Good morning, Pardo.

And I just lay there for a second, not annoyed exactly, more caught out, because it had been a genuinely average week. Friday's tempo never happened. I'd spent Thursday morning at the doctor's instead of doing anything useful with a heart rate monitor. And here was my coach, first line of the day, handing me the nickname like a participation medal.

The whole point of him was that I wouldn't get congratulated for getting out of bed. He'd just congratulated me for getting out of bed.

I didn't reply straight away. I just thought, no. Not this week, pal.

To explain why that mattered enough to fix on a Sunday, I have to go back a fortnight, to a train.

The name came first. That was the mistake.

When I built the coach I gave him a personality before I gave him a job. Three influences, I told myself. John Wooden for the standards. Phil Maffetone for the patience. Ted Lasso for the belief.

Then I named him Ted.

Took me about a month, somewhere between Crewe and Birmingham on a Friday I should have been prepping for the MBA, to work out what I'd actually done.

I just thought Ted was a better name. The better coach was John.

That's it, really, that's most of this post. The name was better. The coach underneath it was worse. Nobody warns you that when you give a machine a personality, the character quietly starts following the name instead of the brief. Every morning got a bit warmer. A bit more "you've got this." A bit more forgiving of the session that hadn't happened.

Until one morning I read the briefing and thought, with something close to disappointment, maybe Ted's too nice now.

Which is a strange thing to feel about software you wrote yourself. But I did feel it. I'd built a coach who let me off, and I know exactly what I do with being let off.

I didn't want to be let off lightly and be congratulated just for getting out of bed. I wanted to earn it.

The rebuild

So we took him apart and put him back together in three gears, in order.

John Wooden is the default. Standards, fundamentals, the unglamorous thing done properly and repeatedly. An ordinary Tuesday, no exceptions.

Brian Clough is the edge. Short sentences, no cushioning, saved for exactly one thing: a session missed, nothing in the calendar to explain it, no word from me. Silence, dressed up as forgetting.

Ted Lasso is the ceiling, and he doesn't speak until the work's actually been done.

The name stayed. It's a joke on the reader now, not a job description.

And then I fell for the other one

A few days into the rebuild, reading over Clough's lines, I actually sent this:

I'm starting to like Brian!

Caught myself doing the exact same thing, pointed the other way. I picked Ted because the name was warm and the character followed it. Now Brian had all the good lines, and I could feel myself wanting the whole coach to follow him instead. Six more months of that and I don't have a coach, I've got a heckler with a training plan.

Twice built, twice caught leaning on the coach I fancied rather than the one I needed. At some point that's not a bug, it's a personality trait.

The night the legs turned out fine anyway

Before any of what follows, one Wednesday night worth keeping separate from the noise around it.

8 July, gone ten at night, still properly hot. Five reps of 400m, dodging dog walkers and their leads round the block because that's just what the route is at that hour during a heatwave. Prime dog time. Opening rep at 4:33/km, easing into it. Then three reps locked at exactly 4:00, like a metronome. Then the last one, unprompted, at 3:40, heart rate up to 170, the highest of the night.

Nobody told me to finish faster than I started. I just did.

I have set up a segment and everything in Strava. As I set it up, I am both the record holder and local legend. Come at me!

Worth remembering that line for later, because everything else this fortnight is about the plan falling apart. That Wednesday is the proof the engine underneath it never did.

A fortnight that mostly went sideways

Then, more or less immediately, it all got complicated. A strength session deferred for sleep. Then, the following Tuesday, football instead of intervals, and a note that still makes me laugh:

Don't let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.

That's Ted, quoting Wooden at me, and I quoted it right back at him, mid-excuse. Coaching myself with the coach's own line before he'd had the chance to.

The next day, England went out of the World Cup, and so did whatever was left of the week's discipline:

Shattered. England are out of the World Cup. I think I just need to get some proper sleep. We go again tomorrow.

Then a properly rough patch I won't dwell on: abdominal pain out of nowhere, a doctor's appointment instead of a run. It turned out fine, and not training was exactly the right call. A full week before any of this got fixed in code, I'd already half-written the fix myself:

Rather than run at 11pm at night, I'm prioritising a good night's sleep. I will do better next week. Reset required.

Saturday, the first run back. Bernard came, as he does.

Then Sunday morning. Which is where this post actually started.

