Long-haul economy flights on a hangover; the music of Damien Rice; interminable chats with your partner about where your relationship is heading while you are in the pub trying to watch the Lions in a crucial Test match.
To the list of things that combine boredom and dismay in equal measure can be added a new one: aqua-jogging your way to a one-hour decathlon.
It wasn't meant to be like this. The slope was already steep enough as it was - learning nine new events from scratch in just over three months, bolting a 1500m on the end and trying to do it all in the sort of time that Terry Griffiths used to take sizing up a single safety shot.
That was before last week's hamstring horror while training with Dean Macey. Unsurprisingly, if there's one thing that makes decathlon training even harder than normal, it's having an injury that prevents you from running, jumping and throwing. Trouble.
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As comebacks go, Pakistan's turnaround from World Twenty20 whipping-boys to champions was as utterly unexpected as it was stirring to the soul. Phoenixes might want to consult copyright lawyers, soap opera scriptwriters think about upping their game.
Battered by England by 48 runs at The Oval a fortnight earlier, comprehensively outplayed by Sri Lanka at this same venue nine days ago, Pakistan looked goners - disorganised in the field, toothless in attack and radars uncalibrated at the crease.
That they could be raising the sport's newest trophy at the home of cricket, with thousands of their green-shirted supporters cavorting in the late afternoon sunshine, seemed scarcely believable.
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It was all ticking along so well. Six weeks into the one-hour decathlon challenge, I'd survived Daley, done two training sessions in each of the 10 disciplines and started to feel a deep affection for the whole event.
To say I was looking forward to this week's workout with Dean Macey is an understatement. I couldn't wait. If there's one athlete you'd want to hang about with for a day, it's the Macinator. Laughs guaranteed, proper training rumble a certainty.
I had no idea how wrong things were about to go. I wish I'd known.
During the first hour there is little indication of what might follow, just the usual heady Macey mix of wisecracking and wallop.
It's hard to choose my favourite anecdote - it's a dead heat between the time he pushed so hard in training the grass on the infield looked white ("I scared meself that day") and when he made his Dutch training partner collapse with asthma ("I cut the rest periods in half cos he wouldn't run the 200m at the speed I wanted") - but it's nowhere near as hard as the medicine-ball drills that follow.
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