The Big Read: The push to be perfect

My friends, we have reached a tricky time of the year. By the time you read this it will be the 20th day of January, which means my early mornings are soon to see one heroic individual fling himself and bang his nose against the limits of human perfectibility.

I like to think of each new year as a kind of super-Monday: an opportunity to start over, bright and fresh, a day zero. I like to imagine that if I apply myself this time and stick to it and do a little bit every day, and each day add an extra grain of effort to the previous day's effort, then as the year piles one day upon another I can ascend higher and higher towards a more perfect and productive me. Each day, with that micro-dose more application, I can edge a micrometre closer to splendid. We all think this, don't we? How would a new week or new year be bearable if we didn't?

I try to follow this practice in many areas of my life, but this year I thought I'd put it to the physical test. Each morning of 2017 so far, after I rise and go through my routines, after my stretches and creepily elaborate skin-care regime, as an experiment I do press-ups. Don't shrug like that - this is a big deal. It has been many years since I did a press-up - I think the last time was in Standard7 at rugby training with Mr Rich. In certain one-on-one coaching sessions he liked to see if we could lift ourselves with him lying on top of us. Usually I couldn't, so he would just lie there for a while in a companionable sort of way, shifting to make himself comfortable, murmuring tactics in my ear and chuckling throatily until our breathing synchronised. Ah, good times.

The thought of doing press-ups each morning was intimidating, but on January 1 I started with one press-up. Anyone can do one press-up. Then the next day I did two press-ups, and the next day three. You see where this is going.

I am experimenting with the grain of sand theory. No matter how heavy a weight might be, if we can lift it, we can always bear one more grain of sand to be added to it, right? So surely if you keep slowly adding an infinite number of grains, you'll be able to bear an infinitely large weight?

It's a version of the old argument that I've pursued over many a beer-browned bar about whether there's a limit on how fast a human being will one day run. I'm a sunny optimist about human potential so I'm inclined to imagine it's always possible to run one-millionth of a second faster than the previous fastest, and that surely implies an infinite progression. But others disagree, most famously a French researcher named Geoffroy Berthelot who concluded that the rate of breaking athletic records levelled off in 1988, and that human beings have just about reached our maximal capacity for athletic improvement.

There'll be no more great surges forward in performance, he predicts, and only advances in technology, gene therapy or doping will see any meaningful shaving down of times. We're about as good as we're going to get.

Well, we'll see about that, I think each morning as I check the calendar and drop and do my press-ups and add one more. No cheese-eating French researcher is going to make a monkey out of me. Per ardua ad astra, mon ami!

But it's all very well being optimistic about the human condition when you're adding one press-up to six to make seven; by the time you're entering the high teens, human evolution starts to seem like a dark corridor heading towards an open trapdoor. This morning I wheezed and winced my way through number 19 then lay on my back counting the stars flashing behind my eyelids and doing some quick calculations. By my birthday I'll be doing 96 press-ups! Is this likely? Thank God it's not a leap year. How will I do 335 press-ups on December 1?

But when conducting experiments on oneself, as with any prolonged endeavour, either physical or creative, it's a mistake to look too far ahead. When you look too far ahead it's like adding all the sand in one go, or Mr Rich. Your knees buckle from the weight in your mind. Some day I won't be able to add a press-up, and some day I won't even be able to do the number I did yesterday. Some day the grains won't be added, and they'll start being subtracted. It'll happen to you, too, kid. But that day wasn't today, and I'm hoping it's not tomorrow.