The big news today is that I'm not cycling to work after all. Don't worry, I'm in fine fettle for Sunday, but the weather is so atrocious that it isn't worth risking having some kind of accident, catching a cold or otherwise doing myself a nasty so close to the event. As I type this, it is veritably tipping it down. The weather forecast for the weekend is slightly better than the present misery, but not much. I've been debating which I would prefer of the two most recent types of weather we've had: torrential and blistering. I think I come down marginally in favour of the torrential as I don't do well in the sun or heat or both (I have very fair skin, so I have three stages of sun exposure: translucent, lobster and peeling). The plan now is to ride into work, gently, on Thursday (assuming we're not all making a dash for Noah's Ark), as by then I'll also hopefully have my panniers to try out (more on them another time).
When I started this challenge, I didn't think I'd be writing in one of my last posts before the event that I had found some royal inspiration. It was reported in the news over the weekend that Princess Eugenie (for those of you who are slightly less Anglophile, she is the Queen's granddaughter, the second daughter of the Queen's second son, making her, I think, sixth in line to the throne) completed the 100km (60 miles) Nightride in London. She may only be 22, so has a considerable age advantage over me, but she suffers from scoliosis and her spine is held together by metal rods after having had an operation ten years ago to correct its curvature . Sitting on a bike for that long cannot have been comfortable for her and she went four miles more than I'll be travelling next weekend, and all at night. She also raised more than £9,000 for her chosen charities, the orthopaedic hospital where she had the operation and an organisation building schools in Rwanda. Frankly, if she can do it, I've got no excuse - congratulations and thanks, Princess Eugenie, for giving me that final spur on!
Given that we're so close now to the event, I thought I'd share with you a bit about who has been reading this blog - this isn't a showboating exercise, I just think it's interesting because the statistics I get shown behind the scenes on this website have a few surprises in them. So far (and not counting your current perusal, dear reader), the blog has had 977 page views - come on folks, send it to your friends and let's get over the 1,000 mark by Sunday. Unsurprisingly, given the geographic spread of my friends and family, the largest number of visitors are from the UK, followed by the USA, but there seems to be a significant minority following my exploits in Russia, a few people on the other side of the world in New Zealand and Australia and even someone in South Korea. Because of the way I've been sharing my posts on facebook and twitter, it is not surprising that the majority of site traffic is routed from those two sites (and, indeed, there was a significant peak in page views when Brian Blessed retweeted a link!) However, there has been a fair amount of traffic in the last week coming from a Belgian sports news site called Sporza and, try as I may, I can't find any reference to this blog on it, so if you know anything about that, please let me know! Finally, more readers are using Firefox than any other browser, more are using Windows than Mac, and more are using Android than iPhone. I can't say that any of this is particularly scientific, the site just counts stuff!
I'd like to thank all the people who've sponsored me for the Bike Ride so far, especially those who've done so in the last week or two. I've made it up to £368 now, creeping ever closer to my £500 target. There's still plenty of time to sponsor me - you can do so by clicking on the link to my Justgiving page on the right hand side of the page and following the instructions there.
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