MABA: One more burpee. I—you—we—can do one more burpee.
Be strong enough to keep going when quitting is an option so you can endure when it's not.
Mark your calendars: Join us for the MABA finale
At 5:30 a.m. Central time on Monday, January 31, F3 St. Charles, F3 St. Louis and F3 JeffCo will co-host the Make America Burpee Again finale at The Awakening. It will be broadcast live on Zoom. Details: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84285337911?pwd=TFFXL2NlS09rS01aZzlDbUl6UjZqZz09
Meeting ID: 842 8533 7911
Passcode: Burpee
Log your burpees here. Fall down. Get back up. Together … with homothumadon.
As of 10:30 Thursday morning, 95 people had completed 3,100 burpees, meaning they successfully completed the MABA task. As of the same time, 165 were within 600 of the goal, which leaves them time for one last run at completing the task. I want to tell them, and anyone else who has a shot at that goal or one they created for themselves, a story.
It starts with a scene I’ve told before, but it’s worth telling again.
We were way out in the middle of nowhere Missouri on a long and lonely stretch of the Katy Trail, a bike path that runs east to west across the center of the state. It was dark and cold and I was miserable after 12 hours and counting of pedaling, pedaling, always pedaling.
We had maybe an hour left in our three-day, 267-mile trip when my friend John Urhahn (F3 Sheldon, the founding Nantan of F3 St. Louis) shouted, “Hold on! Stop!” from behind me. I wanted nothing more than for this ride to be over. Stopping would only delay that. We were so close to the end, whatever John wanted could wait. I acted like I didn’t hear him and kept pedaling.
He shouted again, louder this time, calling my name. You better be bleeding, I thought as I pulled on my brakes and skidded to a stop. “WHAT?” I said in a way that conveyed “AND WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STOPPING ME?”
“Congratulations,” he said, his eyes wide, his smile genuine and unaffected by my bite-his-head-off tone. He was holding his odometer as if presenting it to me as a trophy. “You’ve just joined the century club.”
That’s a biking term. We had crossed the 100-mile mark for the day, a first for me, and he wanted to celebrate. He was happy for me, and I responded by acting like I wanted to strangle him.
If you’re close to your MABA goal and also tired and frustrated, you might want to strangle someone, and that someone might be me. I’m fine with that. Use that frustration as fuel. Keep going. We’re almost done. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. You can do burpees those days, maybe not a ton each day, but some. You can persist to your goal and reach it on Monday. You can keep going.
I want to be careful here and strike the right balance. Push yourself but don’t hurt yourself. I find the NEVER QUIT ethos to be toxic. NEVER QUIT leads to burnout, bankruptcy, serious injury, etc., etc., etc. NEVER QUIT is idolatry masquerading as hard work.
At the same time, quitting sucks. I have spent much of the last eight years trying to build my persistence, endurance and toughness after finding out the hard way that I lacked all three.
I have wrestled with why, and to what extent, I want to build those things. They are ends in and of themselves, of course. When is enough enough? Is there such a thing when it comes to persistence, endurance and toughness? I want to say yes. I want to say no. So I say I don’t know.
I have, though, settled on a definition of my why: I want to be strong enough to keep going when quitting is an option because it will make me stronger when quitting is not an option. Life has before, and will again, put me into situations that feel too big to handle. I will feel overwhelmed, trapped, buried, whatever. The only way out will be to endure, to see it through to the end.
I can walk away from MABA and the only thing that would be hurt would be my ever-expanding ego. I can’t walk away from life. Something will happen—something always happens—in which there will be no “successfully completing the task,” only persisting and enduring. I believe if I can see hard things through to the end when I don’t have to that I will be better able to see hard things through to the end when I have no choice.
I learned this last summer. Giving my mom’s eulogy was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. In the days leading up to it and the morning of it, I was mentally crippled by the grief and anxiety of the task before me.
I took a walk to burn off energy, and a revelation occurred to me, as if an entire thought that would usually take me hours to sort through to conclusion arrived fully formed in my head. It went like this: When I do endurance events, and I want to stop or quit, I repeat a mantra to myself: One more step. I can take one more step. During that walk, I realized I could use that physical endurance and apply it during the eulogy. One more sentence. I can say one more sentence.
To me, to you, to all of us, I say: One more burpee. You can do one more burpee.
You can keep going through Monday.
And then you can quit doing burpees for the rest of your life …
By which I mean until MABA 2023.
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This Week’s Winner in the “Sentence From A MABA Backblast Taken Out Of Context And Put Into Any Other Context Will Make You Laugh” contest: “Thank you all for the inspiration and turning a lonely night in a Hampton Inn into one that is unforgettable.”
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.