I flick up on my phone and the reminder is there; 16 weeks to race date. Fuck.

We’d entered the Mallorca 70.3 at the end of last season, when I was still full of enthusiasm and full of promises of how I would knuckle down over the winter and get some training done, and most importantly I’d keep on top of my body composition.

It’s now mid January and I know I’m carrying some timber but with my Garmin scales broken (the kids thought they’d work as a trampoline ) and having not checked my weight for 3 months, I thought it best to buy some new scales and quantify the damage.

I buy some cheap manual scales from Boots, take them home and unbox them placing them carefully on the bathroom floor. I step on the scales with the optimism of a man who lies to himself so often that he believes nothing is out of control and everything is fine. It’s not fine.

I take all my clothes off and weigh my self again. I then check the dial is zeroed properly. It is. I go to the toilet in the hope that an empty bladder will help me to drop half a stone. It doesn’t.

Twelve and half bloody stone!

I’m still strictly Imperial when it comes to weight, I can do Kilograms but they just don't resonate with my mentally filed historic records. Anyway I’m 17lbs above the weight I was when I last raced Mallorca 70.3 back in 2012. Year on year my weight has crept up by 2lbs per annum and now I’m looking at the net result.

I've resolved to do something about this, tomorrow...