For the last few months I have had an itchy back, which is annoying, as I can’t quite reach the itchy parts without first stretching and warming up with a full Yoga practice. Instead I’ve learned to scratch using the corner of a table, like a dog.

To help my skin I switched to using a non-soap body wash. If you don’t know, a non-soap body wash is one which doesn’t produce a lather and is meant to be kinder on your skin. The only side effect is that it’s impossible to tell which parts of your body you’ve washed as there no suds to wash off. You might as well be rubbing your body with an invisible gel. There’s nothing to see. How can I be clean if there’s nothing to wash off?

While the non-soap body wash helped reduce my itching I thought it would be an idea to check with my GP if there was anything else I could do. And he told me something I never thought I would hear. He said:

“Wash less.”

“Like don’t take a shower?” I asked

“You need to shower less,” he said, “washing too much can dry your skin out and you only need to shower a few times a week, not every day.”

I might have fibbed. When he asked “Do you shower every day?” I said “yes” because I didn’t want him to think I was a dirty stopout. But, with a shower every two days and often more than one shower in a day as I might shower in the morning then shower again after doing some execise, I probably do average 7 – 8 showers a week.

“It’s too much,” he said, “I can see from your back and neck that your skin is not getting enough moisture. Just use some moisturiser and don’t worry about washing every day.”

Like I said I never thought a doctor would want me to be less hygienic but, according to him, washing less is more hygienic than washing more.

Of course, if you start to smell, or start looking like you’ve spent all day jumping up and down in muddy puddles, you should still wash. Washing less may improve your skin, but it’s not going to improve your social skills if no one will venture near you.

So, if you’re currently on a training programme for a summer event and training most days, then remember that it’s okay to not wash. Not washing may be the key to getting you the start line fit and healthy (if not smell free)!

Every beach in Orkney must be a viking beach. Just as every pub in Glasgow is a stabbing pub. They are one and the same. You can’t find a non-viking beach just as you won’t find a pub in Glasgow that hasn’t had some point had someone say “R use looking at ma pint!”

But just beside Scapa Flow, you can find the titular Viking Beach itself, a name that stuck out on the map when I was looking for somewhere to swim and with a beach that looked decent, at least on the satellite view.

My mistake though was to drive past all the calm seas and other beaches on the way and to still swim in this one despite the strong breakers on the shore.

Orkney has hundreds of beaches, and, around Scapa Flow, you can chose many that are either side of the island and only minutes apart. Yet I still carried on with the one that had the strongest current.

The beach was shallow and I was never in any danger. I remained entirely in areas where I could still stand up. But it was a tough swim and I was glad I also had Mrs TwinBikeWife onshore as a spotter.

An important lesson for today’s swim: if the conditions look dicey, just change location. Or don’t swim.

And an important reminder: don’t swim alone.

REVIEW

Ease of Access: There’s a small car park next to the beach with room for 6 – 8 cars. The car park also has a toilet block, which is handy for getting changed – and for washing sand from feet in the sink!

Water quality:  There’s also plenty of room to swim before the beach starts to drop away.

Swim Quality: I imagine it would be great on a good day, see above.

Other People: Despite it being a sunny evening, no one else was around.

Would I go back: Yes but I would check the waves first.

There are some secrets that are so secret that not even the President knows about them. Those secrets are above “Classified”, they are more closely guarded than “Top Secret”, they are only known to a select few as “Swimming Pool Opening Times”.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to find the opening times for a swimming pool on any council website. Glasgow City Council can easily tell you if their gyms are open, but if you want to know whether a swimming pool is open, or, even worse, whether the sauna will be open too, then you might as well have been asking for nuclear secrets. 

I used to swim regularly in Tollcross Swimming Pool, Glasgow’s only pool with a 50m pool, but I stopped after I realised the only way to find out if the pool was open was to turn up as anything written on their website had to be read Jamie Oliver style: with a pinch of salt.

Highland Council is no better. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to work out from its website whether Dingwall swimming pool would be open in the morning for a 7am swim. In the end, I could only confirm the leisure centre would be open as every link to a swim timetable led nowhere. I would just have to turn up and see.

Luckily, it was open, though whether you can use that as guidance for any other days, I’m not so sure. I don’t have the clearance.

Cost: £8 as a non-member. Pricy.

Facilities: £1 for a locker.  Decent size cubicle and nice and clean changing area. 

Swimming pool: Having grown up with a swimming pool that had a viewing gallery on the first floor, it felt reassuringly familiar to see this 1970s design in action again. The pool was divided into lanes and was 25m. Curiously, the steps/ladder into the pool was on the opposite side to the entrance into the pool from the changing facilities. Why not have it at the same side? Why make people walk to the other side? As I say, there is no logic to swimming pools.

