What trikker hasn't has to struggle to quickly explain how the Trikke works, and why it is such addictive fun?

Someone stops you, asks, "How's that thing work?" and you're hard pressed to give them an immediate cognitive grasp of it.

Well, here's a longish write-up of the shortish explanations that I've been giving out lately. I get off the Trikke and let it stand with the front wheel facing forwards, then I show the inquiring mind that a slight turn of the handlebars will make the Trikke want to "fall over," but that "it's easier for the Trikke to fall just a little bit forward in order to do that falling over."

This "falling forward" is the key to (1) understanding a Trikke's way to handle momentum, (2) why trikking is so seemingly effortless, and (3) why trikking is far more akin to water-wind sailing, surf-boarding or skiing than it is to roller-blading, biking, or skateboarding.

(1) Galileo proved that, in a vacuum, gravity will attract a cannon ball and a feather equally -- such that both will fall at the same rate, side by side towards the gravitation source with neither "winning the race." Of course, in an atmosphere, the friction of the air will affect the feather's speed far more than the round-shaped and more massive cannon ball's speed, and the cannon ball, in Earth's atmosphere, will hit the ground long before the feather wafts there.

With that concept in mind, we can see that if we put "a little oomph" into a trikking move, then that's the equivalent of having the Trikke overcome the effects of the road surface's frictional forces with only a "feather's mass" which is able to hold merely a small amount of "forward momentum" that is easily overcome," and the Trikke will come to a stop. But if you put "a lot of oomph" into a trikking move, then that's the same as "dropping a cannon ball in an atmosphere," and the surface/wheel frictions (substituting for air friction) will have the much larger "cannon ball momentum" to overcome than that of the feather -- at the same trikking speed -- and it will take the attritional frictional forces a lot longer to erode the speed of a "big oomphed" Trikke. If a feather-oomph can be imagined as one person pushing the Trikke, you can see that a cannon-ball-oomph would be a large group of people pushing the Trikke. Both Trikkes will go about the same maximum speed, but one of these Trikkes will be much harder to stop because of all the oomph behind it. My apologies to any physicists out there for this "childish metaphor," but most people on the street resonate with this explanation. To trikkers, "oomph" is about getting as much of the body's mass to "fall forward with the Trikke" in a well timed "sudden shifting" of the body's mass. If a portion of your mass is not in harmony with the falling forward, (arriving too late) then you are trikking less efficiently.

(2) Trikking is almost effortless, and the better you are at trikking the closer you come to exerting the least amount of oomph to maintain a speed. As you know, when you push a stalled car, you have to put out a lot of oomph to get it going, but once it gets going, a much lighter pushing will continue the car's speed. Once you get a certain momentum going, all you need to supply to a car is enough energy to overcome the friction of wind and tires. The Trikke is no different. Once you get it going, the amount of energy to maintain speed is far far less than it took to get up to that speed. At speed, you are simply putting into the system enough energy to overcome air and surface frictions. The Trikke's twenty pound weight is added to the amount you must move across a distance, but the efficiency of the wheels in dealing with friction is so much better than what human feet do, that trikking a mile, even though one is pushing an extra twenty pounds, requires less overall energy than walking that same mile.

(3) With skateboarding or roller-blading, we see that all the forward speed is maintained by constant kicking, but with the Trikke, GRAVITY is doing most of the work. While sail-boating, the work you put out is insignificant compared to the work of the wind on the sails. You work to get the tiller and sails properly aligned with the wind, but the wind does the job of pushing tons of boat-mass. To the Trikke, GRAVITY IS WIND. Trikking uphill is EXACTLY like tacking against the wind. Maintaining speed requires a trikker to do very little work -- the work of merely getting the 20 pound Trikke properly aligned with "its wind," while gravity does all the big work of "pulling your body's mass (hopefully not tons of mass) forward. Trikkers are going for the free ride that surfers, sailors and skiers get: Mother Earth hugging us closer and closer.

Trikkers are astronauts in an eight inch high orbit -- constantly free-falling with only a little effort now and then to keep the system "topped off." THIS IS WHY TRIKKING IS SO ADDICTIVE....WE'RE ORBITING, and the free ride that comes from being in unity with a natural force is -- ahem -- trikke-dancing with Nature.

Surfers call one trick they do "hanging ten" -- meaning getting their ten toes up to hang over the tip of the surfboard. Well, trikkers are essentially "on all fours" when they are on the Trikke. We've got wheels for hands and feet.

And when we are carving hard, well, I think that that's HANGING TWENTY.

THEREFORE: Trikking is twice as fun as surfing!