Disco Ball is such a beast he's on pace for 10,000 burpees
And such a HIM he's putting up big numbers by doing burpees instead of counting during hide and seek with his daughter
In this newsletter: An anecdote about burpee hide and seek that is the best MABA-infiltrating-life nugget I’ve heard so far, a bi-state burpee splurge and details about a January 31 MABA convergence online.
Disco Ball of Naperville is on pace for 10,000 burpees during MABA. He somehow still had time for an email interview with Ralph, Q of the MABA newsletter.
Hospital name: Michael Leahy
F3 name: Disco Ball
Age: 40 (Just turned January 4)
Occupation: LED Lighting Project Manager
Marital status: Happily married 14 years this coming April.
Kids: A 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son.
Ralph: I’m at 2,800 burpees and worn out. You’re past 5,000 and going up, up, up. Two-part question, part one: What the hell is the matter with you?
Disco Ball: LMAO, man, not sure there is enough space to give you this answer. The biggest influence is I am in the middle of reading “Can't Hurt Me” by David Goggins, and I was one of those sad clowns only using 40 percent of my potential. Also I recently watched the Go Ruck documentary “The Standard”—it’s all motivating stuff.
Ralph: Part two. Seriously, are you cracked?
Disco Ball: No, but maybe I should be.
Ralph: Rumor has it your goal is 10,000. If that's true, why?
Disco Ball: Yes, because 100 burpees a day wasn’t a challenge for me. I was already doing anywhere from 100-200 burpees a day.
Since last September, I noticed I was getting stressed out at work. I had no real positive outlet, and I took it out in the wrong way. I wanted to change that so I started doing 25 burpees every time something irritated me, I got frustrated or mad, or if I got stuck on a problem. This was a way for me to calm down, clear my head and attack the problem in front of me instead of letting the problem own me.
Here is how I got to the number 10,000: I figured on average I was at about 150 burpees a day, so I said to participate in this challenge I will double my average, so 300 a day. Do the math and in 31 days that is 9,300. No F-ing way I am gonna be that close to 10,000 and not go for it, so I redid the math, I need to average 322.5 burpees a day to get there, so my goal became to try to average 325 a day.
Ralph: What do you hope to get out of this?
Disco Ball: I am trying to learn how to unlock part of the 60 percent of potential most people never unlock. This challenge certainly is a physical challenge, but maybe even more important it’s a mental challenge. To learn how to push yourself mentally through pain (pain, not injury), fatigue, and do it for a challenge that means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things, that’s an invaluable lesson that most refuse to attempt to learn. It’s almost always the mental aspect of life that people never learn to break through to unlock their real potential. Again, that’s something I am learning about in David Goggins’ book.
Ralph: How are you doing it -- in huge chunks of 100 or short chunks all day long or something else?
Disco Ball: Mostly not huge chunks. Twenty-five at a time is my go-to. Mostly it's just a consistent chipping away each day, 25 here, 25 there. Sometimes I will do a single set of 25, sometimes it will be 2-4 sets of 25 with 3-5 minutes rest between. Besides F3 beatdowns, I don’t have certain times I do them through the day. I try to have them all complete by dinner time, but there are times that after I get the kids to bed I have to knock out the remainder of my goal for the day.
Also like to have fun with it. I make up games with this challenge. For example if I am watching a football game, I knock out 10 burpees anytime either team scores, and 25 at the end of each quarter, that's usually good for 150-200 reps.
There’s games I play with my 3-year-old. We play hide and seek, she has until I knock out 25 reps to find a hiding spot, then I go find her. That's usually good for a 100 reps. It all adds up.
Ralph: Do you have a background in endurance sports?
Disco Ball: No, but I was in the military for six years, which was when I first learned how to push my body to its limits, and how to start unlocking the blockades in my brain to get past the mental challenge of situations.
I have been in F3 since July of 2020, before that it had been about a year or so, but I was into CrossFit, and just high intensity workouts to push yourself.
Ralph: You were a combat medic. I’ve done a good bit of writing about the National Guard, and every medic I have met has been balls to the wall. Is it a coincidence that I have met ones who are like that, or does the job attract a certain kind of person?
