You can have peace of mind, all you have to do is freeze half to death
Nine days left. YOU don't got this. But WE do.
I am client/job hunting. If you’re looking for a seasoned writer and/or the type of person who can persuade 1,191 people to do 3.1 million burpees in a month, please reach out.
In this issue: Chasing silence amid the grunting of MABA, burpees amid an historic snowfall in New Orleans and why in the world was that woman smoking a Swishers Sweet at 5:45 am when it was 1 degree out?!?
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 1,434 people registered but only 1,191 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!)?
You can have peace of mind, all you have to do is freeze half to death
The silence is almost physical. Walking to and from workouts this week in bitter cold in St. Louis, I can almost feel the lack of noise. It was like that during the blizzards last week and it’s like that again now that the precipitation has stopped but the feels-like temperature has dropped well below zero.
The only thing that breaks that silence is the crunch of snow under my feet. The snow has melted and refrozen so many times that there’s a crisp layer on top and breaking through it is oddly satisfying. The crunch tickles my feet and my ears, and I intentionally seek out virgin snow just to feel and hear that.
Once I arrive at the workout, the silence gets broken again, this time by the grunting and groaning that accompany burpees.
I like the sound of that, even when it’s me grunting and groaning.
This week, of all weeks, I’m thinking about silence, and our collective lack of it. If the noise gets to you this week (or in the weeks to come), shut off the device, go outside, and do burpees, preferably with somebody, or better yet many somebodies, because burpees are the one thing that transcend political party, race, gender, income, everything.
We are all united in our love of burpees.
It is love, right?
In college I took a class called “Information Anxiety,” which was about how Americans were struggling to process the overwhelming amount of information that bombarded us every day. Sounds timely, right? That class was 32 years ago—before email, the Internet, the explosion of cable news, and the oozing omnipresence of social media.
It is so, so much louder now. But we can find quiet if we look for it.
Last summer, I had a magazine assignment to spend three days canoeing one of the quietest rivers in the country. I called it the Quest for Quiet, and I’ll share it when it comes out. My most vivid memory from that trip is how quickly I adapted to the lack of noise: After about an hour on the river, I turned my head up to look as I heard the drone of a plane overhead. I would have never even noticed that at home.
Since that trip, I’ve been paying close attention to the noise that surrounds me and chasing quiet whenever I can. Yes, I appreciate the irony of someone like me—someone who never shuts up—writing about silence. I have a mantra I repeat to myself when I get deluged with the cacophony of the moment: “What do you want to think about today?” The answer is never whatever is audibly pummeling me at the moment.
I shut notifications off on my phone. The TV is almost never on in my house. When I run or ride my bike, I never listen to anything.
I find the silence liberating.
Even more so in the freezing cold.
The cold actually prompts physical changes in your body that essentially muffles the way you hear—acts as a gatekeeper for what comes in. You can have peace of mind, all you have to do is freeze half to death.
For that canoe story, I drove the 10.5 hours from St. Louis to Valentine, Neb. in silence — no radio, no podcasts, no nothing … until my rental car screeched and displayed a dashboard message I had never seen: it was out of coolant and demanded that I shut off the engine and add some.
I was far from anywhere I could do that. My only option was to hope the engine stayed cool long enough for me to exchange the car at a rental car office 70 miles away.
After getting a new rental car, I barreled straight north through Nebraska’s dimply sandhills. It was like driving across a golf ball. To my left, a pink line glowed on the horizon. Above it, lightning bolts, one after another, screamed at the ground.
I rolled down the window to smell, feel, hear that storm.
Wind ripped through my car.
The stress of that afternoon faded like echoing thunder. My only regret is that I didn’t stop and do burpees.
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This has nothing to do with the rest of this piece, but it was so bizarre I have to share it. See that photo at the top? It was taken Tuesday morning by the Q, my friend Matt “Cold Call” Ramshaw. (I’m the bundled-up guy in the hat.) The temperature was about 1, and the feels like was negative 14 or something crazy like that.
And yet, at 5:45 a.m., there was a woman in a parked car smoking what smelled like a Swisher Sweets cigar. That’s one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen at an F3 workout, and it’s definitely the weirdest thing I’ve ever smelled.
Every scenario I envision that led to her being there and doing that is very sad. So instead I’m imagining there’s some great mystery behind it, like that’s the opening scene of a movie and you can’t believe the madcap series of events that led to it. Or maybe she’s taking part in Make America Smoke Swishers Again (MASSA!!!!) and the dope who writes the MASSA newsletter is always asking for videos of people smoking in unusual places.
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 Jacob “Kilo” Wiest, who did burpees out in the snow in New Orleans. I’ve seen lots of such videos this week, but several things stood out about this one.
1. It never snows in New Orleans.
2. The neighbors walking by wondering aloud what in the hell is going on.
3. I asked Kilo if he shoveled that spot so he could do burpees. And he did, if a foot can be counted as a shovel. New Orleans has “zero” snow removal options – literally no shovels – so he used his foot to clear a spot.