Last week Wednesday saw the start of Paralympics 2012, which spam over a week and a half until next Sunday evening. After missing the opening ceremony while at Matt's drinks at Wonderground by Southbank, I spent Thursday evening at home watching the Games on TV. Then on Friday, I had tickets to the Wheelchair Basketball out at the Greenwich Arena, so after work I headed out there and met up with Uns at the O2.

The first game was the women's match between Canada and the Netherlands, followed by the men's match between Great Britain and Canada. In the women's game, the Netherlands took the lead early on and never showed signs of losing. They dominated the entire way through and won the game by 70 points to Canada's 59. In the next game, the men's match, I was hoping for a GB win, but unfortunately Canada proved too strong for them. The Canadians got into the lead quite early, and even though GB fought back a bit, they never quite caught Canada, who went on to win 70-54. Even though there wasn't a home win, the two games were still brilliant to watch - and a lot more physical and full-on than I imagined. Maximum respect to all those athletes, it's pretty darn inspiring watching them.

On Saturday I was around at Uns' place to help get fit the fridge in her kitchen which she had had standing in the lounge for sometime now. So with the Paralympics on in the background, we managed to remove the old, barely working fridge and replace it with the new one, all properly fitted in place. So not too bad for a DIY Saturday!

On Sunday morning I set off on a cycle around Richmond Park, just a fairly easy ride to get out and about in the warm, summer weather. Then that afternoon Uns and myself set off for Stratford to the Olympic Park for the evening session of the athletics which Uns had gotten in the ballot. We got into the park in good time to give us a bit of time beforehand for a walk around, even though we had been inside the park before, was good to soak up some of the atmosphere.

One of the highlights of the night was seeing Oscar Pistorius run the 200m, in the hope of seeing a South African gold but unfortunately he only managed a second place, with the Brazilian Alan Oliveira finishing ahead of him. But otherwise the other highlight was seeing David Weir race in the 5,000 metres and win in front of a 80,000 strong crowd, with just about everyone raised to their feet and cheering. Just brilliant! What I thoroughly enjoyed about the athletics was that there was always something going on - if not the track events, then something going on in the field events. A brilliant night out, and again the utmost respect to all the Paralympians pushing themselves to the max!

Without a break at all, I was back at the Olympic Park early yesterday morning for the swimming, which I was lucky enough to grab a couple of tickets last week when some went on resale. So I met up with Noel at Stratford and we headed off into the Aquatics Centre for a morning of swimming. We managed to see Ellie Simmonds swim and even break a world record in 200m individual medley heat . No golds though as it was just the heats in the morning, then the finals later on in the evenings. However we did manage to see a total of 11 Paralympic records and 7 world records being broken during the morning session, which was rather impressive!

After the swimming we took a walk through the park towards Park Live to chill out there on the grass in front of the big screen. I only had a half day booked off work, so wasn't going to stay for long but with the weather as amazing as it was, I battled to pull myself away from Park Live so decided to make it a full day off work instead and enjoy the afternoon not at the office!

After a couple of hours in the sun, Noel had to grab some stuff from town so we decided to call it a day. I headed home, jumped on my bike and missioned out for a ride around Richmond Park in the late afternoon sun. Not bad for a Monday afternoon :)