Disco Ball: As a medic going into the Infantry, you certainly feel you have something to prove. You don't receive the same combat training the infantry guys do, so they have this air about them, and they feel that they are tougher than the rest. Don't get me wrong I love infantry guys, but walking into the unit Day 1 you better prove you belong, and once you do, it becomes a competition, to see if you can hang for the long haul. My job was first to fight, then second I was a medic only when someone got hurt, so I had to have the intestinal fortitude to fight along side my brothers in arms, then put my weapon down and treat those that are injured during the heat of battle. When deployed, the medic became the "Mom" always taking care of his soldiers, not only physically but often mentally, you develop a mindset, "I’ll do anything for these guys.” I can’t tell you how many times it pumped up the morale of an infantry unit when they have a bad-ass medic willing to run into battle head first without a second thought, and I think all of that leads to medics going balls to the wall.
Ralph: How does your body feel right this second?
Disco Ball: Wrists are sore, quads are sore, shoulders are sore, my left knee barks at me every time I get to 10 burpees, but it’s just pain, it’s not injury. I use a lot of CBD products to help me in my recovery. I spend 20-30 minutes a night, sometimes 10 minutes right after a BC using a foam roller. I try to eat right and get all the water I need to keep my body functioning correctly.
Using a soft pad to land on has helped a ton—yoga mat, kids’ play mat, rug with padding—they all help absorb the shock on the wrist and shoulders.
A few burpees short of 400, road-tripping fan mail version
Ralph,
You don’t know me. But obviously, I now know you. You only have one chance to make a first impression. And at first, I hated you for making me do these burpees. Only one other HIM from my region wanted to join me in this challenge. But the burpees are actually getting easier. The frequent emails are also great encouragement and an incredible galvanizing agent since I am almost alone in my monthly challenge. Seventeen days later, I now know I love you! I’m getting stronger and feeling good about my accomplishment of 100 burpees/day.
Today I was driving back home to northwest Atlanta from visiting my family on the Gulf Coast on the Florida panhandle. I wouldn’t think that any individual location shown in the attached picture is anything exceptional. But perhaps you’ll like the collection and the fact that all the pictures were taken today during a 6-hour time span across two states. I stopped every hour or so and cranked out 10-25 (depending on how well the gas station food wanted to stay in my stomach).
The first stop was an empty church parking lot in Blountstown, Fla. I had been driving for only an hour and was already bored enough to do burpees.
Second stop at a gas station near I-10 for some refreshments and a few more burpees.
I have no idea where the third stop was. I had seen only cattle and crops for a few hours at that point. While driving, I felt like the Looney Toons Road Runner with the quickly repeating background rolling by every 10 seconds. I’m sure the cows across the street were confused about my strange movements.
Fourth stop included some long shadows at a pop-up concrete plant on the side of a four-lane rural divided highway. It was getting late and darkness would be here soon. I had get 100 in!
I will be wearing my MABA shirt proudly throwing shade all over my entire region!
Bill Simpson (F3 Wall Ball)
Send the unlikely place you've done burpees to mcrossman98@gmail.com.
Hey MABA-boy, how many burpees have I done?
Your totals are here. Through Monday night, 306 men had submitted 488,202 burpees. From the outset, I had hoped that collectively we would hit 1 million burpees, but it’s not looking good. For most of MABA, we’ve held a fairly steady pace for about 830,000 or so. Unless we all turn into Disco Ball, we’re going to fall short of the goal.
But MABA is not ultimately about numbers. It’s about attitude. It’s about resilience. Fall down. Get back up. Together.
Sign up to join us here. It’s not too late. You can either get caught up or pro-rate your goal. Log your burpees here. Forward this to friends. SYITG.
Send your why, or your inspiration, or the PAX who keeps you going, to Matt Crossman (F3 Ralph) at mcrossman98@gmail.com.
You’re not going to do 3,100 freaking burpees in a month and not buy a t-shirt celebrating it, are you?
MABA t-shirts are available. Patches to follow soon. They’re beautiful—easily the greatest design commemorating an attempt to do 3,100 burpees in 31 days I’ve ever seen. Many thanks to Short Circuit for the design.
Preblast: 2 p.m. Central time, January 31:
A MABA convergence, live from STL
There will be burpees. Lots and lots of burpees. All of them broadcast live on our Facebook page.