would have grown up to believe in the greatest American myth: the will to success. This is the idea that you can do anything if you try hard enough. This is just nonsense. And it is pernicious nonsense because the flip side of it is that if you fail at something it is just because you didn’t try hard enough. The best some people can hope for is just to be mediocre. Like me on the guitar: I’m not bad but there is no way that I ever would have been great. Some people play guitar for 10,000 hours and become Duane Allman. Others do the same thing and become me. It is what it is.<\/p>\n