Dr visit

Today I went to the Dr for a more formal medical opinion and was told that do do indeed have a herniated disc and I need to rest for a week and see if it gets better before considering what to do next.

Hopefully what happens next doesn't include cancelling our holiday...

Herniated DIsc

I have been back to the chiropractor this morning and it seems that there must be some herniation of the disc between my 4th and 5th vertebrae. As a result I fell as though someone is standing on my calf muscle most of the time and am having trouble getting up, sitting down, putting on my shoes and so it. It is actually rather crap and doesn't seem to be making much progress towards getting better.

After the chiro, I went and bought 2 new ice packs to start lying on whilst I am on the floor in the hope that it will help with it. I am told that it should be ok for me to drive to Italy for our holiday so I hope that is correct. In the meantime, standing or lying down only, ice as much as possible, lots of ibuprofen and no sitting.

I have more or less given up on the rest of the cycling season and am now concentrating on not eating so that I am not 50kg overweight by the time I am able to start considering exercise again...

Slowly getting better

After a hard weekend of working in the garden cutting hedges and generally working on tidying up, my back is starting to feel better although I do get some rather nasty twinges at times. I even slept OK last night.

Tomorrow I am going back to the chiropractor and I plan on quizzing him about what I can/can't/should/shouldn't do in the coming weeks to make sure that it doesn't come back again.

The new car is ready but we have agreed no to pick it up until after our holiday to save having it sitting in the drive whilst we are away and paying for the tax and insurance for a month when we don't need it.

Silly old bag

The old bag next door has a gardener who is also silly. When we replaced our hedge 3 or 4 years ago he put up a fence along her side of the hedge for some reason, but I assume that she paid him to do it.

Yesterday the two stupid gits cut half of the height off our hedge along her garden.

That stupid f'ing git moron has cut it down to about half a metre high and even made a right f'ing mess of is. I am extremely annoyed about it as you may be able to tell although MK seems to have limited herself to being upset. I want to wee in her shoes. (The old lady that is, not MK)

New Oakleys

Amazingly enough it only took 1 week from ordering these prescription glasses from someone in the UK to them arriving here.

I'm sure there will be some rude comments so bring it on...

Out of action

My back seems to be getting worse so i went to the chiropractor again this morning after we had taken DK to the speech therapist.

I have been told that it doesn't seem to be a slipped disc, but standing or lying down only if possible and no cycling or exercise of any sort until it is sorted out.

Bugger

Kokkeriet

I had a really good meal last night at Kokkeriet in Copenhagen with some clients. As usual the food was excellent (except the barbecued ribs that were as average as they were out of place in a Michelin stared restaurant).

Shrimps & Asparagus smoked cheese & dill
Salted Mullet cabbage in white sauce & crispy skin
Warm Liver Paté foie gras, mushrooms & spruce
BBQ pig, king crab & carrots
"Lobescoves" breast, sweetbread & beetroots
Fennel & Tarragon vanilla & rape oil
Strawberries chamomile & white chocolate

Green strawberries were fantastic, but the real highlight was the foie gras pate with mushrooms and spruce. It was like a delicious meaty, mushroomy hand full of earth and peat in flavour but warm and sumptuous in texture. A great dish.

Unfortunately my back didn't like the 4+ hours in a stiff wooden chair and my sciatica seems to get getting worse. Back to the Chiropractor next week, but in the meantime, I will be standing or lying flat.

Cycling and Sciatica

Last night I went for a fairly strenuous bike ride on the road and managed to achieve my benchmark level of completing my normal 40km loop with an average speed of 33.5kmph. Anything over 33 and I know I am going fairly well. I was hard work and I struggled more with motivation more than anything, but I think that is becuasee I need a rest and my back is aching.

The back was fine wilst I was cycling and I had hoped that this mornings pre booked trip to the chiropractor would help to get it working aqain, but as is often the way with these things, it just made it worse.

My shoe lace came undone this afternoon and I had to get someone else to do it up for me!

I'll be back again next week, but in the meantime I 'll be eating ibuprofen, stretching. trying to do pilates and hoping it gets better with the occaisional application of some ice.

Tonight I am going to kokkeriet for a fancy meal with a client which should be really nice.

Back trouble

Firstly, there were some photos take at the race last Wednesday so here they are:

Since then I have really been suffering with what I think is sciatica. There is a pain down my left leg a lot of the time and as a result I decided to skip the planned bike race on Saturday morning and I have, in fact, not ridden since the race on Wednesday. I should try to sort that out this evening if my back/leg is up to it.

