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My mate Steve used to have a poster of Muhammad Ali in his bedroom; the iconic shot of Ali standing over Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston having flattened him in the first minute of the first round of their 1965 fight.

Some years later adidas used this in their ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ advertising campaign, which was, according to their website, meant to encourage people to take their first steps towards achieving what once seemed like impossible goals (and of course, to sell fuckloads of trainers).

There are many similar phrases meant to be similarly inspiring:

• A winner never quits and a quitter never wins
• Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall
• It’s not over until the fat lady sings
• Etc etc and so on

 

And then there are the more realistic among us:

• If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it (W.C. Fields)

 

I think it’s important to know when you can’t succeed.  It’s important to know when you’re beaten.  Sometimes there are mountains we can’t overcome; we can’t always rise after every fall.  There are certain laws that simply can’t be broken; those of gravity and physics.  There are mathematical impossibilities.  If a team is ten points from safety at the bottom of the league and there are only nine more points up for grabs, they’re very much relegated.  If a man is twenty-three pounds away from his final weight-loss target with only twenty-three days left in which to lose said weight (I swear the weight to days ratio is entirely coincidental), then he has to admit he’s failed in his mission and he should either give up or revise his target.

So I hereby strike a line through my initial target of 17st by April 9^th.  I’m planning to lose a stone by Friday April 23^rd, the day before the cricket season starts.  This is fourteen pounds in thirty-nine days.  I’m inspired by my aforementioned mate Steve (below, drinking a can of 65p cider after coming last in a game of pitch and putt at the world-renowned Selston Par 3 golf course), who recently updated his facebook status:

“one whole stone lost in one month. just thought i’d say cos i’m pretty damn proud of myself.”

 

And rightly he should be proud of himself.  And although I won’t be overly proud if I reach my revised target weight, hopefully I won’t be — in the words of W.C. Fields — a damn fool.

So how am I going to do it?  I’m going to do a bit of jogging (using the brilliant RunKeeper app on my iPhone to monitor my progress), I’m going to cut out (OK, cut down) my alcohol consumption (a bit) and I’m going to make a real effort to eat healthier.

First step on the healthy-eating ladder then was to make my own soup; pea and mint, specifically, which, when I had it for lunch, my boss decided looked like a big bowl of mushy peas.  Which he then said would be nicer with a meat pie.  Which I obviously went to Sainsbury’s and bought.  And then spent the rest of the day hating myself. 

I’m a damn fool, no doubt about that.