It was about a year ago this week I got out of hospital after lung surgery. And that was after three months of pretty debilitating illness, an illness that none of my doctors has ever really explained to me. I caught a cold somewhere in Newcastle, filling my chest cavity with an alarming brown fluid that my daughter described as the forbidden apple juice.

For a while there they were looking at lung cancer as a live option. I remember lying in that hospital bed, full of tubes, waiting three days for the hammer to come down.

Well, that was a year ago. This week I managed to do a barbell squat at 100 kilograms. In fact, I did 24 of them. I'm going to take that as a win. No, a hundred kegs is not Mount Everest.

You can see all sorts of people squatting multiples of that any day on YouTube or Instagram. But I remember one year ago I could barely get off the couch, and shuffling once around the living room counted as my daily exercise.

It's good to be back.