After a sleepless, overnight flight to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize this month, President Barack Obama made a not altogether surprising admission. He was tired.
The president was on his ninth foreign trip to his 21st country; he added a 10th trip the following week.
The year had been bookended by the two most intense periods of his young presidency -- the early decisions to bail out the nation's banks and its automobile industry, and his December orders to deploy 30,000 additional U.S. troops to fight the war in Afghanistan.
Throw in an unemployment rate in the double-digits, a health-care bill still stuck on Capitol Hill, and last-minute negotiations on a global climate-change agreement, and aides say it's no secret that the president was tired and looking forward to recharging during his year-end family vacation in Hawaii.
Obama himself has been candid about the pressures of being president during what he has called an "extraordinary year."
"You have a convergence of factors that have made this a difficult year not so much for me but for the American people," he said in an interview with CBS News last month. "Absolutely that weighs on me."
That weight was particularly striking during the president's exhaustive, three-month review of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Images of a visibly tired Obama, his black hair now flecked with gray, greeting the bodies of fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and walking through rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery sparked rumors that he was skipping meals and losing weight.
Not true, the 48-year-old Obama said. His weight never fluctuates more than five pounds, and he still wears the same clothes he wore when got married 17 years ago. But the gravity of war did take its toll in other ways.
"With this one, you feel it viscerally," he said in a White House interview with ABC News. "You lose sleep. You think about families. You think about history."
In Hawaii, Obama abruptly ended a golf outing yesterday and sped in his motorcade to his compound after he learned that the child of a friend was injured while playing on the beach.
Members of the first family were fine, a White House official said.
The president was playing golf with friends from Chicago who joined him on his vacation. The White House is not identifying which friend's child was injured.
After a brief delay, Obama returned to the course.
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