The killer stat of my sporting weeK? 10,000 hours. No, that's not the time since Tamworth FC or Worcester Warriors won a match. It's not even the time Jonny Wilkinson has spent in the treatment room over the last four years.
Ten thousand hours, spread over ten years, is by common consent, the amount of time needed to be devoted to training in order to reach Olympic Games medal-winning standard.
That's 2.73 hours per day, every day of the week for ten years.
If you're going to take Sundays off, it's up to 3.19 hours per day. Throw in time off for birthdays, holidays and days off for sickness and injury and it goes up a bit more.
Throw in the occasional day when you just can't be bothered and it goes up a bit more. And this is just to be a potential medal-winner. It doesn't guarantee anything.
It was Daley Thompson, possibly the greatest all-round athlete Great Britain has ever produced, who said that he always trained on Christmas Day, as well as every other day of the year, because he was absolutely certain the other fellow wouldn't.
It's a message that Andy Murray is learning fast. Urged on by new coach Brad Gilbert and possibly two or three years late, the 17-year-old is finally getting into the train-until-you-drop routine. It is paying dividends and hopefully, young Murray will soon be reaping the rewards.
In the week when the European Indoor Athletics Championships comes to Birmingham, 10,000 hours is a number worth pondering.
The European Indoors is traditionally a showcase for rising young talent to make a mark on the sporting public's consciousness. Win a medal here, have a successful outdoor season and be talked up as a potential star.
Step forward, then, Amy Harris. The Birchfield Harriers long jumper has recently come to the fore and will be at the National Indoor Arena this weekend. I wish Amy luck and I hope to follow her all the way to London 2012, just as I followed Katherine Merry, who I first met when she was a promising teenager in 1991 and I worked on the local weekly paper in Sutton Coldfield. Nine years later, she won an Olympic medal at Sydney.
Yet in a week when the media is working itself into a lather about childhood obesity, I wonder how many Amy Harrises we can expect to see in the future?
With London 2012 five-and-a-half years away, our potential medal-winners have to be halfway through those 10,000 hours of training already. And where are they?
Our record of nurturing young athletic talent in this country is not great. Too often, we've backed the wrong horse and discovered that a promising teenager does not automatically bloom into an Olympian.
And all the time, that 10,000 hours is in the back of my mind. Would I devote 10,000 hours to being the very best journalist I could be? Would you, in your job? Would the kids loitering on street corners have any idea of what devoting 10,000 hours to anything actually means?
And what are the rewards? When mediocre footballers can ask for and get five-figure weekly salaries, most Olympic hopefuls in what we choose to call minority sports get by on self-generated sponsorship or backing from the National Lottery, a pot which will surely be plundered by the Treasury to fund the rising cost of London 2012.
So when you watch Amy Harris this weekend, wish her luck. The next time you fancy an extra hour in bed, think of Amy and her ilk getting up at the crack of dawn to do that extra hour's training.
And the next time you see overpaid young footballers ruining a showpiece Cup final in a brawl because "Chelsea were winning and were starting to waste time and I was not happy with that," weep for the true spirit of sport and the dedication required to be the best in the world at it.