I'm really looking forward to how bad this is going to suck
100 burpees a day for a month is 'self torture at its finest,' as one participant put it
MABA 2023 starts Sunday. Sign up here: https://f3maba.com/signup/2023. As of Thursday, we have commitments from participants on four continents (North America, Europe, Australia and Africa). We’re missing Asia, South America and Antarctica. Let’s share this widely to see if we can get MABA maniacs on those three as well. And if you sign up from one of those places, please let me know.
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My adventure racing team is named Booger Butts. Fred “Honey Pot” Williams is a gastroenterologist and provides the butts. Scott “Q-Tip” Hardeman is an ear, nose and throat specialist and provides the boogers.
Last year during MABA (Make America Burpee Again), Booger Butts had a monthlong text thread about all things burpees—our aches, our pains, our running totals, our wives wondering what the hell is wrong with us, videos from doing burpees in strange places, etc. Q-Tip won for doing burpees on the USS Yorktown.
I had learned to enjoy being miserable before I started hanging out with those two. But they’ve been terrible, by which I mean outstanding, influences on me. Honey Pot has so many stories about barfing during adventure events that we figure we didn’t work hard enough if his lunch stays inside him. His eyes twinkle when he explains himself: “I just like to suffer.”
And that’s what I hope to do in January for Year 3 of MABA.
MABA is not about the burpees or the suffering. They are the means, not the end. The end is the relationships that result. No good story ever starts with, “remember that challenge that was super easy?”
Early on last year, Q-Tip got obsessed with burpees. He completed 410 one day and proclaimed that his upper limit, never to be bested … and then he did 820 a few days later. He crossed 10,000 for the month and kept going. “It’s been very rewarding,” he wrote. “Self torture at its finest.”
To be clear, he thanked me for providing self torture at its finest.
I can’t decide if I have the best friends in the world or the worst.
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You’re not going to do 100 burpees a day for a month and not buy a shirt are you?
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MABA is an annual challenge in which participants attempt to complete 3,100 burpees in the month of January. You can do 100 a day every day, or bank them and take days off.
Last year 500-some men and women from around the world completed 1.5 million burpees. We did them to build resilience and discovered they gave us so much more than that. They gave us a way to shed light on, and fight, the epidemic of loneliness.
The theme is Fall Down. Get back up. Together. We all fall down. We all get back up. We must not do either one alone.
For more on MABA, watch this.
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Do you know of an inspiring MABA participant I should write about? Email me.