MABA!

F3, CSAUP and a nationwide attempt to Make America Burpee Again

Sign up for MABA here. Log your burpees here. Forward this to friends. SYITG.

            Welcome to the F3 MABA newsletter. You are getting this because you signed up to do 3,100 burpees in January, you nutjob. Through this weekly update newsletter we will share our whys with each other. We will inspire each other, make each other laugh, remind each other why we do Completely Stupid and Utterly Pointless things.

            Future editions of the newsletter will contain scoreboards by region, inspiring stories, etc.

            Send your why, or your inspiration, or the PAX who keeps you going to Matt Crossman (F3 Ralph) at mcrossman98@gmail.com.

And so it begins

            January 1, 2021. Day 1 of Make America Burpee Again: 152 burpees down (for me, anyway), 2,948 burpees to go.          

            The birth of MABA went like this: At The Last Stop, an AO near St. Louis, we did a beatdown with a ton of burpees one morning in early December. At Coffeeteria, CFIT said it appeared we were trying to Make America Burpee Again.

            That phrase—MABA—sounded beautiful to us. How could we make it horrible? Eventually six of us decided to do 3,100 burpees each in January. A good chunk of our region thought that sounded like a profoundly bad idea and wanted in, too. Next thing I knew, we challenged F3 Nation and set 1 million burpees in 31 days as the end goal.

            If 323 PAX do 3,100 burpees, we will hit that goal. I know we can do it. EH your friends. Get them signed up. Let’s motivate and inspire each other. Let’s get after it, together.

            I’ll try to get “why sharing” rolling now. I hope you’ll share yours with the Nation, too.

I get knocked down but I get up again

            My life has been upended just in the few weeks since I helped come up with MABA.

            Like almost everybody else, I fell down in 2020, over and over again. But I got back up, too, over and over again. And what is a burpee except falling down and getting back up? The thought of falling down and getting back up 3,100 times sounded like a blast.

            I would get in better shape, deepen bonds, laugh.

            I couldn’t wait.

            Then I got coronavirus.

            It wiped me out Christmas Day and three more days after that. I slept 10 or 12 hours a night, napped in the afternoon and spent most of the day in bed with full body exhaustion. I couldn’t do one burpee, never mind 100 burpees a day for 31 days.

            I’m a storyteller for a living, and I must confess I appreciated the irony of 2020 kicking me in the nuts one last time. I got pissed at The Rona, pissed at 2020, pissed I had to miss all the beatdowns because of quarantine, pissed that I might lose the gains I had made over the last few years.

            But The Rona gave me my why for MABA: Anger. I was going to do 3,100 burpees out of spite. Or at least so I thought.

            Then, on New Year’s Eve, my mom, Kay Crossman, died, one week past her 79th birthday.

            And my why changed dramatically.

The Queen of Mumblechatter

            The cancer came back, or re-emerged, or whatever, around the week of the shutdown in March. Doctors gave her 6 months to a year. She made it 9.       

            We drove from Missouri to Michigan to see her in June in what I figured would be the last time we saw her. She faced her final months with few regrets. I don’t mean that she thought she never did anything wrong or wouldn’t want a do-over on this or that. I mean in a world that deifies ambition and accumulation, she was content.

            Her life embodied the rich value of a devotion to the second F. She collected friends like nobody I’ve ever seen. My gosh she would have been the Queen of Mumblechatter. We would have had to tell her to shut the hell up so we could work out. At the grocery store, restaurants, gas stations, whatever, she talked to strangers and turned them into friends. She would have EH’d the ever-loving crap out of everybody she knew.

            Her life, full of relationships, beat the hell out of a life of accomplishment-based striving. She loved her four boys and my dad (through 52 years of marriage). If she longed for a bigger house or fancier car or a huge career, I never heard of it. If I told her about F3 and constant acceleration and striving to get better, she would have told me to sit down, have a drink and relax.

            I’ve done a handful of CSAUP events similar to MABA—I did Grow Ruck in Naperville, I’ve gone on a couple really long bike rides, and I spent good chunks of this summer canoeing/kayaking on the Mississippi River, Missouri River and the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. I also tried tobecome an averagehigh school athlete at 48.

            Whenever I told my mom about an assignment like that, she’d call me, and I quote, crazy. (On Grow Ruck, she’s not wrong!) As I’ve been thinking about her over the last few days, though, I think she missed the point of these CSAUP events, or maybe I didn’t explain them well. If I told her I did them because of the deep friendships I made in the course of training for and completing them, she would have signed up instantly.

            She had at least five distinct sets of abiding and widespread friendships. I don’t mean five friends. I mean five large groups of friends, all separate from each other. As far as I could tell, this was not something she did intentionally. It was just who she was.

            I’m damn proud to say it’s who I am, too.

            I’m going to do 3,100 burpees this month because in doing so I’ll drink from a bottomless well of friendships the whole time.