Over the weekend we have done a bit of work in the garden, we took out the box hedge from below the bedroom windows and planted some flowering things instead including fox gloves and lupins which I think will remind me of home. The strawberries are coming along really well as well although I suspect that they will be ripe whilst we are on holiday along with the raspberries.

Presciption sunglasses

Over the last couple of weeks I have grown accustomed to seeing things clearly all the time, rather than just when driving. I am even getting used to the rather odd varifocal lenses and some of this is not even blurred before me as I type (not much though).

The downside of this is that I am now much more conscious of not being able to see when I take my glasses off and although I can see reasonably without them, there is a general lack of clarity and detail that seems both odd and unwelcome. Here comes the annoying bit though, I can't come to terms with cycling with my glasses on and I don't really want to do it. (I don't know why and I don't want to think about it at the moment)

Anyway I have come up with a solution and it, obviously, had to involve spending some money:

I have ordered some prescription Oakley jawbones with transitions photo chromatic lenses which "should" be OK for me to use all year round if the lenses change as well as the other ones that I have without the prescription. When these arrive I can sell the old ones and hopefully won't be horridly out of pocket, but I guess they will end up costing a little bit in the end. The other major benefit of ordering these is that they won't have the disconcerting problem of making everything blurred when I look down at my front wheel like the normal glasses do. I suppose that will make them nicer to drive in too.

There are still no pictures on the web from Wednesday's race, maybe someone will take some tomorrow morning if my back is in good enough shape for me to turn up...

New feature

I guess I am getting some visitors to the site still despite it being rather dull at the moment. I have added a little feature to the right that shows where my visitors are located and I am already amazed to see that I have guests from central and southern America.

Now I need to penetrate the African and Asian markets as well as expanding in Europe...

Dust cup #4 - Not too good

I rode to the race and back which meant that it was a long evening in the saddle. I left home at about 17:20 and got home again at 21:20 with 1½ hours of racing in between. I was really tired when I got home.

The race felt really rubbish, I rode like a poorly coordinated old man and fell off several times including one comical over the bars moment that left me careering down a slope towards a stream and having to grab a tree to stop myself before the water. I came in 179th out of 289 starters which is actually not as bad as I thought it may have been. I was suffering from a lack of sleep and training over the last week or so and was really not on the ball at all especially when it came to the technical sections. If I am going to carry on racing mountain bikes, then I need to train more off road rather than just using the racing as my only mountain bike riding.

I will post some photographs here when they are available at the dustcup website.

Dust Cup #4

The 4th dust cup is this evening and I am not really looking forward to it. It is on my home trails just up the road from here and I would normally be excited about knowing the course well before the race, but I am not. My left hamstring is really tight and my back is aching so I am moving like an old man and I will be rather surprised if those are the ingredients for a successful bike race.

There is no way that I am going to miss it though especially as I can ride there instead of driving and the sun is shining. Whoopee.

Livigno

I am starting to think about our summer holiday in Livigno and have started to take a bit of interest in the weather down there in the mountains. As you can see from the web-cam above, it isn't looking too promising at the moment and I think there has been snow within the last month...
According to weather.com there will be rain or much of the next 10 days and the temperature will struggle to get into double digit Celsius during the day and be as low as 0 during the nights. I can only hope that the extra couple of weeks waiting will be enough for a significant change in conditions.
In the meantime, we can search the basement for warm and waterproof clothing and the Internet for things to do indoors in Livigno...

MIld summer on the way

After a week of dodgy weather and not getting much riding done, I am now ready to get going again with a mountain bike race on my local trail on Wednesday evening and then a road race on Saturday morning. Now I just need to find the evergy required to do it.

Rain rain go away

DK had the drains put in his ears with the minimum of fuss yesterday and was noticeably more outgoing and cheerful afterwards. He could obviously hear better too so that was good t see. The ear doctor was amazed how much snot came out of his ears!

It peed down with rain all day yesterday but thankfully it has bucked up somewhat again today so perhaps there will be some sunshine on the horizon for some of us...

Weekend

We (or at least I) have had a great weekend. I was up very early on Saturday morning for a bike race that started at 08:00, an hours drive away. I finished in the same time as the winner (that is what happens when a group cross the line together) but I places 30th in the overall classification of the race. I was happy to stay with the group and we did 80km in 2 hours so according to my computer at least, that was an average of exactly 40kph. It felt fast!

