MABA: The power of habit

The Gloom is where the desired behavior is the normal behavior.

Make America Burpee Again (MABA) is a nationwide CSAUP in which each of us is committing to doing 3,100 burpees in 31 days. Fall down. Get back up. Together. Sign up to join us here. It’s not too late. You can either get caught up or pro-rate your goal. Log your burpees here. Forward this to friends. SYITG.

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

The MABA Gloom: “Where the DESIRED behavior IS the NORMAL behavior”

Have you formed the habit yet? Have burpees become ingrained in your every day routine? Part of why I wanted to do MABA is to relearn lessons I have to continually revisit: I struggle with daily discipline. I’ve never been good at achieving long-term goals because I lack the diligence to work on them with regularity.

I don’t want to do 100 burpees every day for the rest of my life. But I do hope sticking to daily burpees for a month will show me I can form better habits.

I know from 49 years of experience that I’ll probably fail on my own. That’s why I like being surrounded by the men of F3. They hold me accountable.

SlowPitch—MABA co-founder, the HIM in the gloom photo above and The Last Stop’s stellar site Q—preaches the importance of habits. He loves a quote from James Clear so much that he apologizes for repeating it so often, but it’s worth sharing: “Join groups where the DESIRED behavior IS the NORMAL behavior.” (Emphasis SlowPitch’s.)

There once was a PAX from Nantucket …

First it was SlowPitch suggesting the song “Peaches” be rewritten to be about burpees. (Millions of burpees, burpees for me*.) Then it was Chisel reimagining Green Eggs and Ham as a rumination about where to do burpees. Now comes SAGA, a Wheaton PAX chiming in with a limerick he penned to MABA:

There once was a challenge to burpee
complete with a PAX to support me;
so I learned to fall down,
then got up off the ground,
as the beatdown of pain turned to beauty.

*Apologies if you walk around for the next week singing this to yourself as I have.

**Two of our PAX counted separately. If you do a burpee every time they say, “peaches,” you will do 34 burpees.

Hey MABA-boy, how many burpees have I done?

Your totals are here.

Through Thursday afternoon, 305 men had submitted 376,471 burpees. I hope that collectively we will hit 1 million burpees, but I’m starting to doubt it. For most of MABA, we’ve held a fairly steady pace for about 830,000 or so.

As I wrote this on Thursday, I was debating whether I should try to calculate how many more burpees we’d have to do each day to make it to 1 million, assuming the same number of PAX. I’m data illiterate, so I decided not to try. I told nobody about this internal debate inside my head.

An hour later, Fifth Wheel emailed out of the blue with a graph showing exactly how many more burpees each PAX in each region has to do for us to hit 1 million burpees, and another graphic showing the same based on region totals. In other words, the work I wanted magically appeared in my inbox without me having to do it or even telling anybody I wanted it. It was un-MABA-lievable.

The above graphic is the per PAX per day increase required for us to hit 1 million burpees. Check out Suncoast, best PAX per day average in the country. Straight from Fifth Wheel: “The blue column shows how many burpees each PAX is doing on average in each region every day. The RED box shows how may MORE each PAX needs to do each DAY to hit our goal. This is a WEIGHTED AVERAGE. If you have been doing more, you get a bigger piece of the extra pie. If you’ve been doing less, you get a smaller piece of the extra pie.”

This graphic shows how many more burpees we need per day per region to hit 1 million, with the same weighted stipulations. //Cough// Look at STL absolutely MABA-nating! //Cough//

A few more notes. With 384 HCs, we would hit 1 million easily if all y’all live up to your commitments, which, mighty HIMs that you are, won’t be a problem. Right? But the number of men submitting daily burpee counts is nowhere near 384. Also, and I can’t emphasize this enough, as much as I want to hit 1 million, MABA is not ultimately about numbers. It’s about attitude. It’s about resilience. Fall down. Get back up. Together.

Patches? We absolutely positively need stinking patches! (And t-shirts)

T-shirts are available here. They’re beautiful. Many thanks to Short Circuit for the design. You (probably) know the drill: We need to buy at least 12 to get them made. I can’t imagine doing 3,100 burpees and not buying a t-shirt. But we’re not at 12 yet. The patches are still in the works. I’m trying to figure out the best way to have them ordered and delivered. See this space in the coming days.

MABA to the masses

I’m a freelance magazine writer. I wrote about MABA, second F and the death of my mom here. Please read it and share it with friends.

A few burpees short of 400

We challenge you to send photo/video evidence of yourself doing burpees in a strange place. Whether that’s because you’re a few burpees short of 400 and need to knock them out wherever you happen to be … or because you’re just a weirdo doesn’t matter. We have a fighter pilot in his flight suit, a middle school principal in his office, an engineer next to a JT9D TurboFan engine off a Boeing 747 and a PAX under an overpass, to name four. Whoever submits proof of himself doing a burpee in the weirdest place wins a MABA t-shirt. It has to be in the course of MABA.

In the next newsletter

Crop Circle takes the helm with a post called Life Lessons Learned from MABA.