Robert Turrall

I started writing software in the late 1980s, when a career in computing still had to be explained to people. Analyst/Programmer, as it was then, learning that a system either works or it doesn't, and no amount of talking changes it — only digging in and applying the right tools. An important lesson right there.

What followed was a fast, exhilarating climb: consultancy and training, then presales and account management, then the operating roles — C-level, country leadership, EMEA and global marketing. At the Bank for International Settlements I jointly ran the project to evaluate and replace the bank's entire software planning, design, development, and implementation infrastructure. I built and ran partnership training and sales programmes for international industry giants of the day like Sybase and Software AG. Marketing and partnership roles in a series of early-2000s startups taught me resilience, and what the post-dot-com world actually looked like from the inside. The through-line was always the same: take something complex, make it legible, and hold it to a measurable result.

The last two decades I've spent independent — startups, product leadership, more than twenty remote teams across time zones, and products of my own. I've sat in a thousand sprint planning meetings and operating reviews and run most of them. I know what a solid roadmap looks like, and I know the difference between activity and progress.

Protocol 60 is the same discipline, pointed at the one asset I can't hire someone else to maintain.

I lifted my first dumbbell at sixteen. Like most people I've had focused years, and years where other things took over — but I always came back to it. Training has been the one constant running underneath every job title on the page above.

Somewhere after fifty the question changed. It stopped being about how I looked or what I could lift on a given day, and became about the next thirty years: avoiding injuries, staying strong, mobile, and sharp deep into a decade most people write off. I started measuring properly — WHOOP on my wrist since 27. Nov. 2024 — 590+ days straight, recovery and HRV and sleep tracked daily, cold exposure and the rest of a real protocol rather than a set of good intentions. The gear I actually use — and what's imperfect about it — is here.

What I found is that many of my peers — capable, successful, in command of everything except this — mostly had no system for it at all. That gap is the mission. I built the tracking for myself first; the coaching is me handing over the system I run on my own body.