Ralph’s Place

Ok, so I don’t have it just yet, but it’s picked out and priced up, and the form is on it’s way to HR at work! I imagine it’ll be Wednesday or Thursday before I get the cheque, which means the following Monday or Tuesday before I can actually collect the bike. Even so, I’m excited!

So why a bike? Well, I can’t run (apparently) without destroying my knees, and I spend probably 30% of the year not climbing due to one injury or another. Cycling is low impact and great exercise, it also means I won’t necessarily need to get the tube to work in the mornings… which is a definite plus! I should point out though, I’m still a climber! I’ll cycle to work and occasionally the wall, but on a sunny weekend I’ll still be off in search of a rock to crawl up hehe.

I’ll write again once I’ve got it and tried it out on the commute… in the meantime wish me luck in London traffic! :S

Found another cool feature on Google Reader today, shared items!

This basically means that from any of the feeds I subscribe to (news, blogs etc) I can choose any number to “share”. Sharing an item puts the RSS entry for it into another feed which is displayed on an public page by google. But because it’s another RSS feed, you can also display the list on your own site, or people can register it in their own readers!

So, at the bottom of my side menu you’ll now find a Shared Feeds section displaying the latest 5 feeds I’ve chosen to share. Click on any of them to read more

I’m also starting to realise that as I add more stuff to this site, I’m going to have to think more carefully about the layout… but that’s something that’ll have to wait until I’ve actually got some free time!

Went for a bit of a run at the weekend, along with about 20,000 other people. Bizarre how we were all running the same route but still. Was a nice 10k route through central London, by the river… drew quite a crowd too! I got round in a little over 53 minutes, which was slightly longer than I’d hoped for, but beat my target of an hour by plenty so I’m happy

Ok, so the “bit of a run” was the British 10k London Run on Sunday morning. Ignoring some minor injuries *ahem* it all went really well! Very happy with 53 minutes, just wish my knees weren’t so screwed up because I think I could’ve gone quite a bit better! Yes, as it turns out, I’m really NOT a runner… in fact I’m still limping around today just to prove the point! (Although it is getting much better) I’m thinking now that I might buy a bike and see how that goes instead. Probably won’t give up on running altogether, but to get my knees in working order to go any kind of distance is going to take a long time, so I need something to keep me occupied in the meantime

Now if only this rain would go away…