MABA, Waldo and the coming storms
With 11 days left, you know they'll be here soon enough. Are you ready?
I am client/job hunting. If you’re looking for a great writer or the type of person who can persuade 1,181 people to do 3.1 million burpees in a month, please reach out.
In this issue: Lessons learned from Waldo, the third in a series on men who did MABA all last year, and ice-skating burpees. Wait, what? Yes, ice-skating burpees.
MABA is Make America Burpee Again, the annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day in January. The theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together. Log your burpees at F3maba.com. We have 1,425 people registered but only 1,181 have submitted burpees. We’re on pace for roughly 3.1 million burpees. That’ll be slightly more than last year but only if we keep getting after it.
You’re not going to do 100 burpees a day for a month and not buy a t-shirt, are you?
Or maybe a hat (these are new and look awesome!)?
On Waldo and the coming storms
I stretched my left leg out the car down and put my shoe on the ground. The cold started down by my feet and ran up my body like a zipper. That acted like an amplifier on my physical and mental exhaustion. I stepped out of the car anyway. I set a timer for 20 sets of 2.5 minutes. I fell down and got back up 15 times every time the bell rang and walked in between.
I try to do burpee walks with people, like in the photo above. This time I was alone, which made the cold more cutting and the exhaustion more severe. The “feels-like” temperature hovered around zero. That bitter cold scraped my lungs. The frigid blacktop cut through my gloves and tickled my fingers. Soon enough, though, I was sweating, even as a woman on the Greenway told me it was too cold to be doing burpees.
Yeah, well, I kept going anyway.
What the heck day is it?
I’ve got 11 more days of this?
Whose stupid idea was this anyway?
As I kept going, I imagined the exhaustion and biting cold as converging in front of me, as if forming a blockade. They’re going to coalesce at some point. And when they do, something’s got to give, right?
If I want to finish MABA, I have no choice but to go through them.
As soon as I thought that, suddenly I was back in my car, driving across Kansas in the summer of 2020.
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The weather changed in an instant. I was with my wife and two daughters on our way to Colorado for a family vacation-slash-magazine assignment. “Is that a storm, Dad?” one of my daughters asked, pointing ahead and to the right. “Looks like it,” I said.
On the left, there was another dark cloud. The sky straight ahead of us was clear … for now. But the clouds were converging, and quickly. My weather app said we were headed right into hail and 70 mile per hour winds and that we should seek shelter immediately. But we were in rural Kansas. All I could see was farmland—no buildings, no roads except the one we were on, no people, no nothing. Even if we wanted to seek shelter, there was none to be found.
We had no choice but to drive straight through those storms.
That’s what MABA feels like here at the end.
We bought the ticket, now we have to take the ride.
Let’s be honest: It kind of sucks. And it’s going to get worse, not better.
That’s by design. You’re supposed to want to quit. You’re supposed to hate it sometimes. And you’re supposed to keep going anyway, spurred on by all the MABA maniacs around you who are just as miserable as you are.
Let me pause for a second. This kind of writing always makes me nervous. There’s a lot of garbage out there about persistence/perseverance/endurance. So I want to make clear what I’m not saying. I am not advocating the “do burpees until you die then get up and do more until you die again only worse this time because otherwise you’re only utilizing 40 percent of your strength” mindset.
It seems to me the end result of that kind of posturing is to make everyone who reads it feel less for what they’re not doing instead of encouraging and empowering them for what they are doing.
So, for the record: If 3,100 burpees in a month is too many, do less than that. But do more than you thought you could and do them with people. If you need a day off, by all means, take a day off. Heck, take two.
But then get going again.
It’s not about how many burpees you do or don’t do.
It’s about training yourself to endure while surrounded by people who are doing the same thing.
Here’s what I want out of MABA for me, for you, for all of us: I want to learn to persevere through tough challenges—in this case, endless burpees—when I can quit whenever I want to. I believe that will help me to persevere through tough challenges when I can’t quit.
On top of that, I want to do those burpees with people – lots and lots of people – so that when I am faced with those tough challenges that I can’t quit, I am surrounded by people who love me, by people who have fallen down with me, by people who have gotten back up with me.
The incredible outpouring of love after Cardinal’s death two years ago taught me the power of that.
