Monday morning. Most of the country is logging on for the week. I am lacing up.

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…