The gift that keeps giving: One griddle, 100 burpees and the Legend of Corned Beef Hash
Or how making breakfast transformed a friendship
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MABA Year 4 starts Monday. SIGN UP NOW.
MABA—Make America Burpee Again—is an annual challenge in which participants do 100 burpees a day (on average) every day in January.
MABA is a cure for loneliness. You can’t be lonely when you’re doing 100 burpees a day with your friends.
The MABA 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.
Last January, 848 men, women and children on five continents completed 1,942,169 burpees.
We can top that. Sign up today, challenge your friends to join you and check out the bottom of this newsletter for a special MABA fundraising challenge.
My friend Jay Busbee wrote at Flashlight & A Biscuit last week about great gifts. If you don’t already subscribe to his newsletter, I urge you to do so. His missive got me thinking about gifts I’ve received. So I want to tell you a story about a griddle, burpees and The Legend of Corned Beef Hash.
The Presto griddle was a gift from my great good friend Pat Falco. For years when my family visited his house, and I made breakfast on his griddle. When I moved to St. Louis seven years ago, he had one shipped to my house.
By my conservative estimate, my wife, kids and I have used it more than 1,000 times. I make scrambled eggs on it several times a week. My kids use it for pancakes and French toast. I’ve taken it on camping trips and canoe trips. Still, even with that abundant use, it was a great gift but not yet a legend.
For that, I had to introduce the griddle to my shieldlock, a small accountability group through F3, a free men’s workout and leadership development group of which I am an active member.
Every Friday at 6:30 a.m., two friends (Rob “CFIT” French and Joel “Serena” Weinhold) and I show up at a local park. We hug, warm up, and then do a “park bench” workout — we run a lap around the park’s greenway and stop at each park bench for a set of exercises. When we are done, we have what we all agree is one of the the best hours of our week: I pull out my griddle and make fried eggs and corned beef hash—or CBH, as we call it, and as our friends who have heard us prattle on endlessly about it call it, too.
We were close before our obsession with CBH. We enjoyed working out together. We enjoyed eating breakfast together at a restaurant after. But it wasn’t a Thing We Love or a Thing We Have To Do.
Now, it is.
About a year and a half ago, we decided to stop going to the restaurant and start cooking for ourselves, mostly because it was hard to justify weekly meals out. That decision has had a profound impact on our lives.
Something amazing happened when we started cooking breakfast together, a bonding that is both ineffable and obvious. It’s as simple as the inevitable fellowship that arises as food cooks, as profound as scooping a man’s breakfast onto his plate for him, and as fulfilling as watching men devour the meal you just made for them.
I don’t do all the work. CFIT makes coffee and brings paper plates and plastic forks. Serena, well, he’s a slacker, but we still love him because he supplies the half and half.
As sweat drips off our bodies, we talk, we laugh, we wrestle with life’s problems, which are abundant, as between us we have seven teen-agers. There is no artifice when the smell of CBH is in the air. It’s as if that pleasing aroma demands honesty, forthrightness, transparency. We discuss careers and kids, tragedies and triumphs, dreams hoped for, deferred and dashed.
But it’s not all heavy stuff. When it’s cold outside we cook in an historic, city-owned cabin at the park. Someone decorated it with Christmas candles this year, and Serena’s winking delivery of “when regular CBH doesn't work, you do it by candlelight,” made me nearly spit out that same CBH.
Lately we have become obsessed on a granular level with cooking the CBH to the optimum level of crispiness. We have debated which spatula will best scrape that crispiness off the griddle (best answer: firm, but not so firm as to scratch the griddle), whether being outside is a factor (appears to be), and what impact the humidity has on the cooking process (on a particularly humid day we achieved epic, dare I say peak, crispiness, so maybe?).
During MABA I do burpees while the corned beef hash cooks (roughly nine minutes per side, depending on the temperature outside). I crank out 100 burpees and have a glorious breakfast immediately after.
I can think of no better way to complete a day’s worth of MABA.
BURPEES FOR DOLLARS
Last January 3rd, an Anonymous Donor offered $1 per burpee for every burpee done at one F3 workout with a cap of $10,000, with the proceeds going to Shriners Hospitals for Children. We pretty easily emptied his wallet of that amount.
He’s back again this year, with a twist: The men completing the burpees have to raise/donate to match his $10,000 and reach 20,000 burpees, again on January 3, again at one location in St. Charles, Missouri. We need your help. If you’d like to make a per burpee donation either for yourself or someone else, click here.
Get your MABA gear here
Because you’re not going to do 100 burpees a day and not commemorate that effort with a shirt, are you?