The bug, and the rule that fixed it

The system had two separate instructions about who I get called, written weeks apart, and they'd quietly stopped agreeing. One said an honest week, explained rather than skipped in silence, still counted as clean. Neither was actually what I meant.

Lying there on Sunday I worked out what I did mean, and it's now written into him word for word:

Pardo is a cheer for getting the work done. Alistdair with sympathy is right, but it doesn't deserve a Pardo. That should be a triumph only.

So that's the rule. The name tracks the work, not the excuse. Any session missed, explained or not, and I'm Alistdair until a fresh Monday. But the excuse still matters, in the tone: a doctor's appointment gets Alistdair spoken to kindly. Silence gets him told off properly. Sympathy and celebration, finally two different things instead of one blurry one.

I can be looked after without being applauded. Feels like a fairly grown-up thing to have taught a robot.

Worth going back to that Wednesday night now, the one with the segment and the terrace-worthy self-praise. Everything in between was the plan falling apart, not the fitness. The legs held. Only the calendar needed fixing.

The chant I'd already written

While we were untangling all this, I went back through the character file and found something I'd genuinely forgotten was still sitting in there: a full football-terrace chant, reserved for exactly two things. A perfect week. The day the sub-20 falls.

I'd built that myself, right at the start, before any of this went wrong. Pardo Unlocked. The name of the whole blog was the punchline all along and I'd half forgotten I'd written it that well. Never once fired. Still sitting there, just as demanding as everything else I built this fortnight, only louder when it finally goes off.

Feels about right that fixing the everyday cheer brought it back in line with what I always wanted the big one to mean. Earned, the whole way up.

Two honest footnotes

Josh Kerr broke the mile world record on Saturday, having announced the attempt back in March and trained to the exact second the whole way there. He called his Project 222. Sub-20 means beating 1,200 seconds, so mine is Project 1199. I'll leave that there before it gets embarrassing.

And since the last post left a triathlon dangling in September: no, nothing yet. Not a length swum, not a mile ridden. The 5K is still the whole job for now.

There's a flat trail in Delamere with my name half on it already, and a world record that happened the same fortnight I was rewriting my own rulebook. More on both of those soon.

Even when he's disappointed in me

One last thing, because it's the detail I like best out of the whole fortnight. On the mornings the hard register fires, when it's just short sentences and no cushioning and nothing to hide behind, the email still signs off exactly the same way it always does.

...Ted.

Even mid telling-off. Especially mid telling-off. The consequence was always meant to be the absence of warmth, never the presence of anything worse, and somehow that one detail, unglamorous, easy to miss, is the bit that actually proves the whole three-gear idea works. He's still in your corner on the day he's most annoyed with you. That was always the design. Took a coach built from three different men, and a fortnight of him getting it slightly wrong, to actually prove it.

Tuesday intervals. Friday tempo. Earn the name back by Sunday.

...Ted.

Because I told a robot I would.

That morning I'd driven to Harrogate and back to say goodbye to my cousin. A round trip, a funeral, the sort of day that empties you out in every way a day can empty a person. By the time I got home there was every reason in the world to leave the session. Nobody would have said a word.

Ted doesn't do reasons, though. Ted does the plan.

So I did it. Down on the floor at ten o'clock, sweating through the hottest evening of the summer, running on nothing. And here's the daft part I didn't see coming; the satisfaction of getting it done was unreal.

My cousin was ten years older than me. One of those people I looked up to my whole life without ever quite getting round to telling him. It was unexpected, and it was a shock. The funeral was a celebration of his life, which is exactly the send-off he deserved, and the rest of it I'll keep with my family, where it belongs.

I lost my brother last August. Grief, it turns out, doesn't queue up and wait its turn. The new one reached back and reopened the old one, and for a while there the two of them just sat together.

And then, that same night, I did split squats on a garage floor.

I won't pretend the two things are joined by anything tidy. But doing a hard, pointless, deliberate thing, on a night the world has taken everything else off you, is maybe not as pointless as it looks from the outside.

Right. The running.

No time trial this fortnight, or rather, none I haven't already told you about. The big one was the birthday 5K, the 29th, which I'd fast-tracked as a little homage to turning forty-three. You watched that unfold in Split 01, horse and broken bridge and all: 24:36, four minutes and thirty-seven seconds the wrong side of the dream. So the number's already on the board, and it hasn't moved. This isn't a Split about the number.

