MABA: Meet the beasts who started it all
Jalopy EHed himself. Brick is building a solid foundation. DD is always where his feet are.
In this newsletter: The three MABA originals you haven’t met yet, an STL CSAUP power rankings and an exhortation to finish strong.
Make America Burpee Again (MABA) is a nationwide CSAUP in which each of us is doing 3,100 burpees in 31 days. Fall down. Get back up. Together.
Log your burpees here.
Meet the rest of the MABA crew
I’ve introduced you to CFIT, SlowPitch and Red Turtle. There are three more MABA originals you need to know—Jalopy, Brick and DD.
Jalopy is a finely tuned machine
Jalopy has my favorite first post story.
We’ve been friends for years. We attend the same church, and our community group meets in his house. Our daughters (F3 The Dangler is mine, F3 Bob is his) are best friends.
That photo is us after a blackops beatdown on election day; Jalopy is the hubba-hubba in the back. I’ve got a bunch of post beatdown photos of him. He is smiling in ALL OF THEM. There’s one from after a particularly brutal IronPAX beatdown in which he is smiling so broadly I suspect he’s secretly a masochist.
In the first 18 months I was in F3, I only lightly EHed him. He worked nights, and I would not post for workouts on his schedule, so I didn’t ask him to do what I wouldn’t do. But I EHed him enough that he knew what F3 was and how much I loved it.
He called me one day last spring shortly after the shutdown started. “I got furloughed today,” he said. I immediately tried to empathize with him. But before I could even say, “that sucks,” he brushed off my concerns. “No, no, that’s not why I called you,” he said. I had never heard him use that tone of voice before, somewhere between brusque and purposeful. “I want to go to your workout tomorrow. If I’m not going to work, I’m going to do something good with my time.”
He EHed himself!
Within a few weeks, he said he was “addicted” to F3. That addiction has transformed him physically. When I challenged him and the rest of the founders to do MABA, he pointed out that he hated us and loved us in equal measure. Of course he was in. It took literally zero cajoling. He’s so far ahead of where he was that we’ve stopped talking about it. He’s our Q of Rucking now, our Lord of Loads, and he’s an absolute beast.
Brick is building a solid foundation
We cooked a pancake-and-scrambled-eggs breakfast at The Last Stop on our one-year anniversary there. Brick walked by with his family. He struck up a conversation with GMO, who of course EHed him, as GMO does to ever sentient man he meets. Being EHed by GMO is like hearing the ice cream truck when you are 6 years old. The pull is irresistible.
Soon Brick joined us in the Gloom, and four months later Brick no longer resembles the man he was then. The source on that is Brick himself.
He dipped his toes in the water—weekday beatdowns at first. But within a few short weeks he dove in head first. Weekday beatdowns, weekend beatdowns, rucking, Qing, leading Q source, hitting other AOs, etc. He is accelerating in every area of his life—marriage, fatherhood, fitness, friends. He is open and relational, he says, in ways he never was before. He is blossoming in the Gloom.
And I’d like to thank him here. In the last few weeks, he has reached out to me repeatedly just to check in to see how I’m doing.
DD knows where his feet are … far ahead of yours because he’s a beast
SlowPitch on DD: After one of DD’s first Qs, he closed with a courageous thought: “be where your feet are.” On an 8-mile ruck in January (because 100 burpees wasn’t enough for a Sunday), he told me about reading the book “In Awe” by John O'Leary, which is about enjoying the moments and the small things and very much aligns with “being where your feet are.”
If you watch DD during beatdowns, he is very focused on enjoying it and giving it his all at the same time. He leads by example, whether he is chasing someone else (Ronda and Beans) or is the one being chased (by YHC). He is always “being where his feet are.” And that goes outside of fitness, with his relationships in his Shieldlock, with his colleagues, his friends and especially his family.
He practices these principles with his girls regularly, and he has them focused already on discipline and relationships themselves. I get a phone call every year from Flips (his oldest daughter) about Girl Scout cookies, and this year she began her sales pitch for me, “Hi SlowPitch, it’s that time of year to buy cookies again.” I instantly bought twice as many boxes because she called me “SlowPitch.”
