Half seven in the morning. Kettle not even on. And I'm stood in my kitchen reading an email from a robot that knows I slept badly, knows it's going to rain at four, and has firm opinions about what I'm doing with my legs today.

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.