Yesterday some mountain biking friends came over after lunch and we went for a ride in the forest before having a barbecue. J and MK had made some delicious food for us whilst we were out and we had a nice relaxed evening sitting in the sun eating and drinking. J went to bed back in his old bedroom as we finally had to admit that J and DK sharing a room didn't really work as they kept each other awake in the evening and woke each other up in the mornings.

Today I will have a short day at work as I am going to the ear doctor with MK and DK for the little guy to have drains put in his ears for the 4th time. Hopefully when he can hear properly again, he will start to say something that we can understand...

New Cassette

Well the new chain caused more problems than it solved when I went for a ride with the bike club last night. Obviously one of the consequences of living in a fairly flat area is that you tend to use 2 or 3 gears most of the time and apparently I had worn those out sufficiently on my cassette that the new chain was skipping over the teeth of the cogs.

That meant that I had to get back in the car with my bike this morning (noticing on the way that I had yet another flat tyre) and go back to the shop again to spend a really stupid amount on a new cassette. I really can't believe how much a SRAM Red cassette costs and I am certainly not going to post it here for 2 reasons, firstly, at least one person will point out that you could buy a complete new bike for that and secondly that MK and other wives may realise how much money we are spending on this stuff.

It's rather expensive because it is machines from a solid block of stainless steel. This is supposed to make it hard wearing as well as lightweight, but I am not sure about the durability to be honest...

I did get some useful advice about which race wheels I should buy though...

Next race starts at 08:00 tomorrow so it will be an extra early morning...

Sun at last

We ate outside last night for only the second time this year and it was actually rather nice. Considering how cold and wet it had been the night before there was a huge improvement.

I am continuing to weigh myself each morning and my weight seems to be fairly stable. I think I have gained a little muscle mass from cycling more again and from doing Pilates, but I don't seem to be losing anything appreciable in terms of fat. I suspect that I know the reason for this. I am addicted to sugar. I don't eat too much of the stuff, none at breakfast (oats and dreadful Scandinavian muesli), more or less none at lunch (rye bread and stuff) and then I have to get to and through dinner.

There are cakes and pastries sitting around at work every day and it is all to easy to just eat half of one (and often sneak back for the other half later) at some point during the morning and then I have to manage to get out of the office without eating any more before running the gauntlet of the kitchen at home before supper. That last half hour before we eat is a struggle to control myself and I think I fail more often then I succeed in resisting the temptation to eat something. After that there is the strain of the evening without eating anything else that I shouldn't, but I am not too bad at controlling that these days.

When I look at it in these terms, it looks like the problem must be more related to eating too much at meal times and that may well be the case, but I am sure that avoiding the sweet little temptations during the day should be where I am focusing for now.

wet wet wet

I did manage to get myself together to go out cycling last night with the bike club. It rained fairly heavily for the entire ride and I was cold, soaking wet and filthy dirty by the time I got home 2+ hours and 70km later. At least I had made an effort to burn off the cake that we all ate in the afternoon.

Typically, the sun is shining now and I am sure it will be a lovely evening for me to mow the lawn tonight and then rain again on Thursday when I plan to ride next.

DK had a check up yesterday and is doing fine, he has gained a kilogram and grown 6 centimetres since that set of doctors last saw him before his operation in January.

I don't think I ever published the fact that we actually ordered a Toyota Aygo last week. After some research into used prices and considering the overall experience of owning the thing, we decided to buy the special edition 5 door version with the fancy wheels, extra airbags, metallic paint, electric windows and remote central locking. I negotiated a pretty good price along with some winter tyres and rust protection treatment for the Mazda along with it!

Delivery is expected some time at the end of June/start July so I think we will get it when we are back from our summer holiday.

The highlight of the whole buying experience was 30 seconds after we walked into the dealership when Jeremy said "can't you just hurry up and pay for the car so we can go home?"

That didn't help the negotiating too much...

Dull day

The weather is dull and there's not much going on today other than a check up at the hospital for DK. He is doing fine although he should really be making more progress with speaking by now. His speach isn't helped by the drain having fallen out of his ears meaning that he can't really hear much. That added to the cleft palate and the bi-lingual thing makes for quite a challenge to learn to speak, one that he doesn't seem to be in a hurry to take on!

We won't worry about it for a while yet but he is seeing a speach therapist in a couple of weeks anyway so perhaps there will be some suggestions of things that we can do to help.

Now I just have to get myself together sufficiently to go out with the bike club in the rain...