Other facilities? A jacuzzi and steam room. There was also a flume pipe sticking out of an outer wall but I couldn’t see any evidence of it in the pool itself. Where does the flume go? Don’t ask, no one will tell you!

Busy? 10 – 15 people first thing on a Thursday. I was the fastest but I was also one of the youngest. 

Recommended? Yes.

In the world of sports, we’re so fixated on going forward. We run forward, we throw forward, we score goals that are, by definition, in front of us. Even sports that seem to go backward, like the backstroke in swimming or the high jump where you fall backward over the bar, are just clever ways of propelling yourself in a forward direction. And let’s not forget the defenders in team sports who backpedal like their life depends on it.

But what if we flipped the script? What if we embraced the art of regression? I’ve concluded that the world needs a truly backward sports competition, a monumental celebration of going in the opposite direction. And so, I’ve created the Reverse Olympics, or as I like to call them to avoid a very stern letter from a certain committee in Lausanne, the SCIPMYLO Games.

At the SCIPMYLO Games, the concept is simple: everything is reversed. And I’m not talking about a subtle twist on an existing sport. I’m talking about a full-on, head-over-heels, “Are you sure this is a good idea?” kind of backward.

For our inaugural games, we’ll have a lineup of events that will challenge the very notion of what it means to be an athlete.

Forget the 100-meter dash. Our athletes will line up at the finish line, facing the starting blocks. The pistol fires, and they must sprint backward down the track. The race isn’t over when they cross the starting line; it’s over when both feet are on the blocks and their hands are on the ground, a position that’s both a nod to traditional sprinting and a fantastic opportunity for some spectacular falls. It’s a true test of balance, spatial awareness, and the ability to not trip over your own two feet.

Or what about the Under-Hurdles: Running forward is still the goal here, but the objective has changed. Instead of gracefully leaping over hurdles, our competitors must contort their bodies to go under them. Picture a line of athletes performing a chaotic, high-speed limbo. The winner is the one who can slide, duck, and roll their way to the finish line without getting stuck or, worse, running into a hurdle and creating a domino effect of human bowling pins.

Or the Backward Javelin? Now, this is a tricky one. While a good backward throw might be a sight to behold, safety is paramount. We wouldn’t want to ask anyone to catch a pointy stick flying at 90 mph. That’s a liability nightmare. So, we’ve replaced it with the Discus Return. The athlete launches the discus, and a brave (and well-padded) volunteer must then throw it back to them from the same distance. Points are awarded for a successful catch, with bonus points for a no-look catch and a medal for not needing to be escorted to the medical tent.

If the world of sports can embrace new formats like the high-energy T20 cricket or the fast-paced, digitalized indoor golf leagues, why can’t we introduce a competition that challenges the very nature of winning?

I think I’m on to a winner with the SCIPMYLO Games. Or a loser. Maybe we should even reverse the medals and award gold to the person who comes in last, recognizing that coming in dead last in the most ridiculous way possible is, in itself, a form of victory.

The possibilities are endless at the SCIPMYLO Games! All I need is a benevolent benefactor-perhaps a Gulf state with a penchant for the absurd and a spare £10 billion for the broadcasting rights. With that kind of investment, I can guarantee more people will tune in to watch the Backward Javelin than the entire World Club football championships. It’s not just a sport; it’s a spectacle of glorious failure, and who doesn’t want to watch that?

I like picking a classic band or artist and listening to all their albums in order to see how they’ve changed over the years. Earlier this year I listened to all of R.E.M’s albums and realised that they had released two albums that I had never heard a single song from. Admittedly, for one of the albums, it was for good reasons (rubbish). But for the second album, their final album in fact, it was great and a good surprise to find another decent R.E.M. album.

You have to be careful though, when picking a band. You don’t want to pick a band with too many albums. R.E.M. was okay but Tupac Shakur has ten thousand albums, even though he died only having released two. While Bob Dylan or Neil Young would take the rest of my life to listen to as they release albums and bootlegs and b-sides and live albums faster than you can listen to them.

Currently I’m listening to Radiohead. A nice, easy to manage 12 albums. And, having reached King of Limbs (album 11) I realised that I’d not listened to it since I ran the Kinross to Lossiemouth Half Marathon in 2012.

It’s not that it’s a bad album, I just had a very bad experience with it. I started listening to it on the start line and then, what felt like five hours later, I reached mile one.

Can an album slow down time? My answer is ‘yes’. Every song is so slow and languid that it felt like I was running and not moving. Time had slowed to a crawl. The ground was fresh cement. My feet could barely rise. Oh God, when will a tune start?!?!?

Since then, I must have avoided ever listening to it, even though I love Radiohead and will often listen to one of their albums. Just not this one.

After three miles I switched to Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Fantasy and time sped up, I sped up. I was running, finally. But, ironically, given Kanye’s recent right wing views and dodgy behaviour, I don’t think that this will be an album I will ever listen to again either.

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!