A bunch of us are doing the 100 pushups program. You measure yourself by doing “as many as you can”. I realise now that my problem with fitness is not my pain threshold but my futility threshold. I start to wonder what’s the point long before I would have to stop due to physical issues. So my initial test I squoze out 8 pushups before thinking it was a silly exercise and why didn’t I have a nice piece of chocolate or something. That makes me a rank 2.

There are six weeks’ programs of three days, so we’re doing monday wednesday friday and posting results online for the sake of amplifying peer pressure. The first day’s exercises take the form of four sets of mandatory pushups with a minimum rest of 60 seconds between them, followed by “as many pushups as you can manage”. So the last figure is a measure of how far you’ve come. Already this figure has gone up. I think I’ve raised my futility threshold!

7, 7, 5, 4, 10

Incidentally, I know what the point is to this exercise: it’s our salsa performance routine. There’s a lift where Rachael springs like a little elf onto my side and I twirl her around effortlessly before she alights without a sound. That’s the theory anyhow.