Pardo Unlocked / Start Here
Start Here
A normal chap chasing a stupid, specific number. And Ted the AI robot he built to help, annoy, judge, and brutally call me out.
Right. Quick version, because you have a life.
I am 43. My 5K sits at 24:36. I want 19:59. Not "around twenty." Nineteen fifty nine. The stupid specificity is the entire point.
Rather than train sensibly like a normal person, I built a robot coach called Ted. Ted reads my sleep, my runs, my strength sessions, my excuses, and my fragile ego, then tells me what to do about them. I still have to do the actual running. This blog is the live record of whether any of it works.
The name
Quick thing about the name, because it earns its keep here.
I'm Alistdair. That's the bloke who has to get out and run.
Pardo is what everyone called me in my twenties. Mates, then their mates, then a few hundred people I'd never actually met who somehow only knew me by it. For a good while it more or less buried my real name. It was the going-out name. The good-times name. The one that turned up once the work was already done.
So that's the deal on this blog. Alistdair does the graft: the early alarms, the intervals, the wet Tuesdays, the sessions I'd rather quietly skip. Pardo is what gets unlocked when the graft's actually been done. Work hard, play hard. No work, no play. Ted runs the whole thing on exactly that rule, and only lets Pardo off the leash after a clean week. So far I've earned it precisely never.
The cast
- Alistdair is me. The one doing the running, or finding reasons not to. Pardo is the same bloke, unlocked, once the week's been clean.
- Ted is the robot coach. Blunt, data-obsessed, patient, occasionally right, frequently annoying, weirdly invested in me. He is the door, not the room. A personality combination of all my favourite coaches, even fictional ones!
- Bernard is the ten year old cockapoo. A truly loyal legend of a dog. Runs with me rain, wind or shine, guards the house the rest of the time.
- The family is a wife and a daughter. They couldn't give a crap about any of this but like that it keeps me busy!
Where the stories live
Two series, both on the home page. Sub-20 is the live chase, the one this whole site is named after. Begin at Split 01, and Split 02 is where Ted turns up. Siesta is the back catalogue: nothing to do with running, just the best part of six months on the Andalusian coast through the strangest stretch of the pandemic.
The deal
Every couple of weeks I send a Split: what the number did, what changed, what went wrong, what Ted said, and what I thought about what Ted said. Honest, specific, no motivational-poster nonsense, no spam. If the idea of watching a middle aged man negotiate with a robot over a single second appeals to you, put your email in below.
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