I can’t remember my first bowl of All Bran, the breakfast cereal that looks like a bird’s nest and tastes like a birds nest. I would have been in my teens, I think, as I was certainly eating it every day when I went to university in 1995. Which means I’ve been eating it for 30 years… until last week!

What happened last week? Did you finally realise that cereals don’t have to taste like cardboard or look like you’ve got a bowl filled with the contents of a woodchipper? No. I don’t want another cereal – while there might be more exotic cereals, perhaps a granola with exotic fruits, or a sugar rush high like Frosties – I want All Bran because, well, that’s what I’ve always had. After 30 years it’s a habit I cannot break. It would be easier to come off crystal meth than change my breakfast routine. Yet, after decades of loyalty, after years of paying who knows what fortune to the Kellog’s company, they have betrayed me! They have changed the recipe for All Bran!

It has a taste, you ask? Yes, like plasterboard or a wicker basket. It may not have been a great taste but you could certainly taste the joinery on your tongue. It was a solid taste. And now: it’s slimy. Yes, slimy.

We’ve improved it, say Kellogs. The old All Bran used to disintegrate to dust in the box and people complained their last bowl was more woodust rather than wood chip. So, we’ve made the All Bran ‘bits’ bigger and we’ve changed the recipe that they won’t melt in your milk. They’ll stay solid so it feel like you’re trying to swallow a bowl full of ice lolly sticks.

But that’s disgusting, I say. Whatever the secret ingredient is to keep the ‘bits’ solid has left a strange slimy taste to them. It’s like swallowing an electricity pole covered in jelly.

And now the ‘bits’ float in the milk like an Alaskan logging operation floating the tree trunks down river.

We’ve even changed the name, say Kellogs, to show the world how much better the new All Bran is over the old one. It’s now called “All Bran Fibre Plus”.

But there’s less fibre in the new one than the old one, I say!

Nevermind that, says Kellogs, we changed the name and that’s what counts! Just give it a go!

I did and now I’m got a box of kindling. It’s no longer a breakfast cereal it’s a fire starting kit.

Well, why don’t you change cereal, asks Kellogs.

I will, I say. But you can’t trick me. You expect me to stop buying All Bran and then I’ll start buying Corn Flakes or Coco Pops or some other Kellogs brand, don’t you.

Damn, you got us.

Well I’m not falling for that. I’m going to get a new cereal to replace the one I’ve eaten for 30 years and it’s not going to be Kellogs. I don’t care what the new cereal tastes like (as to be fair, taste was never a factor with All Bran) as long as it doesn’t have any connection to the Kellog corporation.

Ha, nice try, we make most of the supermarket own brands too. We make everything. You’ll never escape us. We are breakfast!

Just watch me!

So, does anyone know any breakfast cereal made by independent producers who are 100% not connected to Kellog?

One of the best features on Strava is the heat map. This shows you the most popular routes near you by highlighting the most used/recorded routes used by the people on the app. Even better, it also suggests a route. So, if you’re somewhere new, you can see where other people are running and you can get a suggestion for a route to follow.

I’m not sure that Strava knew I was on holiday though as the route it suggested was 8 miles cross country over what looked like farmer’s fields and a steep cliff face. Luckily you can adjust the distance and I worked out a four mile route away from the main roads and around some coastal trails instead.

I’d definitely recommend using Strava when you’re away, but it is a pity it doesn’t also have a no-Safari option. No, that doesn’t mean it bans the popular Apple internet browser, Safari. Instead, it could avoid the occasional detour through a field of sheep as part of the route it showed was also a field for the local farmers. Though, given this happened in Orkney, maybe the locals are always wandering into the sheep fields

(And the Orkney folk would say the same for us Isle of Lewis folk!)

I just wanted a burger and chips. I ordered the ‘classic burger’ and I ordered the ‘truffle chips’ (don’t judge me) and the man wrote both down in his pad, looked at me and then said:

“Strong order!”

What.

You don’t get to a checkout with your cornflakes, tin of tuna and 4 litre bottle of milk and the checkout assistant says: “Loving your selection.”

You don’t go to a bar, order a bottle of Corona and the bar man says: “What are you? A lightweight!”

What does strong order even mean? What would be a weak order.

“Can I have a burger please?”

“And would you like chips with that?”

“No, just the burger.”

“Well, that a pitiful order. It’s not even worth the chef getting the grill heated up!”

Maybe he said it because we feel a need to say well done when someone tells us something.

“I went running last night.”

“Well done!”

“I had beans on toast for my lunch.”

“That sounds good!”

“My dog just died.”

“Nice!”

As ‘athletes’ we feel this pressure all the time when talking about races. “I came first in my age group is received the same as “I walked the whole race and then pissed on the finish line while waving a Nazi flag”.

“Good for you!”

When you race, it’s your own race and it’s not for others to judge how you did. You run your own race and how you did might be an achievement for you. So, we congratulate everyone all the same.

Except the Nazi finish line sprinkler. Then it’s okay to judge.

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.

Lochgoilhead and Lochgilphead are completely different places. Unless you’re Iain TwinBikeRun and you’re trying to book a hotel thinking they are the same place. In which case, booking a hotel in one (Lochgilphead) is not at all handy when you are meant to be swimming first thing in the other (Lochgoilhead)!