Finish strong
Five days left. Through Tuesday night, 134 men were on pace to reach 3,100. That’s out of 399 HCs. Another 50 or so have a legit chance to make it. I’d love for far more men than that to hit 3,100. Finish strong. Hit that goal. Push yourself but don’t hurt yourself.
Your totals are here. Through Tuesday night, 321 men had submitted 728,121 burpees. From the outset, MABA’s goal was to hit 1 million burpees. Absent a large group of men withholding their totals and suddenly delivering them, we’re not going to make it. (Related: If you haven’t been submitting your totals, please do so.) But MABA is not ultimately about numbers. It’s about community. It’s about resilience. Fall down. Get back up. Together.
STL CSAUP power rankings
Brick asked me an interesting question after a particularly rough MABA beatdown that I thought might generate good discussion across the nation. He wanted to know how I’d rank MABA against other CSAUPs.
So here goes: F3 St. Louis, CSAUP, power rankings: (This is F3 St. Louis specific; send me your great CSAUPs.)
1. MABA. Given the death of my mom the day before MABA started, I am emotionally attached to it. When I needed second F most, MABA has provided it in ways I couldn’t have predicted and that I could have never orchestrated on purpose. PAX have inundated me with encouraging calls, texts, Slack messages, mumblechatter, etc., all under the guise of MABA but really because these men love me. It all makes me want to cry, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t.
Friends, this has been an utterly remarkable three-plus weeks. I hope/trust/pray it’s not just me and my grief grasping onto anything in the wake of the loss of my mom. I hope/trust/pray it’s not illusory. The bonding that is going on through this has been nothing short of amazing, at least for me and my beloved friends at Last Stop and across STL.
This is going to sound immodest, but MABA has radiated far outside of the STL, too. Men from across the country have thanked us for making them do 100 burpees. (Uhhh … you’re welcome?!? I ask again, what the hell is the matter with us?) One PAX told me 31 days of 100 burpees isn’t enough. He’s going for 100 days. Another told me he plans to keep doing them “in perpetuity.”
This is the clear No. 1 CSAUP for me. I’m a little afraid of what I’m going to do with myself when it’s over and I don’t have this newsletter to write.
2. GrowRuck. I hesitate to call this a CSAUP because I wrote an entire feature story about how it’s a leadership seminar wrapped in a brutal workout. But hiking while blindfolded in a torrential downpour in the middle of the night sounds very CSAUP-y, so here it is. The camaraderie we built in training, driving to, participating in, eating breakfast after, talking about for 18 months, etc. are all very powerful. The big impact of GrowRuck, for me, was learning that my limits were farther out than I thought they were. My fitness level took a huge leap in training for this because I was terrified I wouldn't be able to keep up.
3. IronPAX. As much as I believe in the you against you principle, I’m also competitive and like to know where I stand relative to other men. We do a couple IronPAX beatdowns repeatedly to measure our improvement. Pro tip: Don’t try to keep up with Brick or DD.
4. Athletes for the SAT for Sports (ASS). This was as utterly pointless as utterly pointless gets. A bunch of F3ers trained to try to become average high school athletes (click on the link to learn how I defined that.) This was fun and silly, a good way to pass the time during the dark days of corona disconnection.
Jalopy and Merengue, two mighty HIMs who make the Last Stop and STL great, joined F3 in the midst of ASS. If it helped bring them into the fold, it's better than I would otherwise remember.
How to look good doing a burpee
MABA t-shirts are available. Order here. Patches to come 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. So many burpees. All of them broadcast live on our Facebook page. You’ll get to put faces to all our names. You’ll also get to meet Beans, as he’ll co-Q, and let me just say merely typing that in makes me nervous for me, for you, for everybody within a mile radius of our AO.
A non-MABA note: Come GrowRuck with us!
You should come to St. Louis and GrowRuck with us. July 16-18, sign up details coming soon. Come get your ass handed to you alongside CFIT, Red Turtle, SlowPitch, DD, Jalopy and Brick. I’ll be there with bells on. But hopefully not a blindfold. I bet we'll do middle-of-the-night burpees.