rain miles count double

Hi. Remember me? I’m the Rain Miles guy. You may remember me from such web sites as Rain Miles Count Double, a once-upon-a-time regularly updated blog about cycling in Northern Ireland.

That slightly contrived introduction is my lame way of apologising for not posting anything on Rain Miles for most of July, pretty much since I completed the Bangor Coastal Challenge at the end of June in fact. There are good reasons and some excuses that I will now go in to.

The major problem was that at the start of July the server that hosts Rain Miles Count Double and my other sites was wiped out in a mass attack against the hosts that saw over 100,000 web sites taken offline in total. All data on the server was deleted and I’ve been working (time permitting) for a couple of weeks to rebuild the server from scratch and restore all the data and services.

The Rain Miles server was behaving strangely

I had recent backups of most of the content, with Google’s cache filling in some of the remaining blanks. But I’ve lost around six months worth of email from the start of 2009. If you emailed me around the end of June or start of July and are still waiting for a reply you should re-send your message as it’s likely to have been lost.

Now that the server is more-or-less restored I can get back to my irregular writing schedule, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear. Equal lack of pleasedness-doubt is expected at the news that I do have a list of posts that I want to backfill.

The second reason for the lack of cycling posts has been a lack of actual cycling on my part.

After the Bangor Coastal Challenge I took some time to rest and recover as I’d experienced some unusual hip and leg pain during the ride. This pain is likely related physiotherapy treatment I’ve been having recently for back problems related to having spent the past 25 years hunched over computer keyboards instead of sitting up straight like my mother told me to, and the therapist believes that my dodgy vertebrae are compressing spinal nerves and giving me referred pain down one leg. At the moment the pain is concentrating in one knee and hip (I’m told that’s an improvement) and, though cycling doesn’t seem to make it any worse, it does make cycling more painful than it needs to be.

To simulate the feeling (at its worst) for yourself, give yourself a dead leg by punching it repeatedly for half an hour then insert hot metal spikes into your hip and knee joints. Let me know if you feel like going for a cycle after that.

My regular commuting rides have also been hit by a change of job for Mrs. Rain Miles that involves me (us) getting up an hour or more earlier than before.

So for the past month I’ve been waking up tired, groggy from painkillers yet still in pain and, strangely, jumping on the bike for a ten mile battle with rush-hour traffic or heading out for a four or five hour training ride early on a Sunday morning has seemed less appealing than it has in the recent past. Hence the lack of cycling, and cycling posts.

But now, I’m back. There is no future but what I write … or something.