Avoir un coup de pompe

Literally: To take a stroke of the pump

Example: “Vers seize heures, j'ai toujours un coup de pompe.” — Around four in the afternoon, I always hit the wall.

English equivalent: To hit the wall

Origin: There is a joke buried in it, since a pump is what puts air back into a flat tire. The phrase appears around 1920 — Esnault records it in 1922, among cyclists, without explaining it. Two obvious candidate pumps fail: pompe is slang for a shoe, and a well-placed kick will certainly tire a man, while pompes are push-ups, which will do it too. Claude Duneton points instead at another article from the same year, about air passengers who came off a badly shaken flight gray and barely walking, while the pilot stepped down perfectly fresh and remarked that they had certainly taken un de ces coups de pompe. In flying, a pompe — also a thermique — is a column of rising warm air, and glider and paraglider pilots hunt them, spiraling inside one to gain height. The suggestion is that the phrase comes from the state of passengers wrung out by turbulence, with the rising column read as the stroke of a piston, and passed later to cyclists, for whom a pump means something more literal. Failing that, there is the plain reading: a man whose energy has been pumped out of him, the way you pump water from a flooded cellar.