For the last week, I’ve had no toilet. I’ve had workmen digging holes at the house to move some water pipes. When they started digging, they cut the fibre broadband cable. A couple of hours later they cracked a clay pipe.

“I think that’s the pipe to the toilets,” said my wife, “What are we going to do about the toilet?”

“Never mind that,” I said, “what are we going to do about the internet! We always have the garden. You can’t access Netflix behind a bush!”

Five days without a toilet has meant some visits to my mum’s house, a local gym and the Morrison’s down the road. It’s been annoying and requires planning but largely we’ve survived. Just like I survived the Relentless bike leg, which was also annoying, required planning and made me cross my legs for hours on end after getting battered by the bike saddle bouncing up and down on the tough gravel tracks.

The bike course starts with a long climb uphill. I’d borrowed a gravel bike from Iain TwinBikeRun’s wife as I didn’t have one of my own and organisers had banned mountain bikes.

The bike was comfy but heavy and it had, at best a 32 gear as its lowest setting, and it was still not enough for some of the climbs. Unable to get much purchase on the gravel beneath, wheels spinning but not moving, I had to walk large parts of this first section.

When a downhill did arrive it was almost vertical downhill through reeds, heather and a slope so steep I had my brakes on full to have a controlled fall rather than controlled descent. It felt like it was going to be a long day…

The course is split into two roughly equal loops. The first starts at Carrick Castle and finishes back at Lochgoilhead, the second loops round towards the Rest & Be Thankful (or, to give it its full name, ‘the Rest & Be Thankful is Closed due to a Landslide’) before coming down to Lochgoilhead again.

The first loop is steeper with more short climbs and steep descents in its first two thirds, but the final third is a long descent, which (almost) makes up for the pain of the start.

The views across Loch Goil and into Argyll are undeniable and the weather was almost perfect. However, even with a forecast that it would be dry all day, the west coast of Scotland never disappoints and we had almost an hour of a steady dreich downpour. Even if BBC weather tells you that the sun has expanded by billions of miles and the world was about to be incinerated, it would still rain in Kyle of Lochalsh.

The second loop starts with another long, but not steep climb. The roads also improve, except for a couple of sections with heavy shale and stone that made it difficult to ride. Those sections are short and only take a couple of minutes before the track reverts to a well worn fire track that is clearly used regularly by the Foresty Commission.

The second lap also has a couple of section marked as “gnarly”. And by gnarly they mean no track, steep drops and very technical riding through some woods. Nothing dangerous and nothing to cause any concern unless you decide to ride them because you have the bike handling skills of a professional downhill MTBer.

By this point we barely saw another rider. For a while, the end of loop 1 and the start of loop 2, we kept swapping places with another rider called Michael. But he must have had a second wind and left us for dust after an hour or so riding nearby.

The final few miles are through a wood to the south of Lochgoilhead. This bit is also marked “gnarly” and had been christened ‘Glen Gruel’ by the organisers. This section had only had a very narrow track at best and I spent most of it walking, or riding with my legs sticking out to act as a stabilisers in case the bike wheel slipped and I fell.

It was slow going but given the rest of the race was slow going too, I enjoyed this section more than I thought. It made a nice change just before the finish. A bit like getting punched in the gut instead of repeatedly getting kicked in the head. “Well, at least that’s different,” you think.

The final two miles are an easy, if slightly rocky, descent into Lochgoilhead and transition at the village hall.

Overall

The weather was ideal, the route was varied, but a gravel race is not for me. The slog of going uphill is not offset by the reward of coming back down. I don’t mind climbing but I’m not a good descender on a bike. I spend most of the time coming down, braking hard, which isn’t fun. Then, when I’m on the flat, I don’t enjoy the randomness of gravel and the possibility that any moment I could get a puncture from a stray rock, which could then lead to being miles from a main road and rescue, if I can’t change the tyre. Instead I spend the entire race being mildly anxious about all of it.

So, with that in mind, when we saw a man prepare a barbecue at the village hall and the choice was to continue or to eat a burger straight from the grill, there was no choice at all. Mmmm, cheeseburger.