How many times I could have died before now, and in how many different ways. And yet I came close only once: a speeding sedan ran a red light, hit three other vehicles, and jack-knifed into my rear wheel split second after I’d stepped out of my parked car. A bystander described the scene to me later. “You were a millimetre away from losing your legs,” he said.

I rolled back the images. Looked again. There it was. A new tumor, large, filling my right middle lobe. It looked, oddly, like a full moon having almost cleared the horizon. Going back to the old images, I could make out the faintest trace of it, a ghostly harbinger now brought fully into the world. I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the Earth.

I held my mother’s hand as she passed away.

A flight from Paraguay to South Africa that went badly wrong. The plane nearly fell out of the sky and the oxygen masks dropped. People were screaming but the pilot saved the day, and then apparently never flew again.

The realisation that I am not the best version of myself.

As a great man.

When I lost that 100m final I spiralled. I went quite aggressive. It is an Adam I don't really recognise.

I'm tired, I'm not myself and I'm not enjoying the sport as I have done for the last decade. Some might recognise it as burnout; I just know that over the last few years I haven't had the answers.

To the people who, because of my career, I cannot spend time with. I have to be selfish, unfortunately.