MABA: On Bob Dylan, rooftop burpees and isolation as kryptonite

Or the strangest reason I've ever slept through a workout

            Sign up and/or log your burpees here. Fall down. Get back up. Together.

            The winner of this week’s Ridiculous Video on Slack Award goes to Puddle Jumper (F3 St. Louis, above), who did burpees on the roof of his house while he was supposed to be taking down Christmas decorations. Hey honey, I’ll be down in a min—(falls through roof)

Burpees are nightmares and cause them, too

          I fully intended to post on Monday at Bum’s Hollow, an AO I’ve never been to, as I’m on a quest to do burpees with every MABA man in F3 St. Charles. But I slept through the workout, and I want to tell you the bizarre reason why, not least because after a few heavy/serious newsletters, I want to lighten the mood.

            Yes, this challenge has an important goal—shining a light on and ending the epidemic of loneliness. But it is also a quest in which we celebrate rooftop burpees, dog burpees, ice-skating burpees, etc., so it’s OK to laugh at ourselves, too.

            In part because of MABA, I’m getting the best sleep since I started tracking it last summer. Now my dreams have gone nutso, and that’s why I missed the workout. I dreamed I was walking through a small downtown, carrying a big wooden table. My wife was with me. I was dressed up to look like Bob Dylan because I was somehow part of a police sting operation. A sergeant carefully looked at my hat, how it was cocked, how mussed up my hair was, what color my eyes were, etc., to make sure I looked authentic. The cops wanted everyone in town to think I actually was Bob Dylan.

            Why? Hell if I know. 

            Gosh it was weird. I woke up in the middle of the night so befuddled I couldn’t fall back asleep. Was I still in the sting operation? Did I look enough like Bob Dylan to fool the man on the street? What kind of skullduggery was going on in that small downtown that prompted the cops to conceive such an operation?         

            I’ll never know. The answers, my friend, are burpees in the wind.  

            I finally drifted back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, I was still so addled that I forgot what time the workout started, so I fell back asleep again and woke up too late to make it.

            When I finally came to my senses, I still needed to do my burpees; I sketched out plans for a solo brainstorming burpee-ruck (though I wore no weight). I set the timer to ring every 1.5 minutes for 45 minutes, a total of 30 sets.

            I do my best brainstorming while hiking. Could I throw burpees in and still think enough to make the brainstorming worthwhile? To my surprise, yes. If you see stories from me in either the New York Times or Washington Post, or with a dateline of Wyoming and/or Alaska, it will be because of ideas I had while doing Monday's burpees.

            None of those stories will be about Bob Dylan.

            I mean, unless the sting worked.           

            One more weird thing: I grabbed one of the dozen notebooks scattered across my office so I could jot down ideas in it during the burpee brainstorming session. At some point in the last three years, I wrote “isolation is kryptonite” on the back of it; I didn’t notice until I was halfway done with my burpees. I have no idea when I wrote that or what prompted it other than the fact it’s universally true.

            Whatever its origin, “isolation is kryptonite” sure fits MABA’s theme this year, doesn’t it?    

Roof-pees are the new standard. But they can be beaten.     

            Do burpees in weird places, send me proof, and if it’s deemed the weirdest by our esteemed panel of judges, I’ll buy you a MABA shirt. So far we have roof-pees (see above), double-respect ice-skating burpees, PAX doing burpees at work and a tattoo parlor and another who convinced strangers to do them in multiple places now. I have a bunch of videos of shorties doing burpees and even one dog doing them.
Deadline for submission is January 20. I have two burpee scenarios I’d like to see: From the altar/front of the church during a service, and in a hospital/doctor’s office while wearing gowns as a patient when you’re there to have work done.

            If you’re nervous about keeping pace with 100 burpees per day, toggle down. The point is not the burpees. The point is the relationships you build and strengthen with the people you do them with.

            You’re not going to do a month of burpees and NOT buy a t-shirt, are you? Order your shirt here.

            AV of F3 UK has tied his burpees to a charity that uses horses to help people who need healing. AV’s son is a client there. To donate, click here. 

Mark your calendars: Join us for the MABA finale

            At 5:30 a.m. Central time on Monday, January 31, F3 St. Charles will host the MABA finale. It will be broadcast live. See future newsletters for details.