Paul Pitchford
Business owner, software developer, and reluctant exerciser
Hello. I'm Paul, and this is my corner of the internet where I document my ongoing attempt to become a slightly healthier version of myself.
By day, I run a business and write software. By evening, I convince myself that sitting on the sofa is a form of recovery. Somewhere in between, I try to exercise with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success.
This blog started as a way to track my fitness journey, but "journey" implies I know where I'm going. It's more of a fitness meander, really — with occasional detours into whatever else catches my interest.
Being a software developer with a questionable sense of priorities, I've built my own fitness tracking application. The theory is that if I can see the data, analyse the trends, and hold myself accountable publicly, I might actually do something about my health before it's too late to make a meaningful difference.
The stats you see on this site are live — pulled directly from my various devices and apps:
What I'm tracking
- WHOOP — Recovery, strain, sleep quality, and HRV
- Strava — Activities, distance, and training data
- Body metrics — Weight, measurements, and calculated values like BMI
- Nutrition — Food logging, macros, and calorie tracking
I've also built my own nutrition tracker because I got fed up with every app wanting a monthly subscription just to log what I had for lunch. Now I have the same functionality and full control over my data — plus the satisfaction of not paying £9.99 a month for the privilege.
The end goal? Inspired by Grant Ritchie's approach, I plan to use all this centralised data to leverage AI as a personal coach and nutritional expert. The idea is to have an AI that actually knows my training history, recovery patterns, and dietary habits — rather than giving generic advice that assumes I'm a 25-year-old elite athlete.
Whether obsessively tracking every metric will lead to better health outcomes or just more spreadsheet anxiety remains to be seen. But at least I'll have the data to prove whatever happens.
What you'll find here
- Fitness updates — Honest accounts of workouts, progress, and the occasional setback
- Health data — I track more metrics than is probably healthy for my mental state
- Other interests — Tech, software, and whatever else I feel like writing about
I'm based in the United Kingdom, which means I complain about the weather and use a confusing mix of metric and imperial measurements depending on what I'm measuring.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. Feel free to follow along via RSS — it's the internet equivalent of a newspaper subscription, but free and without the ink stains.