THE climax of the ATP World Tour Finals this Sunday, should Andy Murray make it that far, will be the Scot's 87th match of the year.
This is more than any single season in his career to date, while his personal life - including the birth of his first child Sophia in February - has been fairly hectic too. But just when he should be taking things easy and resting up those aching limbs, it turns out he also has a love match to attend to.
Andy and Jamie's dad Willie is marrying his long-term partner Sam Watson in a fortnight's time and before then there is his stag do, at some unspecified location in Scotland, to be factored in.
It feels like a not entirely inappropriate end to a campaign where Murray and Novak Djokovic have been butting heads like rutting stags for most of the year in order to call themselves the Monarch of the Glen, even if with three Olympians - Andy, Jamie and Andrew Butchart, the 5,000m runner who goes out with Watson's daughter Caitlin - all likely to be involved, expectations of anyone being handcuffed to Dunblane's golden postbox may be wide of the mark.
Another red letter day in the life of the Murray family will come when the fate of his mum Judy's proposed tennis centre, featuring a Murray museum, is revealed in the next few weeks. "I am going to be at home because my dad is getting married two weeks after we finish here and has got the stag do next weekend," said Andy. "So I have got that to look forward to."
All joking aside, 85, 86 or 87 matches - depending on how things go this weekend - and no shortage of long-haul travel, is quite a strain to put on the human body, even one as finely tuned as Murray's. It averages out as one match every three and a bit days over the last 11 months.
Having undergone a microdiscectomy on his lower back in late 2013, however, the Scot has learned to listen to his body and trust it. For all the weariness he complains of after long, gruelling matches such as the one on Wednesday against Kei Nishikori of Japan, he is armed with the muscle memory from winning 21 consecutive matches and confident he is not pushing things too far.
Playing matches, in fact is the easy part. The difficult bit will come when he forces himself to get the rest and recovery he needs then builds his conditioning back up again with his equivalent of a football pre-season with a training block in Miami in December, this time in the company of Kyle Edmund and Leon Smith.
"The toughest year for me was the one where I had my back surgery," recalled Andy. "Up until then, I found that really tough, really tiring, stressful. Although I was having really good success on the court I was in pain all the time. Now, while my back is occasionally sore and a little bit stiff, it isn't like it was before.
"I trust my body a lot. I put a lot of work into it. Obviously the last few months my body is used to playing matches and playing a lot of them, which is good. I will definitely need to take a break at the end of the season. Then build that back up again. But right now, when I'm playing matches, it doesn't feel too bad."
The Scot never lacks for motivation and certainly doesn't right now. Despite impressive wins against Marin Cilic and Nishikori, a defeat in straight sets to Stan Wawrinka in today's final round-robin match would actually leave him vulnerable to missing out on the semi-finals here and handing that hard-earned No 1 spot back to Djokovic. Victory, on the other hand, would take him onto 22 back-to-back match wins, enough to equal the best winning run of his career, also recorded during this stellar year. The Scot would already be year-end World No 1 if points were awarded for his Olympics win but that is another story.
Wawrinka has claimed one Grand Slam a year for the last three years and is living up to his reputation of a man whose play improves the longer a tournament goes on. Murray has won nine of the pair's 16 career meetings, but only one of the last four, including a defeat at this venue 12 months ago.
"He is always dangerous," said Murray, who re-iterated his intention, all things being equal, to play for Great Britain on Davis Cup duty in Ottawa in February. "Once he gets through the first couple of rounds, his record when he gets deep in tournaments is really good. Sometimes it takes him a while to find his range but once he does he isn't easy to stop. I expect him to play better on Friday than maybe he did in his first match."
What role, other than turning up, Andy has on his dad's big day remains to be seen but he proved trustworthy with his own wedding ring when carefully removing it from its time-honoured place on his shoelaces when they needed re-tied against Nishikori. "I untied my laces to tie them up again," said Andy. "The ring was right next to my shoe. I wasn't in any danger of losing it."
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