In my bathroom there is a very expensive tube containing a lotion from a very expensive shop. Every time I see it, I snigger. It’s a hand creme by a company that really should know better given they charge the earth for something which is mostly just water but, clearly, they don’t, as they called this creme: “Hand Relief”.

I’m just glad it’s not run out as I don’t want to be asked by my wife to get some more when I’m in town and I have to pop into an expensive shop and ask the perfectly poised girl at the counter: “Can I get some hand relief?”

So, let’s all have a giggle and get that out of our system before I talk about massage guns – and this advert which either suggests a purpose similar to our lotion or a crime scene and the weapon used to kill her.

Either way, giggling over, let me say:

THIS GUN IS BRILLIANT!!!!!!

For the last three years I have gone for an annual physio check with a physiotherapist next to my office. She spends 45 minutes using her elbows and hands to mimic a sledgehammer to my back and she checks my posture and sets me up for the year. She is fantastic – https://glenberviephysio.com – and I’d recommend her once lockdown is over, however, with COVID outstaying it’s welcome like an unwanted party guest, it may be some time before I’ll see her again.

What’s worse, swimming helps stretch me out and helps fix wee niggle and pulls. But with the pools closed the pulls have started to become more common and I knew I was missing a massage to sort it out. So, I thought about getting a massage gun.

The only one I knew was the Theragun but it was far too expensive to take a chance on something I didn’t know would work – or even how it worked. At nearly £400 it would have been a big gamble. However, as I was checking reviews I found one which said that if you want a brand name then buy a Theragun but if you want another one that’s better, quieter and over £300 cheaper then buy a Sportneer – which was available for £70 on Amazon.

Now, £70 is worth a shot. Especially on Amazon when you can return it because…. err…. it didn’t work, honest, and if I’m telling a lie Mr Bezos then really, you can afford a little bit of fraud for being the richest man in the world and running an evil corporation that strangles small business and has a slave workforce but is so easy to use that we completely forgive it.

The Sportneer was easy to use. You just attach a had to a small pneumatic drill. You select a speed – from your mama’s ass whipping to kung fu fist of fury – and then hold it against which ever part of your body needs some relief. Wait, not relief, that’ll get us giggling again. Let’s say physio instead.

I tried it on my back and shoulders and over my clothes to keep this review PG friendly and I could feel instant relief from the tired and stiff points around my upper back and neck.

It was, and I say it again and make no apolgies for using capitals a second time, BRILLIANT!

After working on my back for 10 minutes and then swapping the head for another to work the neck I felt as good as a session with the physio. And while it can’t tell me if I’m still ‘balanced’ it did help work and ease the knots that had built up over the last few months.

This gun is BRILLIANT. As I’m sure are Theraguns but, if you want to spend £300 on something else instead then definitely check out the Sportneer massage gun.

Link: JEff Bezo’s Satanic Money Making Website

“Bonnie” is a good Scottish word. Literally. It means “good”. So, if you asked me what the weather was like today and I said “bonnie” then you would know that the weather was good, which is good as the weather is rarely good in Scotland. And, if it is good, you might ask yourself why not just say “good”, why have “bonnie” at all?

I think we have “bonnie” because we needed a word which was both a description and an exclamation. It is so rarely “good” that when things are good we get a surprise. “Bonnie” suggests a surprise.

You: “What’s the weather like today?”

Me (standing in welly’s and waterproofs): “I’ll just check by looking outside. Blimey. It’s dry. It’s a bonnie day! I better look out those shorts I wore 10 years ago the last time the sun came out!”

So, when I describe this video as “bonnie” I mean it with maximum praise. This video shows Rob Wardell, a Scottish cyclist and coach, attempt to break the fastest known time to cycle the West Highland Way, the 95 mile trail from Fort William in the Highlands to the edge of Glasgow. Most people take five to seven days to walk the West Highland Way. Rob tried to cycle it in less than nine hours…

But don’t watch this for the cycling – though the attempt at the record is a good draw to watch – watch it for that attempt being on the bonniest of bonnie days Scotland has ever seen. Perfect weather, perfect conditions and fantastic drone footage of the West Highland Way from start to finish. By the end you won’t care if he makes it or not as you’ll just want to skip back and watch anther flyby of Loch Lomond, Tyndrum and the Devil’s Staircase.

