Pull-up failure runs in my family. It happened to my grandfather in 1935. He was 11 — bookish, gawky, one of the few Jews in his Munich public school. His gym teacher, a sadist who had long had it out for him, ordered the boys to do pull-ups. When my grandfather’s turn came, he gripped the bar, writhed and reddened. ‘‘Look at Felsen!’’ the gym teacher growled. ‘‘Hanging there like a blutwurst. I knew he couldn’t do it.’’ Blutwurst — blood sausage. His classmates erupted in laughter. For the next year or so, until he and the other Jews were expelled from school under the Nuremberg Laws, he was Blutwurst.

A half-century later, I dangled at the bar. It was 1990. George H. W. Bush wanted the youth of the world’s only remaining superpower to be strapping and sturdy, so he tapped Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the face of a program called the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge. If you could do something like 10 situps, 10 push-ups and three pull-ups, you won a certificate fake-signed by both the president and the Terminator. On the day of the challenge, I managed to bang out the situps and push-ups. Then came the dreaded pull-ups. I flailed my legs in a futile attempt to gain momentum. No dice. I hung there, a link off the old sausage chain. Total pull-ups: zero.

For the next 20-plus years, I didn’t so much as try another one. Then, in my mid-30s, I took stock of my waistline, which was a snug 38 inches. It was time to make some changes, so I bought some gadgets and downloaded some apps. After months of record-smashing walks, I was maybe a 37. Eventually I joined a gym and spent untold thousands on personal trainers. Soon enough, I was even doing sets of pull-ups. I had fi­nally slimmed down, but all I talked about was squats and smoothies. I had become loathsome, the very species I’d spent most of my life mocking: a gym rat.

One unseasonably warm day last winter, I decided to exercise outside. I jogged over to one of those rusty pull-up bar stations in Prospect Park. Two other people — young, shirtless guys with Caribbean accents — were there, doing incredibly acrobatic moves on the bars. I took a turn and railed off a respectable half-dozen pull-ups. The guys smiled and shook their heads.