Happy World Burpee Day
How the exercise everyone hates changed my life and a bunch of my friends' lives
Today is World Burpee Day and somehow I did not know that until just now.
Everybody hates burpees. I love them. They teach me about resilience and perseverance, how to fall down and how to get back up.
They taught me this winter about love and grief, fellowship and friendship.
In the winter my friends and I made up MABA—Make America Burpee Again, a challenge in which we all promised to do 3,100 burpees in January. Doing 100 burpees a day changed my life and the lives of a bunch of my friends. The bonds that we formed in that sufferfest continue to grow. On Saturday, 25 men showed up for a workout I led even though I advertised it as an attempt to see how many burpees we could do in an hour (see photo above).
We’re going to do MABA again in January. We threw it together at the last minute last time. We did it just to do it. This time, it will have a purpose: We will use it to shine a bright light on the epidemic of loneliness. You can’t be lonely if you’re doing 100 burpees a day with your friends.
Crazy, maybe.
But definitely not lonely.
Below, I wrote a love letter to burpees that will appear in the second edition of Freed to Lead, a book about the origin, rise and philosophy of F3 Nation.
PAX ESSAY
Matt “Ralph” Crossman is an F3 leader in St. Charles, but his F3 roots go all the way back to the Charlotte early days – as you’ll learn in this piece. A longtime journalist, he has written more than 40 cover stories for national magazines.
— Fall Down. Get Back Up. Together. —
By “Ralph”
I’m a long EH. I lived in Charlotte when F3 launched. Within a few years, F3 bumper stickers were everywhere, and half the men in my church wore F3 shirts. In 2014, Charlotte Magazine asked me to write a story about these nutjobs who got up before the birds and talked in code and drank Dredd-flavored Kool-Aid.
I attended (but did not participate in) a workout to write the story. Guys with strange names like Gump and Nanny and Dropcloth lifted heavy things, ran across a parking lot, did ab exercises, then ran back to lift the heavy things again. As I took notes, they directed good-natured jabs at me because I was wearing dress shoes and drinking coffee, which made me smile because it’s exactly what I would have done.
The story appeared in a health supplement issue, not the regular magazine. It was distributed in doctor’s offices. I almost felt guilty about getting paid for it because nobody would ever read it. I underestimated F3 Nation, and not for the last time. They went crazy with it on Twitter. The magazine was not planning to put the story online, but F3 maniacs generated so much social media traffic that they put it up. I have never heard of that, before or since.
I coveted what those F3 men had, but I didn’t join, for selfish reasons. I make my living as a freelance magazine writer. I thought, F3 is a national story. If I write the national story, it will come with a fat paycheck. I can’t “join” until I write the national story.
I went to a coffeeshop to write a pitch to send to Big Boy National Magazines. There was an F3 sticker on a car in the parking lot and a guy wearing an F3 shirt inside drinking coffee.
I sold the story to Men’s Health in 2018—four years after that initial beatdown. By then I lived in St. Louis. I was unsure about participating in a workout for the story, in part because I didn’t want to embarrass myself and also because taking notes is difficult when you’re bear-crawling. St. Louis’s founding Nantan, Sheldon—now a close friend—talked me into participating.
My plan was to go to one workout and write the story. I knew I would like it. I underestimated, again, how much. I had so much “fun” I expanded the reporting phase to three workouts then six then just kept going after I turned in the story.
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If I’m known for anything in F3 St. Louis, it’s for enthusiasm for second F. I swarm the FNG before warmups, I check in on him during the beatdown, I make sure he knows about coffeeteria. When I’m not helicoptering the FNG, I concoct adventures and invite PAX to join me.
I’ve always done this—camping trips, park excursions with my kids and their friends, day hikes, etc. Co-workers called me the social director because I had so many parties. There was no grand plan. I was lonely, and I didn’t want to be lonely, so I had parties.
In the more than three years since I joined F3, I’ve organized two 2.0 camping trips, three three-day bike trips, two three-day canoe trips, convinced a dozen men to join me as I trained to try to become an average high school athlete at 48, etc. I had selfish reasons not to join, and I have selfish reasons for issuing invitations: I had paying assignments for each adventure. But I’ve been gratified to discover there is more than just CSAUP fun happening.
Most of this is still on accident, and I feel immodest saying this. But now I see my invitations take men places they wouldn’t otherwise go—physically, emotionally and relationally.
I learned that through MABA.
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You never know what’s going to come out of a PAX’s mouth when it’s so early it’s still dark and he’s already done more than 100 burpees. In this case, that man was CFIT, and the words were “Make America Burpee Again.”
To those of us who had done the burpees with CFIT that morning in December 2020, Make America Burpee Again sounded beautiful. How could we make it horrible?
After goading from SlowPitch, I texted six PAX: If two of you do it with me, I will do 3,100 burpees in January 2021.
All six said yes.
Next, I invited the St. Louis region. If 20 of you join us, I said, I’ll take it national. A couple Slack posts later, more than 400 PAX from across the country said MABA sounded like a profoundly bad idea and wanted in, too.
I cast MABA as an exercise in resilience. We all fell down in 2020. We all got back up. That’s what a burpee is—falling down and getting back up. How much resilience could we build by falling down and getting back up 100 times a day? What kind of bonds would we build by doing those burpees together?
The MABA motto was “Fall down. Get back up. Together.” The together part was crucial. I work alone. I ache with isolation. Second F fills my need for deep friendships. As the January 1 kickoff approached, I imagined MABA would be a fun and edifying distraction, a way to thumb my nose at the Dumpster fire that was 2020.
