I’m invisible!

Through lockdown I’ve tried to keep to Windfarm Wednesday. This is a ride out to Eaglesham wind farm on the Southside of Glasgow on a Wednesday. Unless it’s raining in which case it’s wind farm Thursday. Or, because it’s Scotland in the summer, Windfarm Maybe Next Week When The Rain Finally Stops.

Now that the clocks are going back I will need to pause Windfarm Wednesday until the Spring, assuming that we’ll still be working from home, which, given current conditions, is a safe an assumption as Donald Trump will lie when he opens his mouth.

I will miss Windfarm Wednesday because it’s been the first time in six years that I’ve had the chance to consistently ride outside during the week. Normally I’d be commuting to and from Larbert and would only get the occasional chance to head out between arriving home and dinner and dog walking and all the other things we need to do at night. Instead, I would try and grab 45 minutes on an indoor bike before the evening overtakes me.

Having the chance to spend at least one night a week outside has been fantastic and has provided a good break from lockdown life as it allowed me to not become too insular by living and working from home 24 hours a day. Instead, it’s an escape to flee the city and, most importantly, to find new places and visit parts of Scotland I’ve never been before, even if only an hours distance from my house.

Over the last six months I’ve tried to explore new routes but to always pass the windfarm on the way out or the way back. It’s good to have a target – the Windfarm – but the journey changes every week.

Over the winter I hope to flip this approach to the long nights and not fall into an easy routine on the indoor bike as the journey doesn’t change: the bike doesn’t even move.

Instead I’m going to try various simulated climbs and try a new one each week through Zwift and other apps so while my journey may not change each week then at least I’ll always have a different target.

Last week I shared a few tips and handy links about winter swimming. You can find it here: Introduction to winter swimming.

This week I share one tip to help you acclimatise and train to love the cold. If you want to know what swimming in winter is like then just do this – headbutt a tub of ice cream. Easy!

If you want to know the first signs of hypothermia then here’s a video of me trying to eat a Twix after 90 minutes of cycling in zero degrees in just a short sleeved t-shirt. I’m wearing three layers of clothes to warm up and I still look like this:

Now, try to imagine swimming when you can’t control your body. Grim – and dangerous.

I normally stop swimming in October, once the water temperature falls below 12 degrees, and will only try a few quick dips until April. While I like the ‘shock’ of cold water I don’t like the ‘reward to travel’ ratio as it shrinks considerably in winter months. Why do I want to travel for an hour or more just to spend five minutes in the water? Instead I could walk to my bath and sit on some icecubes for five minutes and still have time to read a good book by an open fire?!?!

For anyone considering longer swims in winter than I thought it would be helpful to share a few links on how to prepare, what to expect and what to do if you get too cold – or, worse, get hypothermia and can’t eat a Twix. The links are below but if I had any tips to share these would be them:

• Never swim alone
• Swim for less time than you think you would comfortably manage
• Never swim alone
• Keep to the edge, the water will be much colder the deeper you get
• Never swim alone
• If in doubt, don’t get in or, if you are in, get out.
• Never swim alone

And for more on hypothermia.

Hypothermia and winter swimming recovery…

I was told before I swam outdoors for the first time that the best thing I should do is to splash my forehead with water. 

This seemed like terrible advice. The last thing I want to do before swimming in open water is to splash my forehead with water because… well, the water is BLOODY FREEZING!!! Firemen don’t set themselves on fire before tackling a burning blaze so why do swimmers have to freeze before they jump in??!

But cold water it was.

Or at least it was in May in Scotland: the water had only started to reach 10 degrees aka Highland Tropical.

Below 10 degrees, if you’re going for a dip, you need balls of steel – and toes of steel and feet of steel and basically an entire body made from a metal that doesn’t know how to gasp. Above 10 degrees and you can start to consider a paddle, just as long as you don’t dip your head below the surface as otherwise it’s instant brain freeze, faster than sticking an ice lolly up your nostrils.

But the thing is, you adjust to it. The more you do it, the easier it gets. It’s an ice lolly this week, next week it’s a three bar heater. The more you swim outside. the more your body adjusts to the temperature until eventually your skinny dipping in Ben & Jerry’s and wondering why it’s so warm.

First, you have to go in. And the first dip is always the hardest. The water runs down your back. You’re slapped in the face with an ice cube and you lose all feeling in your feet and toes.

If you’re really unlucky, the shock of the cold, causes you body to contract and it feels like Mr Freeze is hugging you, and not in a good way. In a “I’m going to crush your chest coz I’m a strong supervillain type” way.

However, next time, it get’s easier. And the time after that you’re Mr Freeze’s equal. You’re Kettleman! The only man who can make Mr Freeze disappear!

But first you’ve got to get in. So, I splashed my forehead with water and got in the loch. It was freezing. And it was fantastic. And one day I might get my feeling in my feet back.

Mark the day. Sunday 27 September 2020. That was the day I started to ride away from the house for a cycle round Renfrewshire and, before I got a mile away I turned round, rode home and picked up full length gloves and an extra jacket. Brrrrrr. It’s getting cold!

