MABA: Theodore Roosevelt, STL's founding Nantan and the horse he fell off of
Lessons in getting back up from the Rough Rider
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. We have WAY more HCs than we have PAX who have logged their scores. With 350 HCs, we will do more than 1 million burpees in January … that is, assuming all y’all live up to your commitments, which, mighty HIMs that you are, won’t be a problem. Right?
Send your why, or your inspiration, or the PAX who keeps you going, to Matt Crossman (F3 Ralph) at mcrossman98@gmail.com. Forward this to friends. SYITG.
Following the Rough Rider’s trail
MABA is about falling down and getting back up. The life of Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th president, is an incredible illustration of the power of the resilience. Roosevelt, who died 102 years ago this week, lost his wife and mother on the same day. That crushed him, of course. But it did not destroy him.
Roosevelt embodied the strenuous life all HIMs should want to emulate. (He would have made an incredible F3er. Proposed nickname: Xanadu.) Because he lived a life of perseverance, I’m a Roosevelt fan boy. A couple years ago I sold a story about visiting his ranches in North Dakota. Sheldon, St. Louis’s founding Nantan, went with me.
A Roosevelt biographer named Rolf Sletten took us to visit key Roosevelt places. To really get in Rough Rider mode, we went horseback riding.
We had barely left the stable when I heard a noise behind me. Sheldon’s horse, Denny, was bucking. I looked back in time to see Sheldon flying off of him. Just as Sheldon’s butt lifted off the saddle and his feet left the stirrups, my blue roan quarter horse, Lakota, got spooked and started running. I yanked on the reins to stop her. When I looked back, I expected to see Sheldon in a crumpled mess on the ground. I hoped he had only broken a few bones.
As Sheldon was flying through the air, he had the presence of mind not to try to catch himself. He knew he’d break his hands if he did that. The downside of that was that he landed on his face. Somehow, he was unhurt. By the time I turned around, he was already on his feet, smiling even.
I wanted to leave and said so, framing it as a statement to Sheldon, not a question. There is no way I would get back on a horse after that. But there was no way he was going to leave. He came to North Dakota to ride horses where Theodore Roosevelt rode horses, and he was not going to let one setback — scary though it might have been — stop him.
From atop his horse, Sletten, the author who knows as much about Roosevelt’s resilience as anyone, listened to our conversation. When Sheldon insisted the ride continue, Sletten nodded approvingly: “Roosevelt always got back on the horse.”
Two whys
“It seems society wants you to get complacent the last six weeks of the year as it focuses on consuming: food, drinks, things, gifts, etc. What better way to start of the year accelerating than by falling down 100 times a day and getting back up? Plus burpees suck so what better way to eat the frog?” —Kurt Wunderlich, F3 Wolverine, St. Louis
“100 burpees per day for the month of January—F3 Phoenix has added ‘Dry-u-ary’ on top of that.No alcoholic drinking for the month. Both of these take discipline of the mind. My motivation is F3 Panther my 12 year old who is also doing the burpee challenge. He is very quick, I think being short is a definite advantage!” —Steve Burroughs, F3 Focker, Phoenix
A few burpees short of 400 …
… is the name of a contest in which we challenge you to send photo/video evidence of yourself doing burpees in strange places. The leader right now is Redo, a middle school principal who did burpees in his office at lunch under a sign that said, “ultimate challenge.” Highlight: He calmly tucked his tie into his shirt before starting. 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.
Totals shmotals
We are working on a MABA scoreboard. Disclosure: I kind of don’t want to. I don’t want this to turn into a competition. But I imagine a lot of you want to know your running totals (as do I), so we’re doing it. If this devolves into a pissy argument about whether someone’s numbers are legit I’m going to personally visit every AO in the country to give an atomic wedgie to every last one of you.
As of 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, the 277 men who have submitted their scores have tallied 169,875 burpees. I hope that collectively we will hit 1 million burpees. As of now, we are off the pace, at least according to what has been turned in. But if all the men who HCed do all their burpees, we will hit 1 million, and then some. But MABA is not ultimately about numbers. It’s about attitude. It’s about resilience. Fall down. Get back up. Together.
MABA hits the big time
I sold a series of stories on MABA to Success.com. Look for the first one to drop on Tuesday. I’ll share the link here. When I do, read it and share it, would ya? I’ve written quite a bit about F3 adventures for them. See here and here and here and here.