Five and 2011

I do believe this blog is now 5 years old. Happy birthday blog. Though you already seem to be getting a bit long in the tooth.

It's also traditional to summarise the year that has passed, so here's a super quick summary:

• New Year in the Maldives. Very nice time, although it did rain on New Year's Eve
• Las Vegas and San Diego in March
• Great road trip by myself in Rosie around the perimeter of Scotland
• Started running, built up to around 16km with a 28 minute 5k pace. Very pleased.
• Another drive up to Scotland with wife.
• Picked up stress fractures from too much running. Displeased.
• Muscat, Oman in October.
• Maintained weight, just about, even though I couldn't run or even walk much through to the end of the year.
• Got my broken crown (from evil NHS dentist) fixed and generally got my dental health sorted out.
• Said goodbye to Rosie and hello to Florence.
• Still working at Barcap, though looking at options in 2012

Death of personal blogging?

A personal blog seems to be more and more outdated these days, what with Facebook introducing the timeline feature and Twitter getting more and more popular.

Blogging is still good for people with journalistic aspirations, or perhaps wanting to keep an online record of a particular subject, but for most other things, they seem to be dead.

In fact, I'm finding Google Reader for my RSS feeds less and less useful. I get most of my news first from Twitter these days and when something does show up in an RSS feed, it's old news.

I'll certainly keep this blog alive as it goes back quite far and I like to look things up from time to time, but I doubt I'll be posting here much any more.

For personal stuff (with a restricted audience) there's Facebook.

For random thoughts there's Twitter.

For health stuff, there's my blog at MyFitnessPal.

Another Health Update

Bah, not much to report really except, I've been seeing Wilna the physio for about a month and George the podiatrist a few times too.

No running and even walking is seriously frowned upon, until things are sorted out.

The "things" are:

1. Stress fractures (I can't be bothered to remember the fancy medical terms) in both legs, top of fib on left leg, bottom of femur on right.
2. Stiffness in must of the muscles in my legs. This is where Wilna is doing miracles.
3. Hips that rotate out unnaturally, and therefore feet too.  This causes unusual stress in all sorts of places. This is where George is doing his stuff.

To date, I'm generally pointing in the right direction, have inserts in my shoes to balance out the stresses and on the whole W & G seem pleased with progress.

It'll be late November, at the earliest, before I'm even thinking of running. Right now, I'm not even allowed to walk to work - "no more than 10 mins, 2 or 3 times a week."

All this was quite difficult at the beginning as I'd got a bit addicted to running, then I tried P90X, but had to stop a lot of that - especially the plyometrics - so I joined a local gym so I can swim. 

I'm getting used to the lack of exercise, especially the cardio, and this worries me as I don't want to get used to not exercising. At least I'm not gaining weight. A month ago, I was around 92.5kg and today I'm 93. This in spite of raising my daily calorie intake by 300.

More detail on this on my fitness blog at http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/goron59

Health update

An update on my last post.

MRI scans on my legs show some "stress damage" under the knee and my doc has told me to cease any impact exercise and minimise walking as much as possible too, including walking to work.

This also buggers up my P90X ambitions as Plyo is basically jumping up and down... even with soft landings, it's going to be an issue. Also, the leg work on Friday made my shins really sore, so that's out too.

I'll just have to see what I can do. In the mean time, I've got physio and podiatrist appointments to sort out, then a follow up with doc in a few weeks.

Bah :(

Slow here

Very little posted here this year.

Much of my activity has been centred around health and fitness - which is a bit of a change for me - and as such, I write things in a fitness blog and also semi-privately on MyFitnessPal.

I've been there for 420 days now, lost 51 pounds, got into running, regularly doing 5-10 km and peaking at over 15km.

I've picked up some injuries, and right now I'm getting some diagnostic work on a problematic left shin/lower leg. Not being able to run frustrates me, so I've taking up P90X. It's only day 2 (of 90) but it's hard work.

It occurs to me that little else has happened for me this summer apart from all the above, but I'm happy, have made many new friends and generally feel pleased.

Let's see if all this continues through out the autumn/winter.

Back to work

Back to work after 11 days off for the price of 3. Thanks Wills and Kate!

Not so great being back at work, re-experiencing the horrors of Windows XP and Office 2003.

It's like being in the stone age.

Decision

I've deleted the one at blog.soapyfrog.com (it's all imported here anyway) and visiting blog.soapyfrog.com will redirect here.

I still won't be putting much here, preferring Momento and Facebook, but at least this will require no maintenance :-)