Now the cold should be good training for Celtman but I can see from my training this month that I’m starting to do more indoor rides rather than heading outside. I think October will see that accelerate along with the last of any serious swims (anything longer than 10 mins!).

The water temperature is falling too. I didn’t think of starting a swim in skins this month but I did manage to finish a few swims with a five minute dip without a wetsuit at the end of a swim. I then spent the rest of the night trying to warm up. Baby, it’s cold outside… and in the water.

The towel is not something we spend a lot of time thinking about. We mostly take them for granted – until we forget to bring one to the shower, or, worse, a loch after swimming outside.

There is nothing worse than coming out of a loch, looking in your bad and finding nothing to dry yourself except the t-shirt and jumper you were going to use to keep warm.

That’s why it’s important to dress right for swimming outdoors and there is no way you can go wrong if you wear a dryrobe.

Now some folk have fancy dryrobe’s with a waterproof outer shell and a nice soft inner lining to keep you dry and warm. I however have no time for such luxuries. If you want to wear a towel then wear a towel, like the one above.

It’s still a dry robe, for that all important branding when lochside, but it is nothing more than a towel stitched to another towel with an added hood and arm holes.

It’s brilliant. (And cheap).

Once you get out of your wetsuit you can use all of your new towel robe to dry every single bit of you just by rubbing yourself all over. It’s actually better than a towel because, while wearing it, you can feel it rub against all the bits you can’t normally reach if you had a towel. Between the shoulder blades? No problem. Just sit in your car with your towel robe on and rub your back against the back of the seat. It’s brilliant, and despised.

I will admit that it’s not the fashionable item. In fact it’s banned in my house as, when my wife sees it hanging up, she does threaten to burn it on the basis that it is a crime against fashion. But it’s not meant to be fashionable. Just look at the photo above. No one is going to go out on a Saturday night to a fancy restaurant in a towel robe. But it is practical and effective and I would recommend it to all budding open water swimmers… and to monks who want to keep warm.

However, despite my wife’s claim that it is not fashionable, I would beg to differ. Maybe it’s too fashionable?

Hear me out: perhaps the highest praise for the towel robe is the fact that it is so ingenious and forward thinking an item that it’s not even listed in Wikipedia as a form of towel. Check it out. Here’s the entry: Towel but, under types of towels, there is not one mention of it as an item of clothing. So, there you go, a towelrobe is so fashionable that it’s not even mentioned on the website which knows everything.

So, get ahead of the public, get ahead of the fashion pack, next time you’re at a loch, or being dined out at Gordon Ramsay michelin starred restaurants, why not wear a towel?

The Callanish Stones are the second most famous stones in the UK after the prehistoric Stonehenge and, of course, the far older stones of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

I was home for the weekend in Stornoway and and decided to see if there was now a tourist friendly route to cycle in Stornoway. Over the last few years the island has become more of a tourist attraction with cafes popping up in villages that previously only saw food when the weekly grocer’s van popper round.

I started the ride by heading north west in an anti-clockwise route but only because the wind was coming from the south west and I wanted it behind me when I finished. part from that the ride can be done in either direction.

First up (1), on the tourist trail is the Arnol blockhouse, a tradtional croft restored and rebuilt. But, ignore that and look in the field next door where you can find the local bus.

Next up (2), you have the Broch, an ancient stone keep/castle/no one is quite sure what it for. My dad always used to say there was a secret tunnel which led out of the Broch so the clans could escape. When we were young we would spend hours looking for the tunnel until, a few years later, when we were older, he admitted there was no tunnel because “why would they have a tunnel which the enemy could enter and bypass the walls?”. We said “what about Star Wars and the Death Star, that had a tunnel?” because, when you are 10, history and science fiction are exactly the same thing.

After the Broch, head to the Callanish Stones (3) and the 15% climb to get up to it. Thankfully the climb is less than 20 metres.

(The Callanish Stones are, of course, not as good as the Calla Stones because the Callanish Stones are only Callan-ish…)

The stones are fantastic and only ruined by the fact that they are completely pointless. No one knows what they are or what they do or why they are there. It’s a mystery and one that I have to say I SOLVED!

Yes, I know what the Callanish Stones are for because, earlier in the ride I passed another stone and it had a sign beside it.

And I can’t believe that no one has put two and two together and realised that if that one stone can be a scratching stone then the Callanish Stones must have been a pre-historic cat sanctuary and they needed lots of stones for cats to scratch. I will write to Tony Robinson and get Time Team on the case!

The final stretch (4) is the old road from Stornoway. Don’t carry onto the main road as it’s usually busy with people driving to town and there’s nothing particularly scenic to cut straight up. Instead the back road leads you up to the top of the moor and, in the summer, you’ll find people cutting peat.

Overall, there’s not many hills but it is a very choppy route. There’s some great views of both the Hebridean moor and the North Atlantic when you get to the west coast.