This is a Split about the state I was in around it.

Because here's how a taper is supposed to go. You back off in the days before the test, you bank some rest, you turn up fresh and fast. Textbook. And here's how mine actually went: the fatigue I'd been outrunning finally caught me, all at once, and "deload" quietly rebranded itself as "do-nothing."

The evidence, if you want it, reads like a charge sheet.

The 23rd: fell asleep putting my daughter to bed, lying next to her, and woke up with the evening gone. The 24th: too hot to move, and honestly the rest felt like the wiser call. The 27th: a long day at uni, then straight into my niece's birthday BBQ, and any window for a run escaped out the back door while I wasn't looking, real fatigue sitting where it had been. The 1st of July: rundown, and in genuine need of proper rest. Add a funeral and the hottest week of the year to that, and you have a fortnight that had absolutely no intention of going to plan.

Life had a fortnight going spare. Life won.

And yet.

Here's the thing I keep having to relearn, apparently. It bent. It didn't break.

The strength session after the funeral still happened, at ten at night, and I've told you how that one felt. The 400m intervals held together better than I had any right to expect: five reps, no fade, and the last one clocked 3:53 per kilometre, which matched the quickest of the lot. On the 3rd I got out for a threshold run and it just felt good to be running again, the kind of good that reminds you why you started. I even stopped to take some photos. Winsford, but not as we know it.

And when I actually went back through the log, the fortnight I'd airily written off as a lazy, do-nothing wash told a very different story. The intervals. The time trial. The threshold that felt so good to be back out for. A couple more easy runs on top, and a daft lunchtime football I'd forgotten I'd even played. I'd convinced myself I'd done nothing. The log, as ever, begged to differ.

Now. The robot.

You'll remember Ted is the coach I built, the one who emails me at half seven every morning with firm opinions about my legs. What I maybe undersold is how much of my life, currently, is spent quietly fixing him. This fortnight served up two beauties.

The first was a scheduling row. Ted told me, in the morning email, to go for a run. So I went for a run. Model citizen. And then that evening, reviewing the day, he told me off. Not for the run. For skipping the strength session. The strength session he had not, at any point, mentioned. I had followed his instructions to the letter and still ended up in trouble with my own software. All sorted, in the end. Another bug filed and squashed.

The second one I'm still a bit fond of. I'd noted in my diary to Ted that I was staying up to watch the football. Fine. Reasonable. And the next morning he emailed to check I'd enjoyed the tennis. I don't watch the tennis. I have never told him I watch the tennis. Somewhere in his little electronic head, football had become tennis overnight, and he'd served it back to me with genuine warmth. Another bug, fixed before nine.

His verdict on the fortnight, once the dust settled? Another deload. Strict orders to be in bed before midnight. The robot, it turns out, can read a tired man better than the tired man can.

The best evening of the lot, though, wasn't a session at all.

Another cracking evening out on the trail, the light doing that thing it does in early July. And then, up ahead, a fox. An actual fox, stood on the path like it owned the deeds. Bernard clocked it roughly half a second before I did, and the fox, being no fool, was gone before it became a conversation. Then, further along, a cat. Fox and then cat, in a single evening. All that was missing was a squirrel to complete the set and crown the whole thing the perfect storm.

It never came. Just short. And watching him scan the treeline afterwards for the squirrel that owed him an appearance, I have never seen a dog so close to greatness and so quietly robbed.

So what did I learn, in the fortnight life won?

That the plan is not the point. The plan is a stick to aim at, and life is allowed to knock it out of your hand now and then, and stacking up the runs I somehow did through a fortnight like that one is a win by any honest reckoning. I'm learning to let the plan bend without treating it as a failure, which for a man who set a target of nineteen-fifty-nine and meant the fifty-nine, is no small thing.

And the honest kicker, the one I can't dress up: I slept woefully this fortnight. Some of that was the heat. Some of it was grief. And some of it, if I'm being straight with you, was lying awake at stupid o'clock getting obsessed with this blog. The very blog meant to keep me sane. There's a lesson in there somewhere. I'll get to it once I've had some sleep.

Next fortnight, then. Another deload, bed before midnight like I've been told, and then back to the real work: Tuesday intervals, Friday tempo, the slow business of turning 24:36 into something that starts with a nineteen. My cousin knew how to play the game. I'm still learning. But I'm out there, most days, trying.