You can watch it here:

What do you do when you don’t have any races in the future? Run an old one instead!

The only races I have booked for this year are two races postponed from 2020: Celtman and the Caledonian Etape. With no guarantee either will take place and with no other races on the calendar I thought it would be fun to revisit some favourite races from previous years and run them myself. I’m also thinking that in a backwards year it would be fun to start at the finish and run them backwards too but I’m not sure my navigation skills are up for that. Whether forward or backward, the races would include:

• Kirkintilloch 12.5k;
• Glentress Trail Half Marathon;
• Loch Leven Half Marathon;
• The Balloch to Clydebank Half Marathon; and
• The Forth Road Bridge 10k.

But then I had another thought – why stop at running races I’ve ran before? I would like to support the organisers and clubs by running the races and paying my entry fee. It doesn’t quite feel right to run these races without giving something back.

Instead, I’ve started to look at races which don’t exist anymore and where I wouldn’t need to show any support to anyone as there is no one to support. Brilliant, I thought, before I realised that if the races don’t exist anymore then how am I going to find them or the routes to follow? That’s where this website became invaluable: http://www.scottishdistancerunninghistory.scot

Scottish Distancing Running History provides a great guide to old Scottish races and the runners who took part. From that I was able to find such races as the Princes Street Mile, the Glasgow to Edinburgh Relay and Scotland’s first mass participation marathon: the Inverclyde Marathon.

And from that I had an idea: as part of training for Celtman I should aim to run a marathon in April but as there are no marathons and we may still be in lockdown then why not run the old Glasgow marathon route, a race which was always ran at the end of March?

Between 1979 and 1988 the Glasgow Marathon was one of the biggest marathons in Scotland. It’s legacy continues today in the Great Scottish Run, which has started and finished in the same spots – George Square and Glasgow Green – and followed much of the second half of the race. It would be great to recreate it – though I’ll refrain from wearing a singlet, tiny shorts and sweatbands like every 80s runner.

Well, that didn’t turn out as planned…

Normally I’d post a snapshot of my monthly training but that would be pointless this month as I did almost no training at all. At first, it was for a very good reason. My daughter, Rebecca, was born on Wednesday 6th January. All very exciting and, because I knew it was coming – the whole nine months pregnancy does give you a few warning signs that an infant is on the way! – I knew I would need to adapt to training around her this month.

Not that training was the only thing to change. After a week at home Mrs TwinBikeRun turned to our daughter and said: “Rebecca, is Daddy’s beard scratchy?”

I’d not shaved in over a week. It was still too soon to call my middle age bumfluff a beard but it had ambitions.

“Are you telling me to shave it?” I asked her.

“I’m not saying anything,”she said “but Rebecca would prefer it.”

Damn. It was only a week and Mrs TwinBikeRun had tried to ‘turn the wean against us’!

So, in that first week I didn’t do any training, or shaving, and just tried to help out with getting Baby TwinBikeRun into a routine. Once we knew the times she was likely to sleep through the day in the second week I started to either go for a run or jump on the bike for 90 minutes.

This is easy, I thought. We can feed her, change her, play with her and then have some time for Celtman.

And then we all got COVID.

Not that we knew we had COVID. My wife felt tired one day, I had a sniffle another day and then my daughter got tested as part of a routine check and she tested positive, which meant that we’d all had it because she hadn’t met anyone else.

While we’ve been lucky compared to others who have had it, it has meant that we had to self-isolate for 10 days from the point the last one of us had symptoms.

Which meant for most of the month I wasn’t able to do anything because, if I was self-isolating, then I wasn’t doing any exercise in order to get healthy after having COVID, even though I didn’t know I’d had it until after I’d had it.

However, everyone is well and beyond the boredom and frustration that comes from staying in one place, I can’t complain about not starting Celtman training this month, not compared to the alternatives. Instead, I look forward to starting in February.

Update from Celtman

With the uncertainty caused by COVID as to whether Celtman will be possible in June it was good to get the following update this week. It’s good to see that a decision as to whether it may go ahead will be made in March so that everyone can prepare. I suspect we’ll see a race in June but it will only be open to UK based entrants.