The big race…

Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and ask: “How did you win that race?” You know the race I’m talking about. That first race, the one that really is a matter of life and… well, not death really, let’s call it ‘not being’. Yes, that first race we all experience but none of us can remember - the sperm race.

In the words of the mighty Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life; “Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.” Now that’s a laugh, and of course it’s meant to be; billions of sperms get wasted over the course of a man’s lifetime. To be exact, if he gives rise to the average 2.6 children, then around 524,000,001,997.4 of them are simply a waste of a cell.

Yes, the average male will produce roughly 525 billion (that's BILLION) sperm cells over his lifetime and lose at least one billion of them per month – whoops! A healthy adult man can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single whoops.

Imagine it, a billion sperms cells all lined up for the big race… on your marks. Get set. Go… and they’re off!

The odds of being the first past the winning post are incredible. Sometimes I wonder just who I beat to get there? I imagine million upon million of alternate ‘me’ all lined up and ready to go. Some of them would be blonde, others dark, redheads, mousey. Some taller, others shorter, all shapes and sizes and over fifty percent of them would be girls potentially. In fact they’d have all sorts of potentials; scientists, murderers, priests, plumbers, artists, professional footballers, hookers, actors, thieves, drug addicts, maybe even the odd world domination dictator or two.

Of course there would be the defectives as well. But the strong would outweigh the weak. Even so, I find it really hard to believe that I was the strongest contender. Somewhere in there could have been a David Beckham - which would have pleased my father - or another sperm (probably a girl) who wouldn’t have argued back - which would have delighted both of them. Unluckily for them though, it was me that pushed my way forward and, probably through luck plus a bit of cheating, came out on top to win the gold medal of life instead of nonexistence.

Whoops indeed.