Rain, hail or shine, the weather presenter is clocking on.

Being a TV weather presenter has to be the easiest job in the world, right? Wrong.

At least not according to the schedule of Today‘s Stevie Jacobs, who has been with the show for 10 years now.

Sure it’s not digging trenches, but in this excellent article with News Corp, he gives us some insight into what’s required for those endless Live crosses from around the country.

Here is an excerpt:

“I really feel like I’m the luckiest person in the universe,” he said, “it’s the best and worst job at the same time. You’re doing 16 to 18 hour days, you’re up at four in the morning and then you’re travelling for the rest of the day. You might have two plane flights, a five-hour drive, a boat trip, a helicopter and you never know where you’re going to be or how long it’s going to take to get there, so we work extraordinary hours behind the scenes which I don’t think many people really understand.”

To give an example of what a typical day involves, on Tuesday Jacobs woke up in Melbourne at 3.30am, spent three hours crossing to Today from a P&O ship, flew to Sydney at 10am for a few hours work, before flying to Brisbane three hours later and catching a boat in rough seas to Tangalooma Island to shoot a story for the next day on feeding dolphins at 6.30pm.

After checking the satellite feed back to Channel Nine and dinner with the crew, he fell into bed at 10pm, before getting up at 3.30am to do it all over again.

“We do something like that five days a week,” he said. “It is gruelling, it is exhausting, but if you love what you do, and I do, then you just deal with the hours, I don’t want to be doing anything else. Sometimes you get really exhausted and it wears you down, but you just need to know when to recharge.”