Standing tall by falling down
On MABA, underestimating my F3 brothers and the fruits of shared suffering.
SIGN UP NOW FOR Year 4 of MABA. It started Monday, but it’s never too late to start.
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 to join you.
Log your burpees here. And you’re not going to do 3,100 burpees and not buy a shirt, are you?
An Anonymous Donor promised $1 to Shriner’s Children’s Hospitals for every burpee we did at Wednesday morning’s F3 workout in St. Charles, Missouri up to $10,000. To get that money, the men in the workout had to raise $10,000 on their own and put up 20,000 burpees. For every dollar we fell short, he’d keep $1. For every burpee we fell short, he’d keep $1.
At noon Tuesday I thought we were going to miss by so much we would owe the Anonymous Donor money. Not enough men had signed up for the workouts, and donations were way down.
I didn’t think we’d come close on the burpees, and I knew—I didn’t think, I knew—we had zero chance at raising the $10,000. By my calculations, we were going to miss each by more than 5,000.
A local TV station had agreed to do a story on this burpees for dollars challenge. I texted Cherry Limeade (our connection to the TV reporter) to suggest we should steer the reporter in a different direction because who wants to do a story on a bunch of guys who barely do any burpees and raise squat in terms of money?
Shows what I know.
I arrived Wednesday morning at my beloved Last Stop and was once again blown away by my F3 brothers.
There was Brick, calm, cool, collected, cracking wise and counting the men so when we counted the burpees, we’d know how many we completed.
There was Sloth, the very definition of an opposite nickname, lighting the gloom with his smile, his outside voice echoing in the darkness.
There was Waffle Fries, whose body and body language have changed so much in the last 18 months of F3 workouts that I didn’t recognize him even though he was a few feet away. A few years ago he was invited to join F3 but didn’t because MABA intimidated him. And now here he was, a MABA veteran, teaching newbies and vets alike to call cadence for burpees (no easy task).
There were Flo and Power Clean, who drove from 40 minutes away and were at the park before I was, even though I live a 10-minute walk.
There was Cowbell, giving a TV interview about a topic he spent most of his life lying about to hide the truth. Not too long ago he wouldn’t talk to anybody about his leg. Now he’s talking about it on TV. This man has so much courage. Watch the video here.
There was … so many more great men, doing hard work because they know they, and countless children, will be better for it.
In 45 minutes, 83 men completed 22,720 burpees and raised $10,500, eclipsing both goals our Anonymous Donor had set.
We’re on pace for 2.5 million burpees. We never maintain our early pace, but we’re 17,000 burpees ahead of where we were last year.
Send me photos or video of yourself doing burpees in strange places. The best so far this year is next to an outdoor ice bath on a frigid St. Louis day.
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