Backblast: April 26th, 2025
AO: The Fortress – Grace Church – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Big Box
Callahan
Coconut
Deliverance
Guardian
Hannibal
Meatloaf
Spaulding
Tarnished
Workout: GCM pRelay Hand-Off Training
FNG’s: N/A
Mission and Principles:
F3: Fitness, Fellowship, Faith
Mission: To plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership.
The core principles of F3 are that it is always:
1. Free of charge
2. Open to all men
3. Held outdoors, rain or shine, heat or cold
4. Led by men who participate in the workout in a rotating fashion, with no training or certification necessary. You versus you. Modify or stop an exercise if you need to. The most important thing is that nobody gets hurt.
5. Ends with a Circle of Trust
Credo: Leave no man behind but leave no man where you find him
Warm-up: In cadence, but exercises and reps were unknown. Deliverance lead this while YHC was setting up cones
SSH (2 is 1) – 20
Windmills? – 8
Chain Breakers? – 9
The “Thang”:
Leading up to the Glass City Marathon Relay, the Swamp had practiced running a lot. Every week for 8 weeks, actually. And three was a lot of stretching. What we didn’t practice, however, was the hand-off. This beatdown was an attempt to remedy that. Format was the following.
PAX counted off into teams of 3 (YHC was alone). At the start, one person starts the given round’s MOT from 1st cone to 2nd cone. One person starts at the 2nd cone AMRAPing the queue exercise. One person stays at 1st cone to perform 5 "hand-off" reps before jumping to the next OPEN cone and AMRAPing the queue exercise. Once the person performing the MOT reaches the next cone in line, they handoff the MOT to the person AMRAPing the queue exercise. The person who just completed the MOT then performs the 5 “hand-off” reps for that round before running to the next OPEN cone. This order of operations continued until all 3 members of a given team made it to the queue AMRAP at the 10th and final cone. Intent was to have 3 heats per round, with the winner of each heat adding one addition “hand-off” rep to the count for the next heat of that same round. Exercise layout was as follows:
Rd. – MOT – Hand-Off Exercise – Queue Exercise
1 – Bear Crawl Forward – Hand-Release Merkins – X-Factors
2 – Crab Walk Forward – Supermans – Plank Jack Shoulder Taps
3 – Inchworm Crawl – Perfect Merkins – Bay City Scissors
4 – Alligatorn Crawl – Hrrrpees – American Hammers
5 – Wheelbarrow – T-Cross Merkins – Gas Pumpers
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 10
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Meatloaf
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: Great weather for some relays. And great relays…once the initial confusion settled. In future runs, calling out the exact order of operations would help to alleviate said confusion: “hand-off reps” run to open cone AMRAP queue exercise MOT “hand-off reps”, etc. That said, leading beatdowns is often like herding cats regardless of how simple things are on the surface.
What would I change? The exercises; MOTs, hand-off exercises and queue exercises. They were all strategically chosen for two reasons. To represent the “hand-off” of the relay, and to save our legs for the relay. And they did just that. But…they didn’t push how I would typically want to push. Running the relay without exercise limitations would be awesome. Burpee broadjumps? Jump away! Blocks? Absolutely! At the end of the day, the format worked great, so that’s what should stay. Sub out exercises as necessary.
Oh…the end of the beatdown was awesome. In-cadence burpees to “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer. It may become a staple starter or finisher to future beatdowns, either partially or the entire song. It’s just THAT good.
Speaking of music, the playlist relayed the message well.
“Hold On” – Commodores
“Hold On” – Pearl Jam
“Relay” – The Who
“Pass It On (Straight Ahead)” – Jimi Hendrix
“Pass It On (A Sure Thing)” – Chaka Khan
“Hold On, I’m Comin’” – Sam & Dave
“Give It Up Or Turn It Loose” – James Brown
“Give It Away” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
“Take It On The Run” – REO Speedwagon
“Pass It On” – Ryan Hurd
“Pass It On” – The Coral
“Take It Away” – L.A.B.
“Take It Away From Me” – James Moore
“U Can’t Touch This” – MC Hammer
This was a fun one for sure. A great format that can be tweaked endlessly with different exercises/MOTs. We’ll be seeing an unrestricted version soon.