And as of this week, I've got a reason to be out there that I didn't have a fortnight ago.

It began, as these things now do, with a WhatsApp group. Three of us, me, Dave and Gilbo, conjured into existence one evening out of absolutely nowhere. No warning, no context. Which is a very Dave way to start a thing. Dave McDave: an old friend from up in Scotland, the kind you don't speak to for the best part of a year and then pick straight back up mid-sentence. And he'd had an idea, which where Dave is concerned is always cause for mild alarm. There's a triathlon in September. The three of us did one together the best part of eighteen years ago. He reckons it's high time we did it again. And, he announced to the group, he's getting in shape for it.

It has a 5k on the end.

Now here's the part that's been rattling round my skull ever since. That triathlon, eighteen years back, might be the only time in my entire life I have actually run a sub-20. Might be. Because here's the catch, and long-suffering readers will enjoy this one: I have no proof. None. No watch, no Strava, no record of any kind. Just a hazy memory, a number I'm not altogether sure I'm allowed to believe, and two witnesses, Dave and Gilbo, neither of whom I would trust to remember a shopping list, let alone a 5k split from eighteen years ago.

And here's the genuinely annoying bit. At the time, I didn't think the sub-20 was any kind of achievement. Barely registered it. It was just the run leg of a triathlon, and in my head I had far bigger fish to fry. What actually bothered me, what I stewed on for days afterwards, was that I'd gone too soft on the bike, and that halfway through the swim I'd bottled the front crawl and switched to breaststroke like a man quietly conceding. Twenty-five-year-old me ran the exact number forty-three-year-old me now lies awake chasing, and spent the rest of that day cross about his swim technique. If I could reach back through eighteen years and give him a shake, I would.

So there's really only one option, isn't there. Go back. Do it again. On the record this time. And beat the ghost of my twenty-five-year-old self, who is, I'd remind you, the very same smug article still convinced I'm built for this sort of thing.

And beat Gilbo and Dave, obviously. The very same two witnesses, now doubling as the only two men standing between me and doing it all again. That part is not up for discussion. Although, in the spirit of the honesty this blog runs on, I do have a concern about Dave's "getting in shape." By my reckoning, our Dave has not meaningfully exercised in at least ten of the last eighteen years. He'll do well to turn up at all, let alone finish. He's enjoyed his Tennent's, bless him. Whatever base he's building from, it is a low one.

September, then. A finish-line 5k, a couple of old mates, and a personal best I might already own and cannot prove.

See you at the start line…

The Lockpick

• Current 5K form: 24:36 (birthday time trial, 29 June)
• Lifetime PB: 20:15. Target: sub-20:00 (~3:59/km). Gap: 4:37
• This fortnight's win: turning up anyway. Intervals, the threshold, and more besides, in a fortnight that deserved none
• This fortnight's stupid obstacle: the heat, the fatigue, and a robot who thinks I watch tennis
• Ted's verdict: another deload, bed before midnight, no arguments
• Bernard's verdict: the fox, the cat, and the squirrel that never showed. Just short of the perfect storm
• Next test: a triathlon in September, eighteen years on, with a ghost to beat. But first, sleep.

Pardo Unlocked / Bonus

Bonus drop: the Spain story, all of it

The robot is mine. I built it. This is, apparently, my life now.

I'll come back to the robot. Because the daft thing is, none of this was the plan. There was no grand scheme to be coached at dawn by my own software before I'd managed so much as a brew. It started somewhere far more ordinary, and far more annoying.

It started with the gym.

I'd re-joined. Full of good intentions, direct debit and all. And I discovered, quite quickly, that I hate the gym. Not the training. The training I actually like. I mean everything wrapped around it. The commute that somehow eats the best part of an hour you didn't have. The music, always either aggressively nothing or someone shouting. And the vibe. That specific gym vibe. Mirrors and grunting and a fella doing his ninth set of scrolling on the one machine you need.

The moment it really crystallised: flat on my back under a loaded bar, attempting to press roughly half my own body weight, while balancing a pair of noise-cancelling headphones on my head in a doomed effort to drown out the drum and bass thumping down through the ceiling. There is no dignity in that. There is, I'd decided, no dignity in any of it.

So I did the sums. I liked the workout. I hated the getting there. Could I keep the first and bin the second?

