I decided to do some press-ups. They’re good for you, apparently. A calisthenic classic. This much I picked up in a doomscrolling session. Some algorithm somewhere must have decided I’d be open to the idea and, not for the first time, the algorithm was right.
I used to do lots of press-ups, perhaps 20 or 30, most days. I can recall how this started. It was 1985 and I was spending a gap year working for my dad’s scaffolding company. That I was the boss’s son didn’t stop my workmates from sharing with me their thoughts on my shortcomings. One such shortcoming was identified by a muscly scaffolder called Andy. “Your arms are puny,” he told me. “Do some press-ups,” Andy advised. So that’s what I did, and my arms bulked up a bit. Thank you, Andy.
That’s how the press-up habit started, but I couldn’t remember why it stopped. No worries. Time to get back on the horse. I rolled out of bed, popped to the toilet, washed my hands, dried them and rubbed them together in a right-let’s-do-this kind of way. Not wanting to get ahead of myself, I thought that for starters I’d just knock out 20 and take it from there. I assumed the classic starting position, face down, with my legs and arms straight, and lowered myself to the floor. So far so good. But it turned out this was where my attempt at a press-up came to an end because, try as I might, I couldn’t push myself back up again.
Pressing down on the floor as hard as I could resulted in elevating my body not one degree. I was more alarmed than disappointed. This couldn’t be right. I looked up some instructions to check I hadn’t missed something. Nope. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do a single proper press-up. How had it come to this? I lay there face down, nose buried in a shaggy bedside rug, lamenting my decline.
There’s nothing to make you feel old like finding out that something you used to do all the time, having not done it for a while, is now completely beyond you. Looking back, there have been plenty of these warning shots fired across my bows, dismaying alerts to the harsh reality of time passing. There was the time I visited an old friend in Plymouth who had a teenage son with a skateboard. I hadn’t been on a skateboard since my early teens and wasn’t much good at it then. But, on a gentle enough slope, I could manage a stately pace without falling off. Not any more. I stood on this lad’s skateboard for less than one second before it flipped from under me, leaving me on my arse.
It was the same with football. I used to be a goalkeeper – again, not a very good one but, barring several calamitous lapses in concentration, I was half decent. Then I broke my leg playing and my enthusiasm waned. For several years I didn’t play at all, before a mate asked me to turn out for his team. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could still catch and kick the ball but, when I leaped to attempt a proper save, it all fell apart.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t get airborne – I could. Or that I couldn’t tip the ball over the crossbar – I did. The problem was that when I hit the ground I saw stars and all but passed out. A couple of teammates had to help me to my feet. I honestly thought I must have been clattered by an opposing player. But no, I just couldn’t deal with hitting the floor any more. And that was the end of my goalkeeping comeback.
I thought all these things were just like riding a bike, in that once you could do it, you could always do it. Not so. In fact, I’m worried that riding a bike might itself now be beyond me. I’ll stick to the press-ups. Or rather press-up, singular. I’m building up to executing one whole press-up very soon.
