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.

Because we’re twins it’s easy to remember Iain Twinbikerun’s birthday. It’s the same as mine! Easy!

This year I gave him a gift like no other because no other face mask has ears – or a tongue. Or make him look like a rabid collie. And this gift is special because, despite all the rules and regulation about wearing a facemark to protect people from COVID-19, he has a mask that shops will beg him to take off when he tries to go in.

I had three goals this month: one was to ride to complete a circuit of the Western Isles west coast; to swim at least one 3K swim and to run a half marathon. At time of writing I’ve completed two of them – the bike and run – but not yet the third, the swim. Although I am hoping to complete it this weekend, weather permitting.

I’m still not following any training plan other than trying to ‘do something’ five to six days a week. As September approaches and the weather starts to turn I have thought whether my ‘do something’ should morph into ‘follow a plan’ but I still think I’m too early for that. Why follow a plan when I could just be following whatever I want to do that day? If legs feel heavy, then take an easy spin indoors on the bike while watching YouTube. Feeling good, go for a longer ride outdoors. In short, this August update is more about marking process than sharing anything useful. So, in an attempt to justify this blog then I will share one thing I have found useful over the last two months:

This simple and easy flapjack recipe. And my top tip – swap the golden syrup for maple syrup.

Twinbikerun? Nah, this month it’s twinbikerunfood.

Back in May I started my challenge to try and run as many streets near my house in Glasgow in one month. You can find out how I got on here. But I didn’t stop when I got to the end of May. I loved finding new streets that I’d never seen despite being only a few minutes from my front door. And I loved that I was now getting a real sense of where I lived and how neighbourhoods changed even from one side of a street to the other. So, I carried on and this is what I’ve learned 25 runs later:

• Glasgow may be the home of world famous architect Charles Rennie McKintosh but did you know that, before he became a famous painter, MC C Escher also designed Glasgow’s streets. It must be easy to run an American city with identical blocks making it easy to navigate and criss cross. Instead Glasgow resembles an Escher painting with streets that you run for miles and miles only to find yourself back at the start and running in the opposite direction. I swear that the film Inception was filmed in Glasgow and the famous scene of Leonardo Di Caprio showing Paris fold in on itself was actually filmed in Clarkston and required no special effects at all. If you’re thinking of running every streets then pick somewhere flat and straight and ideally somewhere that doesn’t require you to navigate a maze worth of a minotaur.
• After 10 or so runs you’re starting perimeter will expand. You will need to run for five minutes just to get to an area you’ve not already covered. By 20 runs you’re probably running a mile to get to new streets. That means two miles of your run will be spent getting to and from the streets you’re ticking off. There is no way to stop this that doesn’t involve a car. I don’t know if using a car to get to places is within the spirit of running every street. It is called ‘running every street’, not ‘getting dropped off and then running every street’. I suspect by the 30th run I will be driving though as my runs will basically consist of running to a street, then, exhausted having got there, ticking it off and then running home.
• You do run longer than if you went out for a non ‘running every street’ run. It does give you that thought in your mind to just run another street or block or area before coming home. If you want to train for a marathon then running every street is good practice. Perhaps not good practice for an ultra-marathon though as you’ll never be able to follow a trail for 50 miles without going paranoid about passing all the tracks leading off in other directions.
• And, finally, having reached the milestone of day 25 and having run on average 10km every run I do intend to carry on. Not just because I’m still enjoying it but because I still haven’t completed the page of my Glasgow street map showing all the streets near me.

Saunas and steam rooms are crazy. I’ve mentioned that before. See blog here. But gyms are no better. When I look back I can’t help thinking why I thought any of this was acceptable.

Only in a gym would you see a girl and boy swap places on a weights machine and kiss each time they stopped while shouting “Smash it, babe!”. Not just once, not just twice, but three times, which means six times as they were each doing three sets. Smash it, babe. Smooch. Smash it, babe. Smooch. Smash it…. Stop it. This is a gym, not a kissing booth.

Only in the gym would you see someone taking a selfie in the changing rooms while flexing a bicep. I don’t care how big your bicep is and how keen you are to show it to the world, can you not show them my bare bum in the background too?

Only in the gym do you pull your hood over your head even though your running on a treadmill and it keeps bouncing off your bonce every twenty seconds. Why are you even wearing a hoodie anyway? Uisean Bolt didn’t wear a hoodie to run the 100 metres. Mo Farah doesn’t shop in George for Asda for his running gear? Why are you even wearing a hoodie? And why does it have no sleeves??!?

Only in the gym is it acceptable to have an entourage. Anywhere else and it would be a group or a gang or a gathering. In the gym, the five of you hanging out at the weights rack can only be described as an entourage, which is French for wallys because all of them are wearing trackie bottoms, a sleeveless hoodie – and a cap. Which leads me to…

Only in the gym will you see someone with superglue on their head. Yes, superglue. Because it can only be superglue keeping that cap on their heads because it stays on their head even when they lie back on a bench and press 200 pounds. Why does the cap not fall off? Does working out make you immune to the universal laws of gravity?

Only in the gym can someone have an orgasm louder than Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally and no one bats an eyelid. Who knew that lowering a bar would lead to so much joy you have to scream: “Oooooooohhhh Aaaaaaaahhhhhh Ooooooooohh” like Nick The Headless Horseman at an orgy.

And, of course, there’s only one thing worse that you can see at the gym. The one thing I’m glad I can no longer see while gyms remain in lockdown – yourself in the mirror. There’s no worst sight than catching yourself halway through a rep with a face that suggests you’ve just had a stroke while being slapped red raw with an extra big kipper.

Gyms should remain shut. Or at least all mirrors should be removed from gyms before they’re allowed to re-open.