Four years ago I went up Snowdon in a wheelchair. Last Saturday I walked it, and I have the chest-strap data to prove the wheelchair was easier.

So next June I’m going back with a mountain bike, to ride down the exact rock I had to haul myself up by hand. On a shoulder that’s been torn three times. In flat shoes.

This week: two knees with no cartilage, walking down the Snowdon Mountain Railway because it had better grip, a summit stop that turned me into a statue, and a watch that scored the worst four and a half hours of my life as cheap and recorded seven hours of standing still. Plus my first ever DOMS at nearly sixty, seven hours on cold trains, and not being able to stand up at Peterborough station.

No lesson. No redemption arc. A taxi home.

Survival without the motivational poster.

Contains frank discussion of chronic illness, disability, joint injury, incontinence, and past opiate use and mortality risk.

My family has a tradition. First heart attack in your twenties, second in your thirties, lovely funeral, very young crowd. My cardiologist says it's when, not if. I'm fifty-nine. Nobody can explain why.

This week: being adopted and discovering that the diagnostic pathway for Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is "go and find your relatives". Familial hypercholesterolaemia, Klinefelter Syndrome and the genetic firewall. A heart attack that has had more previews than anything in the West End, and an ECG that keeps coming back "unremarkable". Why the official medical plan is to have it and see. A generation raised on Protect and Survive, a door and some tins.

And a confession. The host of a podcast against the motivational poster has, it turns out, written several. The evidence is read into the record.

No lessons. No redemption arc. Just the next appointment.

Surviving Purely Out Of Spite. Survival without the motivational poster.

Three weeks after a hospital bed, I rode RideLondon at threshold heart rate, then wrote an essay about it that ended: "sometimes, it's enough."

I host a podcast that exists to set fire to motivational posters. I wrote a motivational poster.

So this week I read that essay back and cross-examine the man who wrote it, one line at a time. On trial: a promise to my doctors and my wife with a loophole big enough to ride through, an HRV of eleven milliseconds reported next to my average speed, and ninety grams of carbohydrate an hour pushed into a gut that once ignored thirty-two sachets of Picolax. There's also the claim that the mind can override physiology, from a man whose physiology has dislocated something three hundred and sixty thousand times.

No lesson. No redemption. Just the numbers, and a man who should have read them.

Survival without the motivational poster.