But MABA turned into much more than that, because 2020 wasn’t done knocking me down.
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The symptoms started with leg pain. Next came tiredness and body aches. I got the results Christmas morning: I had Covid-19. The symptoms were mild until that night, when the tiredness morphed into full-body, can’t-get-out-of-bed, forget-3,100-burpees-I can’t-even-do-one exhaustion.
That continued for three days until I started to feel better. I had fallen down again. But I had also gotten up again, even if I was still wobbly. I woke up New Year’s Eve feeling normal. As I made coffee, I had a sad premonitory thought: I wonder if today will be the day I get the call, the one I had been dreading for six months. Thirty minutes later, my brother called: Our mom, Kay Crossman, had died. She was one week past her 79th birthday.
I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry: In the last week of 2020, I got sick with the illness behind a worldwide pandemic that killed 2 million people (and counting) AND my mom died.
For months, her death had been looming. Her cancer returned when the shutdown started in March. Doctors gave her six months to a year. She made it nine months. My dad chokes up when he describes how she fought. On top of the cancer, she had excruciating pain, shingles, gall stones, bad prescriptions, bad falls. She got knocked down, but she got back up, over and over until, finally, mercifully, she couldn’t.
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I have never been knocked down like that. But I never considered dropping out of MABA. I needed the distraction. Carrying a heavy heart, I started MABA January 1. I was under quarantine, so I did 152 burpees on my own. Every time I fell down, I thought of her. Every time I got up, I thought of her.
It is tempting to declare I did those burpees in her honor. But she would think doing 3,100 burpees in 31days was ... how to put it ... dumb. But if I told her I was doing it with friends and making more along the way, she would get it.
Her life was evidence of the power of second F. Making friends was her singular character trait. As news of her death spread, I was deluged with phone calls, texts, emails, Facebook messages, etc. Her smile, her laugh, her bright blue eyes, her exuberance—I heard about it all.
She never stopped talking to people. If you went to the grocery store with her, you had to allot time for her to chit-chat with the cashier, the butcher, the guy pulling in carts, etc. Lord help you if she saw you in a Detroit Tigers hat.
She was all of my friends’ favorite mom. People loved being around her, none more than my two girls. When my wife and I called her to tell her we were going to have our first child, all I said was, “we took a test.”
I didn’t say what the test was or what the results were, or even that we knew the results, yet she started crying immediately. She had tried to keep from me how badly she wanted grandkids; the word “test” broke her resolve.
Before visits from their beloved Nana, my daughters sat by the front door, noses pressed to the glass, desperate to hear the sound of my dad’s diesel pickup that heralded her arrival. Watching my mom play with my daughters was like watching a hurricane dance with a tornado. She made up a game in which she told stories about a grandmother who did whatever she pleased. Those tales entertained my girls for hours.
After a few days, my mom would be exhausted. The solution – to tell fewer stories – was unthinkable.
I’m proud to say I’m just like her. My job requires me to talk to strangers. I can do that because I grew up watching her do it. It’s because of her that I have the type of personality that enables me to invite people I don’t know to do 3,100 burpees in a month. She might have thought MABA was dumb, but it only exists because of her.
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When my quarantine ended, I Qed a workout in which eight F3 men did 150 burpees apiece, and 16 shorties did ... well, not 150, but a whole bunch. Later, one of the moms told me I could get 16 kids to do burpees in the cold and have fun doing it only because I have my mom’s personality. That might be the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me.
In the weeks after her death, I wanted to hide.
Sadness kept knocking me down. The salve was to mimic her—to surround myself with friends. I posted to workouts far more than usual.
When I needed second F most, F3 provided it in ways I couldn’t have predicted and that I could have never orchestrated on purpose. My F3 brothers sent encouraging calls, texts, Slack messages, many of them in the guise of MABA mumblechatter, but the real reason is because they love me. It all made me want to cry, and sometimes I did..
We were already close-knit at my AO, The Last Stop. MABA pushed our relationships to greater depths. It spread to our families, too. I lost track of how many adorable videos men sent me of their children trying to do burpees.
One PAX, a beast named DD, caught coronavirus three weeks into MABA. He had been having daily burpee sessions with his school-aged shorties, Flips and Hermione. During his isolation, his girls walked up to the line they were not supposed to cross to be safely distant from him. They wanted to talk and do burpees.
He set a timer. Staying safely apart, each did seven burpees every 90 seconds until they reached 105. MABA has radiated outside of St. Louis, too. I wrote a newsletter about MABA. Men from across the country wrote back to thank me for making them do 100 burpees. (Um, you’re ... welcome?!?) One PAX told me 31 days of 100 burpees wasn’t enough. He targeted 100 days. Another told me he was “addicted” to burpees and planned to keep doing them “in perpetuity.”
I co-Qed the MABA finale beatdown, when 20 of us in St. Louis (and more watching on Facebook) did 318 burpees apiece in an hour. I choked up at the COT, nearly overwhelmed by the love and support MABA had brought me. And it wasn’t just me. Testimonials poured in. Pillsbury said he teared up as he wrote a summary of how MABA had pushed him far beyond what he thought he could do.
I didn’t see any of this coming. I had no idea CFIT’s silly comment about MABA would turn into a CSAUP that would change my life and many more. I underestimated F3 Nation, again.