A quick change of booking and we had a hotel closer to the start line with entertainment – a band played on Friday night – and art. If you can call a random drawing of Renton from Transporting on a shelf in a stairwell ‘art’ especially when every other picture was of deers, glen, moors and shortbread tin covers. Maybe they just order a job lot of “Scottish images” and no one spotted that the junkie from Leith was not exactly a Highland bus tour for the over 70s material.

I liked the band though. Especially as the band turned out to be one man with a guitar and a back track of classic songs all sung in a voice that can only be described as “my God, please don’t do the accents!”

He sang ‘We come from a land down under”, with an accent that can only be described as Skippy The Bush Kangaroo and ‘No Woman, No Cry’ with an accent that Nigel Farage would deport.

Speaking of race hate, I hate a gravel race. Several years ago we entered the Dirty Reiver, a gravel race in Keilder which, after 70 miles of hitting every stone of every track, made me realise that a bike was a viable form of homemade vasectomy. You can read more about the race here.

Why I entered The Restless, I don’t know. I think I was intrigued by the possibility and novelty of racing an off-road triathlon. The Restless being the first off-road triathlon organised by XTri, who also run Noresman and Celtman. It also helped that the race was relatively close to home in Lochgoilhead, only 90 minutes from Glasgow. Or 120 minutes if you book Lochgilphead.

The swim course looked nice, a sea swim in August with Castle Carrick providing a backdrop that could be used on the wall of a Scottish hotel. While the bike course looked manageable at 35 miles rather than a full 56 miles that a normal middle distance triathlon would require. The final run was also intriguing with a good summit and view promised.

Registration

Once we got to Lochgoilhead, registration was straightforward. We could register up to 7pm the night before and bikes could also be dropped out at transition 1 rather than set up in the morning. Given the strong midges on the west coast I could only hope the person watching over transition had a hazmat suit to keep the wee blighters away.

Transition 1 was around five miles down the coast from Lochgoilhead and was next to Carrick Castle, a 14th century tower that sits on the edge of Loch Goil. It made an impressive backdrop when racking bikes on Friday night.

After racking up, we went back to registration and attended the race briefing. Again, a very well organised event.

Swim

The swim start was 7am, practically a long lie-in compared to other XTri events. As Carrick Castle has no parking, competitors are bussed to the start.

“Unfortunately there’s only one bus” they said at the race briefing. “You’ll be split by number into a group of 53 and a group of 31. The bus has 53 seats. so we can’t take everyone in one go nor could we get a second bus!”

Turns out hiring a bus for Lochgoilhead was one of the hardest tasks the organisers had to solve.

Luckily we were in the second group and had an extra 30 minutes sleep before having to catch the bus from Lochgoilhead to the castle.

Catching the bus was straightforward, with lots of parking nearby in a yacht car park/yacht yard/don’t know the proper term for where people park yachts on land. Land marinas? Earth docks? Who knows?

Also there was plenty of toilets, unusual for for most races where finding a toilet is harder than spotting a monster in Loch Ness.

We had around 30 minutes to wait between arrival and the swim start, plenty of time to get everything set up in transition and check that our bikes hadn’t been stolen in the middle of the night after security was eaten alive by midges. Luckily, they must have survived the night and our bikes were still racked by the castle.

The swim started in the water and we lined up in-between two canoes. The route had been shown as a short swim down the loch before passing around two bright yellow buoys, before returning up the loch, in front of the castle before reaching another fixed buoy, turning and returning to the castle and transistion.

When we started there was only one buoy, and I wonder if they had problems with the second as the course turned out to be shorter than it’s anticipated 1.8km. I didn’t mind as it meant I felt strong throughout the swim as I’d trained for the longer distance and was getting the benefit of a shorter course on longer training.

There were around 85 people starting, from an initial field of 104. The organisers confirmed at the briefing that their target had been 100 people as they thought that would be the capacity for the event. I think they were right, while their was plenty of room in the swim, as we came back to shore and started the bike, there were some narrow and steep paths that could easily cause bottlenecks if more people were leaving and trying to get passed one another.

After a period of warm weather, the loch was warm (for Scotland) and almost flat calm. My only criticism would be that the final fixed black painted buoy is not as easy to see against the dark moor west coast background as a the yellow inflatables. I’d add a yellow inflatable to this buoy too, just to help with sighting.

At transition, I took my bike from the rack and got to start my ride on…. a woman’s bike. Iain TwinBikeRun’s wife’s bike to be exact. I didn’t have a gravel bike so had borrowed her gravel bike to use instead.

How did I get on? Second part next week!

I ran home on Tuesday and passed the set of Spiderman: No Way Home, currently filming in Glasgow city centre.

The film had cordoned off a street while filming what appears to be a chase involving Spiderman and a tank. I could see the tank and what appeared to be Spiderman standing on top of it. Various modified cherry pickers carried big banks of lights and I could see crew bustling about as they got ready to film.

Earlier, Mrs TwinBikeRun, who works on the street, was blocked from leaving her office at lunchtime by one of the crew. A man in a hi-viz jacket stopped her and said: “We’re just about start filming, can you wait until we’re finished? You should also get your camera out.”

“Why?” said Mrs TwinBikeRun, “do you not have people to do that?”

They didn’t laugh.