Enter the garage.

Nothing fancy. A rowing machine. A bench. A set of adjustable dumbbells that quietly do the job of a whole rack without being a whole rack. Cold in winter, I won't lie. But it's mine, it's ten steps from the back door, there's no commute and no queue for anything. And the music is mine. Played out loud. No headphones balanced on anything.

And here's the part that actually mattered. More than I realised at the time.

Before the garage, working out meant leaving. It meant announcing I was off to the gym, usually at precisely the wrong moment, and then vanishing for the best part of two hours. And coming home to a house that had, quite reasonably, got on without me. To a wife and a daughter (and a dog) who'd all clocked that I'd picked dumbbells over the tea-time chaos. The grief on return was fair. I'd earned it.

The garage fixed all of that without me really planning it to. I found the sweet spot, too: nine o'clock at night. The day done, the household settled, the garage sat right there with no excuse left standing. Wife away or not, I can get the session in and still be in bed at a reasonable hour. Thirty feet away, not two hours gone. If someone needs me, I'm there. Sweaty, mid-row, but there. Nobody has to plan around it. Nobody has to resent it. The vibe, for the first time in ages, is right.

That should have been the end of it. A bloke, a garage, some dumbbells. Sorted.

It was not the end of it.

Because I wanted the routine to actually stick this time, and left to my own devices I'll cheerfully do chest twice a week and never once trouble my legs. So I asked ChatGPT to build me a sensible strength routine. Something structured. Something to stop me freelancing my way into an injury.

And somewhere in the middle of describing what I wanted, almost as an afterthought, I mentioned running. Just to round it out. General fitness. Bit of cardio. Nothing serious.

Which is when it came back to haunt me.

The sub-20. That target I'd set myself back in January, with all the confidence of a man in a good mood who has temporarily forgotten what running actually feels like. I'd buried it so well I'd genuinely forgotten it existed. And there it was, surfacing in a conversation about dumbbells, tapping me on the shoulder. Remember me?

I did a couple of sessions off the back of that. Strength in the garage, a bit of running bolted on the side. It was working. It was fine.

And then, of course, I had the thought. The thought that turns a grown man's fitness routine into a multi-week project with version control and a colour scheme.

Hang on. What could I actually build here? With Claude?

Now, I'd like to be clear about the scale of the overcorrection, because it matters. I had set out to make exercise simpler. To remove faff. To do fewer things, more easily, closer to home. And I answered that goal by building a piece of software that reads my runs, my strength sessions, my sleep, the weather and my calendar, and then writes me a personalised coaching email every single morning of my life.

I looked at a small amount of friction, and I thought: what this situation needs is an automation pipeline.

Which brings us back to half seven this morning. Kettle off. Email open. A thing I made with my own hands, telling me, kindly but firmly, what today holds.

I set out to spend less time on all this. I have never spent more time on anything.

More next time. Specifically: what happens when the machine you built starts telling you to run intervals at an ungodly hour on a Tuesday. And what it's like to actually go and do them. Because, for reasons I still can't fully explain, I do.

Whitegate Way. That flat old railway trail out past Winsford, the kind nobody photographs. Me, my watch, and my mate Ricky T.

I'd booked the day off for this, which probably tells you everything. It was my birthday, and I wanted to give the time trial the respect it deserved. Clear head, clear legs, not something crammed between two meetings. Ricky had taken leave too. Two grown men, annual leave, for a 5K. The stars, I decided, had aligned. It was meant to be.

Or so I thought.

Now, you need to know about Ricky T. Ricky's chasing the exact same thing I am: sub-20. Except he's about a minute up on me and a far more natural distance runner, the kind who makes it look like a pastime rather than a fight. On a good day, that drags me round to a better time than I'd ever manage alone. On a bad day, he just gently, apologetically, disappears up the trail. Hold that thought.

And Bernard. Bernard wasn't meant to come.

That was the whole plan. Leave the dog, run light, do the serious thing. But you try walking out of your own front door past a dog doing The Look. You know the one. Ears down, eyes up, the full this-is-how-it-ends-is-it routine. I lasted about four seconds. Late addition to the squad, then. Bernard: one, my race plan: nil, and we hadn't even laced up.

