Akani Simbine spends less than six minutes a season racing.
And to be in prime condition for those 320-odd seconds of competition, scattered over several months, the Commonwealth Games 100m champion must train about 1,100 hours a year, which works out to almost four million seconds.
If a financier invested R4-million for an annual return of 20 or 30 cents, he'd get fired, but that's what South Africa's premier sprinter must do to reach his dream.
The 24-year-old, who clocked his 9.89-second South African record in 2016, is confident he can go substantially faster. He wants to break the 9.85 African mark held by Nigerian Olusoji Fasuba as he tries to get as close as possible to 9.69, the fastest time achieved by a human being not named Usain Bolt.
Not that he's ruling out the Jamaican's 9.58 world record.
"As humans, if someone does something, like Wayde [van Niekerk] running 43.03 [his 400m world record], everybody starts believing they can run sub-43," Simbine said this week ahead of his departure for his northern hemisphere summer of competition that begins in Boston on Sunday.
"Usain ran 9.5, Yohan [Blake] ran 9.6, so that stuff is humanly possible.
"If they can do it, what's stopping me from running just as fast and setting goals? I don't want to limit myself [by setting a goal time], I just want to aim for the stars."
Winning in Australia's Gold Coast last month has earned him extra recognition on the streets, with fans pointing upwards as Simbine did when he crossed the line first.
"I get noticed more, people just point, saying: 'You're the guy who did this.' It's made me more hungry to achieve more and run faster and win more races."
The change in his self-belief is palpable, says Werner Prinsloo, who has coached Simbine since he took up athletics as a pupil in 2010.
"It's given him a lot of confidence to know that he's got a global title because that's what we wanted for a long time, and that's the one thing that was missing."
The Commonwealth Games has its share of snobs who look down their noses at it.
But the fact is that Simbine's 10 predecessors from the past 14 editions - including multiple winners Don Quarrie of Jamaica and England's Linford Christie - all won Olympic silverware except for two, Kim Collins (2002) and Lerone Clarke (2010), who still had the consolation of landing world titles.Most of them tasted Commonwealth success before reaching the Olympic and world podiums.
The statistics may be favourable, but Simbine and Prinsloo are grounded in reality, and they're fine-tuning their strategy.
Simbine opened his 2016 and 2017 seasons with sub-10 attacks, while this year he has yet to go sub-10, his 10.03 in Gold Coast being his best to date this season.
Simbine has been under 10 seconds 15 times in his career.
Last year he dipped below that on eight occasions by the time he went to the world championships in London in August.
It was more than any of the three medallists did. World champion Justin Gatlin had been under 10 three times, runner-up Christian Coleman six times and third-placed Bolt just once.
The focus these days is on peaking at the right time.
"When we got to the major competitions we couldn't put on our best performance because my body had already been drained so much," says Simbine.
"Now I'm getting into the season well, building towards something. Our tactic for this year is working."
Prinsloo says the priority is competition.
WINNING WAYS
"Winning the race is more important now than running times. I think the goal for this year is just to win races. Every single race that he gets into, he goes for the win.
"Because if he wins, regardless of the time - and there are other big names there as well and he still wins - he can say when we get to world champs next year: 'Well, look at the other seven guys, I've beaten them all.' It's just going to boost him so much."
The potential for a fast time is there.
"He's good for a 9.8-low. Definitely. Whether he goes faster than that is up to him," says Prinsloo.Simbine still remembers the futility of chasing times, as he did in 2014 when South Africans were hunting the first sub-10.
Simon Magakwe got there first, winning the national championships in 9.98, ahead of Simbine in 10.02. "I learnt a lot when I was trying to dip under 10, but I didn't make it."
One of Simbine's biggest strengths is his ability to learn from disappointment.
In 2016 he became the first South African sprinter since 1932 to reach an Olympic final, where he ended fifth.
The following year he ended fifth at the world championships in London. That was disappointing, even though he was hampered by a hip niggle.
"I always say every year I want to improve, and [in 2017] I knew what I could do and it didn't come together."
For all the talk that sprinters are the closest thing to cage-fighters that track and field possesses, Simbine shows a calm demeanour, even when he's upset.
"I've never seen him lose control. He'll get angry and I can see it, because he gets this ice-cold look on his face. Then I know he's angry," Prinsloo says of the sprinter who started out with the nickname Mr Chill but is now better known as AK.
Simbine knows about anger, having driven his mom crazy with his childhood antics, like breaking items at home, or stealing jars of peanut butter, or hiding lunchboxes from school under his bed until their contents became mouldy.
"Running away wasn't going to work because I get the speed from her so she was going to catch me," he says, explaining that his tactic to avoid hidings was to cry.
"I'd know that if I did something wrong, this woman was going to hit me, so the only thing I could do was cry so she wouldn't hit me."Parents, they love tupperware - 'You're messing up my tupperware, now I must throw this thing away' - I didn't understand. For me, it was just a container and I didn't like the lunch," says Simbine.
He also recalls a time when he was about nine and he played with his dad's car in the driveway. He decided to start the engine, but the car was parked in gear and it jumped forward into the garage door.
"It dented the car a bit and my mom lost it," says Simbine, who recently received a C63 from Mercedes, one of his sponsors, as a reward for winning a Commonwealth Games gold medal.
When Simbine and Prinsloo linked up, Prinsloo had only just begun working as a coach.
He had placed two articles in the local Kempton Park knock-and-drop to advertise his services and Simbine's mom, Elsie, contacted him.
"It was fate, I guess," says 41-year-old Prinsloo, also a sprinter in his school days. "I consider myself extremely lucky to have had him so early in my career. We grew together.
"We pushed each other, I had to push myself in my abilities and knowledge because I have to be a step ahead of him. A guy like him comes around only once in a lifetime."
Prinsloo travels internationally with Simbine, getting to mix with top coaches like Glen Mills, the mentor of Bolt, and Lance Brauman, who trainsShaunae Miller-Uibo and Noah Lyles.
"We're hoping to spend some time with Brauman in Florida," says Prinsloo.
"Its for Akani to train with him and for me to learn from him. We're trying to set up something like that, maybe next year, so that we can spend two or three weeks there.
"I can never stop learning," he says, adding that they won't attempt the 100m-200m double at major competitions again.
"The one thing we learnt from London last year is to focus on our strengths. Do the 100, be the best we can be."
The relationship between Simbine and Prinsloo went to a new level when fibre connectivity provider Liquid Telecom gave the athlete a sponsorship that allowed his trainer to quit his job and coach full-time, at least until the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.
Previously Simbine would spend most of the northern hemisphere summer in Europe, with Prinsloo joining him only for the bigger competitions.
But that's another thing that will be different this year, and Prinsloo will join him at his training base in Gemona, Italy, early next month.
"I have a good feeling about this year," says Prinsloo.
There are 150 seconds of racing left...