And the injury of Tim “Waldo” Johanns, and the resulting outpouring of love in the last two weeks, has taught me it again. Check out this video update Waldo made to see firsthand the impact of that love. I’m struck by how peaceful he is, and that’s because he’s been surrounded by people who love him and covered by their prayers. This goes way way way beyond F3 and MABA, of course, but F3 and MABA in their own small ways, reveal this truth.
The men of Waldo’s F3 region (JeffCo, in Jefferson County, Missouri) had a workout on Saturday in his honor at roughly the same time Waldo had a second surgery on his spine. Every burpee they did, they donated to his total, just as he had exhorted all of F3 Nation to do for Cardinal two years ago.
In his summary of the workout, Cory “Yzerman” Heeley wrote:
“We will all fall down, we live in a broken world. For some of us it has been addiction, for others it’s as husbands, or employees, or friends. It could be a health scare or being dealt a hand that doesn’t feel fair. For Waldo it was a literal, devastating fall.
“But we have an opportunity because Waldo’s story isn’t done, and we can be part of it. Waldo, we are with you today, tomorrow, and onwards, brother - we love you. We know that not just do we have the chance to be part of your story, but you will continue to be part of ours as well, helping men get back up when they’re the ones who fall because this has always been about more than a burpee. MABA is a chance to take this silly exercise and teach ourselves an essential truth: that we are made to be together. So we fall down, but we get back up, together - as many times as it takes.”
Yzerman’s thoughtful distillation of the power of community hit me right when I needed it, when I was tired and exhausted and not particularly interested in keeping going. Plus, I can see real storms coming in my life, storms that might knock me down—aging parent, tough job market, vexing college decisions for my daughter. I will have no choice but to go through them, and I can’t quit them no matter how bad they get.
I hope, I pray, that I’ll be a stronger when they arrive because of the burpees I did with all y’all. But I don’t have to hope or pray I’ll have people helping me get back up: I know I will.
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Back on that Kansas highway, rain lashed my windshield. The excited chatter that had filled the car for hours trickled to silence, replaced by the droning beat of the rain.
I briefly considered stopping on the side of the highway. But I knew if we stopped, we’d get slammed by the worst of the storm for sure, and that if we kept going, we might escape it.
I was half right. We didn’t miss the storm entirely, but we missed the hail and 70 mile an hour winds. But not by much. We saw two semi-trucks blown over, and hard rain pounded our windshield for 30 minutes.
Then the sun came out again.
Meet Honker, the 60-year-old HIM who did MABA for all of 2024
Third in a series of men who kept MABA going all year last year
Real Name: Kelly MacMillan (center in photo)
F3 Name: Honker
Age: 60
Married? Yes
Kids? 1 son
What’s the matter with you that you did 36,600 burpees in one year?
It was R12’s idea, and Betty Crocker’s fault. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
What do you know about yourself now that you didn’t at this time last year?
A Slaughter start (20 burpees to open a workout) is not as bad as it sounds. Last year that would have sounded like death.
What was the biggest challenge to doing this, and how did you overcome it?
Just doing it on non-F3 days by myself. I would text the guys that I was done and see if they were doing it. You have to try to keep holding yourself accountable to you and to others around you.
What was the reaction among your loved ones as this was going on?
They all know I am like this. Don’t do a lot of down time, always move.
Right now, on this day, what hurts the most?
Right shoulder first, right knee second
Throughout the year, what hurt the most?
Right shoulder first, right knee second. See a trend?
You did this with Betty Crocker. Did you ever say to each other, if you quit, I’ll quit, or did you ever want to say that to each other?
Ha. BC and I both know we would not quit. He got hurt, and I got hurt, and we lost the margins we had built up. We both had to catch back up. That required a hard 4th quarter push
What advice do you have to someone starting MABA?
Build in a margin just a few more a day. Hitting it every day does work on you, so start slow and go at your pace. It does help a lot to have guys that will meet with you and do it as well. We used this as warm up extra credit before the work out starts. Almost like a F2 every morning. Not sure yet what we will be doing in 2025 but it will be something.
Where’s Waldo Competition
Every year MABA runs a competition to see who can submit video or photo proof of themselves doing burpees in the most unusual places. Entries in previous years include whatever you call the rink you play curling on, an operating room, too many beaches, mountains and planes to count, the roof of a house, the cherrypicker of a firetruck and much more.
This year, I am naming it the Where’s Waldo Competition.
This week’s entry comes from his cousin, F3 Dynomite, in Minnesota, who did burpees while ice skating