Quick context for anyone who's wandered in here: I'm a bloke from Winsford. Full-time job, an MBA quietly eating my evenings, and a dog eating everything else. This year I decided I'd run a sub-20 5K: twenty minutes for three-point-one miles, a clean, brutal, unarguable number. Today was the first proper look at how far off that actually is. The "before" photo, basically.

For the uninitiated: Bernard is a ten-year-old brown cockapoo, and ninety-nine percent of the time he is an impeccably behaved gentleman. The other one percent is squirrels. Show him a squirrel and the gentleman vanishes on the spot, replaced by a small brown wolf answering a call only he can hear. Lead be damned.

Understand though, Bernard is the real thing. A proper companion, loyal to a fault, who guards the house like the deeds are in his name and asks for nothing in return but to be in whatever room I happen to be in. Man's best friend, no notes. He contributes a great deal, mostly by doing very little. It's only squirrels that undo him.

He's ten now. In dog years that puts him at roughly twice my age. Because, oh, I should mention: I turned forty-three today. And yet he runs like a puppy let off for the very first time, every single time, while my head remains firmly convinced I'm twenty-five and built for this sort of thing. One of us has made peace with the calendar. It is not the one writing this blog.

Ricky and I had both said the number out loud, which between two runners is basically a blood oath. So we set off on the warm-up, the three of us, looking for a clean stretch of trail to do the damage on.

We found a horse.

There it was, out on the warm-up. A horse. On the trail. Enormous and entirely unbothered, doing whatever it is horses do, parked squarely across the clear stretch we'd earmarked for the main event. The plan had been simple and, in hindsight, adorable: warm up, turn round, run one clean hard 5k back. The horse had other ideas, and there's only four k of trail in that direction, so "just go further" wasn't on the menu either. So much for clean. We carried on, improvised, turned later than we'd meant to, and a tidy out-and-back 5k quietly arranged itself, with a personal insult built into the middle.

That insult being the broken bridge. If you run round here, you know the one: the trail dips down and then hauls you back up. On fresh legs it's a feature. On the wrong legs it's a tax, with interest. Remember it's there. I certainly would.

Then we went. And for one glorious kilometre, I was a runner.

First k: under four minutes. Three fifty-something, flying, lungs full, legs light, the lot. And I remember thinking (this is the funny part): oh, this is fine, this is easy, I've cracked it.

I had not cracked it.

And this is where the wheels properly came off. Last two k, I was in bits. And naturally that's when the broken bridge came back round, the dip and the climb, arriving exactly when I had nothing left to pay it. Heart rate north of 180 and still climbing, which the watch flagged with what I can only call concern. And (I'm not proud of this) somewhere in there I started running with my eyes shut. Only for a second at a time. Bargaining with the universe. Which is exactly as clever as it sounds when you're on a tree-lined trail, and I made firm, repeated, apologetic contact with several branches I never saw coming.

Ricky T, by now, was a dot. A lovely, encouraging dot, calling "keep going!" from a distance that made keep going feel largely theoretical.

But I kept going. Eyes shut, branches swinging, Bernard having the morning of his life, until we hit our line, the made-up one, at a time of:

24:36.

Not twenty-anything. A full four minutes and thirty-six seconds the wrong side of the dream.

And that's when the reality of it landed. Sub-20 isn't a stretch. It's a different postcode. There's a version of this blog where I pretend I'm closer than I am. And reader, this won't be that one.

Here's the bit I won't dress up with a joke, though. I'd come with intention, and I gave it everything I had on the day. The horse, the branches, all of it. Win or lose on the number, that was the reward. Doing a hard thing on purpose, with my mate up the trail and my dog losing his mind with joy, on a quiet stretch of Cheshire on a Monday morning the rest of the country spent working. That's the part the watch can't take off you.

The other reward came shortly after, at the Old Star. Full English. The lot. Earned, frankly, and eaten in the manner of a man who'd recently tried to expire on a railway line. And Ricky shouted breakfast. Wouldn't hear of anything else. Legend that he is.

So that's the start line. Twenty minutes is up the road with its arms folded. I'm 24:36 and one sausage heavier.

Oh, and for reasons I'll explain next time, the way I'm going about closing that four-and-a-half-minute gap is not to simply train harder like a normal person. It involves a robot. And a garage. And a frankly unreasonable amount of tinkering for a man who, honestly, just wanted to get fit without hating it. Longer story than it sounds.

More on that, and the morning the robot emailed me before I'd even had a brew, in Split 02…