MABA: The road from amateur to pro goes through The Grind

3,100 burpees in 31 days sucks right now. Keep going anyway.

            Make America Burpee Again (MABA) is a nationwide CSAUP in which each of us has committed to do 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 the PAX who keeps you going, or the whack-a-doodle place you’ve done burpees, to Matt Crossman (F3 Ralph) at mcrossman98@gmail.com.

Road from amateur to pro goes through The Grind

            This is starting to suck, isn’t it? (Starting to?!? It sucked the first day!) Many of us have done at least 1,000 burpees already this year (some nutjobs have done more than double that … looking at you, Gekko in Jacksonville.) That’s something to be proud of. That’s the good news. The bad news: We’re not even one third of the way done.

            The excitement of accepting the challenge of a CSAUP has worn off. The thrill of nearing the end is still two weeks away. We are smack in the middle of the grind, my brothers, and it blows.

            Then again, if it wasn’t hard, we wouldn’t do it. As Doc Quinn of KC says every morning (or at least every morning I’ve been at a beatdown with him): “We don’t get out of bed for easy.”

Until I learned to “embrace the suck,” I thought it was the dumbest aphorism I had ever heard. There are still days when I wonder why the hell I keep agreeing to do hard things. Last summer I was grinding through a project similar to MABA. I wasn’t going to quit, but I didn’t want to keep going, either. I whined about it to Sheldon. He sent me what follows via email. It encouraged me. I hope it encourages you:

            “A few months ago I ordered my squat rack from a company named Grind. It came with a banner that says ‘Built by GRIND.’ That phrase hit me on another level, and I hung it up right in front of the rack so I see it each morning when I am doing hard exercises that I don’t much care for, like squats and deadlifts. To me, it is a strong reminder that I only move from amateur to professional when I embrace the grind. There are no shortcuts or hacks, I have to put in the work day after day, I have to learn the hard lessons and put in the effort consistently to get to where I want to be. It’s a lesson I am still learning to live out, but it’s an important lesson I hope to master and pass onto my girls and others.”

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

The scoreboard is ready. Your totals are here.
            Through Sunday night, 293 men have submitted 267,306 burpees. I hope that collectively we will hit 1 million burpees. We’re running a bit behind—the current pace is 920,720—perhaps because our HC number does not align with the number of PAX who have submitted burpees. With 379 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 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)

            MABA patches and t-shirts will be available soon. They’re beautiful. Many thanks to Short Circuit for the design.

It ain’t a CSAUP until someone sends me a bloody hand picture and/or Merlot gets splashed.

Both happened on Saturday, one in South Carolina, one in St. Louis.         

A few burpees short of 400 contest

            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. 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.

This is Backstage from Tri-County doing burpees while waiting for school to open for his kids. Says Backstage: “I wonder what that lady in the van across the street watching me thought. Oh I know: ‘Man that guy doesn’t waste a moment! Good for him! He knows how to fall down and get back up again!’”