Question from a 6-year-old: Why is there so many burpees?!?
We're on pace for 3 million this year, so it's a fair question that deserves an answer.
SIGN UP NOW FOR Year 4 of MABA. There’s plenty of time left to log burpees—the men in the photo above completed more than 2,500 on Saturday with a “feels like” temperature below zero. MABA—Make America Burpee Again—is an annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day (on average) every day in January.
Loneliness is killing us, middle-aged men especially, and MABA is a cure. You can’t be lonely when you’re doing 100 burpees a day with your friends.
MABA’s theme is Fall down. Get back up. Together.
We all fall down. We all have to get back up. We must not do it alone.
Sign up today and challenge your friends, enemies and frenemies to join you. If your kids are doing burpees with you, please log them as a separate entry. They will love that, and so will you! Every burpee counts!
Log your burpees here. And you’re not going to do 3,100 burpees and not buy a shirt, are you?
Questions from a 5-year-old: Why is there so many burpees?!?
MABA started three years ago with a dozen or so participants. We kept inviting people, and they kept saying yes, and by the time the first year ended we had 400-some men, women and children complete 898,102 burpees.
So far this year, 1,138 men, women and children on six continents** have completed 1,162,611 burpees (as of EOB Friday). That puts us on pace for just more than 3 million.
I bring up those numbers for several reasons. If nothing else they are interesting (palindromes are COOL!), and I hope you’re proud of the collective effort we have all put in to end the scourge of loneliness.
They also give me an excuse to answer a question posed by the lovely Shivvers, the 6-year-old daughter of Kyle “Brick” Luetters, one of the OG 12 who, by the way, has done double the goal of burpees so far this year.
Shivvers has seen her daddy FALL DOWN and GET BACK UP over and over again; in fact, she does the final five TOGETHER with him every night. So it’s natural for her to wonder, as she did in a question addressed to me and posted to Slack the other day: “Why is there so many burpees?”
This is my answer:
My dear Nora,
There are so many burpees because few are not worth doing.
You will learn many things from that fabulously handsome dad of yours, and one of the most important will be the value of doing hard things.
The world, my sweet child, will teach you to crave comfort, to bask in ease, to always seek the path of least resistance.
Poppycock, I say! Baloney! Horse feathers! And other more colorful words I don’t want to say in front of you.
You will grow, darling, when you push yourself, when you strive, when you reach for goals that are just out of your reach. Some days you will reach those goals and celebrate. Some days you won’t, and you will lament what seems like loss.
I promise you, at the end of your life, when you look back, you will not remember the days you took it easy. You will not remember the days with few burpees.
You will remember, and fondly, I guaran-dim-damn-tee it, the days with a butt-ton of burpees.
With love and burpees,
Uncle Ralph
Meet the 1,000 burpees in one day lunatics, first in a series.
A handful of men have completed at least one day of 1,000 burpees. I’m going to introduce you to them over the next few weeks.
First up is Andrew “Lady Fish” Rackovan, 37, the 1st F Q at an AO in Jefferson County, Missouri.
Ralph: Are you out of your mind?
Lady Fish: No, I’m not out of my mind. I fartsacked on a pre-BD EMOM, and the BD that just so happened to be a VQ.
I felt terrible. I felt like I let not only the Q down, but everyone else that showed up. I heard the Mary included a snowball fight. Bummed I missed it.
Anyway, as penance, I committed to 250 burpees for each fartsack and 10 for each guy I let down that morning. That put me in the hole for 650.
Just so happens that day I was working a booth for my business at a fishing convention and had nothing else to do. We were there for 11.5 hours so I bumped my commitment to a goal of 100 burpees an hour. Ran outta gas at 1,117. It was also a good chance to tell the other showgoers about F3 when they saw a guy just doing burpees behind his booth.
Ralph: What other crazy physical stuff have you done, and how does this compare?
Lady Fish: I have ran a couple half marathons, hiked up mountains, did power lifting for a while and joined F3 during Ironpax (THAT’s probably the craziest thing I’ve done). 1,000 burpees is definitely a physical and mental game. You get to a point that you want to just stop, but you just keep going. I would put 1,000 burpees in a day one of the toughest things I have done for sure.
Send me video/photos of yourself doing burpees in strange places
MABA has blessed me in many ways. Not least is that I get emails like this one, with the photo above attached.
Good afternoon,
Frogger from F3 Central IL here. I work for IDOT and with the recent snowfall have been working long overnight shifts clearing the state highways. I made time for my daily burpees in our 3000 ton salt dome next to our endloader that we use to load snowplow trucks.
Thank you for your time and keep up the good work.
Edward Harezlak
**I’m still working on finding someone to do one burpee done in Antarctica. I emailed a bunch of government media relations contacts who cover Antarctica with what I thought was a glib and funny request to get one person to do one burpee. It was ridiculous, of course, but the utterly humorless answer I got back was even more so: I am following up on behalf of NSF and the USAP program. Unfortunately, we cannot support this request at this time. Please let me know if you have any further questions.
Seriously?!? That’s your answer when asked to find one person to do one burpee in freaking Antarctica so MABA can claim burpees on all seven continents?!? I wanna party with you, cowboy, after you take the stick out of your butt.
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