By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor
Torrance resident, Terry Peterson, is known as the “Unigeezer” but he doesn’t look a day older than 45. Flattered by the compliments, he never says 60 is the new 40 however.
If you ask him how he does it, you’ll quickly learn that it’s because he found the fountain of youth… sort of.
“Unicycling is my fountain of youth,” he said. “It pretty much saved my life.”
He recalled passing a bike shop on his way to the beach as a child and wondered aloud about what looked like a bicycle-half hanging upside down on a wall. He went inside and inquired about the half-bike and if he could try it. The bike merchant took it down for him. His parents ultimately bought the unicycle for him.
“Unicycles were little more than novelty back then,” Peterson said. “I had no inkling, no clue that it would become an actual sport decades later.”
After a couple of years, he had learned all he could about unicycles. He broke spokes and bent rims going down hills and jumping off of curbs. He said his parents got tired of buying him new unicycles all the time, so they bought him a Schwinn Stingray bicycle instead. Forty years would passed before he picked up a unicycle again.
Peterson is a piano tuner by trade. He has never married and he has no children. The work of a piano tuner is a sedentary one, but he enjoyed it. Peterson described a period during which he was afflicted by a deep depression, some would have called it a midlife crisis, but he wouldn’t. In fact, Peterson doesn’t speak much about this period of his life at all, except to say that he was overweight and unhappy with his life up to that point. Rather than dwell on his feelings, he looked for something else to do to fill what was missing.
Peterson admitted that he suffered from attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
“If you hadn’t noticed already, I’m kind of a hyper guy. I’ve had ADHD all my life. But the great thing about ADHD is that it lets you hyper focus on what you love.”
And Peterson loves unicycling as much as he loves piano tuning. He said he found he needed to excel at something other than his job to relieve is depression. He composes music but he needed something physical to get the juices flowing. After awhile he started feeling psychologically better.
When he picked up the unicycle again, Peterson said he had a spare tire around his waist and was not feeling great physically. He thought about running to get the weight off, but it hurt his knees. He considered swimming; he noted it was a good overall exercise, but it was inconvenient — finding a pool with which he was comfortable and dealing with opening and closing times. He considered mountain biking, but thought it too boring, even though there were Red Bull like events of mountain bikers going up and down mountains and jumping off of cliffs.
Then, Peterson saw a Kris Holm video on YouTube. Holm is a pioneer in mountain unicycling. He rode across the great wall of China and other rocky terrains, doing drops from heights of 15 feet or more. He also rides in Vancouver’s North Shore where there is an abundance of trails and wooden ramps. It was then Peterson wondered if he could still ride. It had been 40 years. So he purchased a unicycle online, took it into his backyard when it arrived and tried it.
It was like learning to ride a unicycle again.
“I couldn’t believe it. I got up on my first mount and picked up where I left off 40 years before. Once you learn you never forget. Your muscles remember. So I started taking it off road. It wasn’t the proper unicycle for that. It didn’t have the nobby tires, but I just tried that, and I was huffing and puffing every 50 feet. I didn’t have any cardio. I was out of shape.”
He eventually got a better unicycle. But little by little he got better. After about 6 months, he was tearing up the trails, riding nearly every day. He had lost a lot of weight, going from 175 pounds to 145 pounds.
“It’s not that I’m trying to be thin. But I ride six days a week so I burn so many calories. When we’re kids, we have such a high metabolism. But as you well know, your metabolism declines as you age. But going back to the depression thing, it also makes you feel better. It’s almost like a runner’s high,” Peterson explained.
If one were to distill Peterson’s “fountain of youth” into a formula, it would be all consuming passion plus exercise and connection.
Like Kris Holm, YouTube became a natural platform for Peterson to promote unicycling. In the past 10 years since he began posting videos of unicycling exploits, he has amassed 4,733 subscribers and nearly 3 million views on his 600 plus videos on his YouTube channel. It is because of this platform that he has been able to expose unicycling to a whole new community of people he never met before.
“I’ve met so many people around the world. Not in person, but they’ve seen my videos and I save more correspondence with them,” he said. “My favorites are older people. ‘I’m 35, I’m 45, I’m 55. I thought I was too old until I saw you ride.”