The greatest flash mob burpees at the Arch with eight teen-age girls story ever told
And also the only one, so you HAVE to read it
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The greatest flash mob burpees at the Arch with eight teen-age girls story ever told
I moved from Michigan to Missouri in 2000, newly married and about to start a new job at The Sporting News as my wife started law school at Washington University. My first glimpse of my new home state was the Arch. One minute the horizon in front of me was flat and uglified by strip malls, gas stations and odd billboards about finding out who the father is. The next minute, a giant wicket appeared as if raised by God’s marionette string from the muddy banks of the Mississippi River.
The Arch looked like a gleaming and spit-shined explosion, like freeze-framed fireworks, like a hug with glitter, and it was visible for miles and miles. The Arch slow-motion welcomed me to a new state with a new job, new wife, and new life, really.
As the Arch faded in the distance behind me, I looked in the mirror, looked ahead, looked in the mirror, looked ahead. Getting married and moving to St. Louis were unparalleled life adventures for me, and for many years I saw the Arch as a mysterious icon of this exciting new direction my life had taken.
Still today, every time I drive near it, I am fascinated by how it changes based on the angle at which you see it. Like a slowly spinning coin, it gets wider and narrower based on your vantage point. Even now, I try to steal a glimpse when I am exactly to the side of it because from there, it looks like the Washington Monument.
I take strange delight in my kids’ fascination with the Arch. “Where’s the Arch, Dad?” they asked when they were younger, as it served as a symbol of the start of a long road trip to Michigan. “There it is,” they yelled when we returned.
By design, the Gateway Arch has always portended coming and going, arriving and departing, one part of life ending and a new part beginning. I see that happening with my girls, as they have long since stopped calling out the Arch as we drive past. Soon enough they’ll embark on their own versions of seeing the Arch for the first time, with their childhoods disappearing in the rear-view mirror and their new lives unfolding in front of them.
Not yet though. For now they are in between—old enough to roll their eyes, young enough to occasionally not do so, old enough to make plans, young enough to need their parents to execute them, old enough to think a flash mob burpee is ridiculous, young enough to do it anyway.
And so it was in this gloriously complicated in between phase that we arrived on Saturday at the Arch, as part of our St. Louis Landmark MABA Burpee Flash Mob Extravaganza. Joining me on this Completely Stupid and Utterly Pointless expedition were Josh “Jalopy” Ritter, Jeff “Brown Nose” Devorss and eight teen-age girls — Katniss, Elephant Girl, The Dangler, Shrute, Bob, Giggles, Tornado and Bookworm.
At the Arch, we did burpees outside in three places—at its base, underneath it facing St. Louis’s famed courthouse, and underneath it facing the Mississippi River. We also did burpees inside the Arch, at the top, and I’m going to proclaim that we are the first to ever to do that because good luck fact-checking THAT.
Our tour of St. Louis locations crying out to be burpee-d in front of continued as we fell down, got back up, together, at Busch Stadium, Forest Park, and finally, at Imo’s, a local pizza chain that is, bar none, the most St. Louis place to eat and thus a perfect place to end our day of fun.
Speaking of in-between phases: Brown Nose, Jalopy and I paid and sat together; the kids let us pay and sat together away from us. Young enough to go out to eat with us, old enough to sit by themselves.
Normally you could see the Arch from where we ate, even though we were several miles away. But it was so foggy that at some points you couldn’t see the top of the Arch even from the grounds, and you could only see for a block or two in any direction from the top. It was like a custom-made metaphor for parenting, especially this in-between phase. You see almost nothing clearly, and every decision seems shrouded in confusion.
But still, somehow, some way, every now and then, you get something right, and the result is a day like we had on Saturday.
I mean, this feels like bragging: Eight teen-age girls went with their dads to do burpees at seven different locations and not only did they have fun, not only were they engaged with us and each other the entire time, not only did they sing Taylor Swift all the way there and all the way back, but I can barely look at the smile-soaked photos without wanting to cry.
I want to remember it all—looking at the Mississippi River out one side of the Arch and Busch Stadium out the other, the grainy (and disgusting, don’t tell Mom!) sidewalk chafing our hands outside as we dropped for burpees, the girls bracing themselves against the frigid wind blowing off of the Mississippi River and so much more. Brown Nose’s and Jalopy’s ears were ringing from the incessant, high-pitched giggling … and the girls laughed a lot, too.
The road to 3 million runs through YOU
Log your burpees here. We’re on the final push of MABA (Make America Burpee Again) now. Three days left. We’ve already set records in every meaningful category — burpees done, people completing burpees, continents upon which we did burpees (seven), etc.
We are on pace for 2,941,277 burpees. We’re not going to do THAT many and not break 3 million, are we?
To hit 3 million we need to keep our pace and collectively add 58,723 burpees. For context, that’s 60 percent of our one day average. If March had 32 days, we’d hit 3 million for sure. Here’s how we can do it even in 31:
Log burpees you might have forgotten about/get caught up if you have fallen behind in logging them.
Encourage men at beatdowns who are doing burpees but not doing MABA to sign up and log them.
Up our pace just a tick. Let’s pick a nice round number — 300. If we spread those 58,723 burpees among 300 men for three days, that’s only 65 extra burpees per day. You can be one of those 300, can’t you?
Host a monster final day beatdown with a host of MABA maniacs who do a zillion burpees.
Do me a solid, would you? Share this newsletter with anyone you know who’s doing MABA. MABA has more than 1,100 participants. But the MABA newsletter doesn’t have anywhere near that many subscribers.