Backblast: July 5th, 2025
AO: The Fortress – Grace Church – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Coconut
Golden Gate
Guardian
Nitrous
Peach
Tarnished
Ukulele
Wario
Workout: Inception
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
Pho-tivator – 4-Count
The “Thang”:
Stage 1: Entering the dream world, i.e. inverse human timer. 1 PAX performs X reps of an exercise in real world and everyone else does specified out and back MOT to dream world. When timer PAX hits half of the required rep count, that's the kick and everyone else MOTs back. It was essentially a pacing exercise where the rounds got increasingly longer.
Round Exercise Reps MOT
1A Cactus Squats 20 Bear Crawl
1B Perfect Merkins 20 Murder Bunny
1C Absolutions 10 Crab Walk Forward
2A Cactus Squats 30 Bear Crawl
2B Perfect Merkins 30 Murder Bunny
2C Absolutions 15 Crab Walk Forward
3A Cactus Squats 40 Bear Crawl
3B Perfect Merkins 40 Murder Bunny
3C Absolutions 20 Crab Walk Forward
Stage 2: Building the dream world. PAX partnered up. Partner 1 performed 8ct body builder burpees while partner 2 performed 10 bricklayer paces towards a cone ~50 yards away. Upon completing 10 bricklayer paces, partner 2 left their block and ran back to partner 1. Team wheelbarrowed back to block, and flap jacked. Series was repeated until teams reached the far cone.
Stage 3: 4-stage Inception where the PAX teamed up to go 4-levels deep into the dream. The rules were as follows. At least one PAX had to stay at each level of the dream in order to keep the deeper levels in-tact. At least one PAX had to go 4-levels deep into the dream. The rest of the PAX could decide what level they wanted to stay at for the duration of the dream sequence. All PAX had to get back to level 1 before the dream collapsed. The work was as follows:
Level 1 100 Burpees
MOT to 2 Bear Crawl
Level 2 SSH until picked back up
MOT to 3 Murder Bunny
Level 3 Cac. Squ./Perf. Merk until picked back up
MOT to 4 Forward Crab Walk
Level 4 10 Absolutions
MOT to 3 Forward Crab Walk
Pick up 3
MOT to 2 Murder Bunny
Pick up 2
MOT to 1 Bear Crawl
Pick up 1 Finish remaining burpees in cadence
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 9
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Ukulele
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: I have been putting the backblasts in so late I doesn’t remember what the weather is like during the beatdown. It was relatively dry, warm, and muggy. Not the best weather for sleeping, but we dreamt anyway. And it was awesome. All three stages introduced elements that I really liked. The inverse human timer was a great pacing activity that only gets more brutal as the reps increase. The only reason we even got out of the round was because Coconut got the 40 perfect merkin draw. Else we would have never left Stage 1. Stage 2 was nice. Bricklayers are a bit clunky, but they really set the mood of world building along with the body builders and the wheelbarrows.
Stage 3 was where the beatdown really “kicked” into high gear. It was a total team effort where certain PAX committed to certain levels based on their skillset. As much as I wanted to try and knock out the 100 burpees, it was made clear that my speed in the crab walk was required for the team to complete the objective. Coconut and Tarnished were able to hold down the burpees at Level 1. All-in-all I think it is a formula that could be used in other beatdowns.
Playlist was formulaic, as usual, but a little disjointed in its approach. Bookended with theme tracks from the Inception soundtrack, the middle contained dream-themed songs in addition to music examples of a song within a song (within a song), similar to the dream within a dream motif of the film.
“Dream Is Collapsing” – Hans Zimmer
“Release The Beast” – Breakwater
“Robot Rock” – Daft Punk
“Runnin’ Down A Dream” – Tom Petty
“Sleep Now In The Fire” – Rage Against The Machine
“Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” – Eurythmics
“Dream On” – Aerosmith
“Cola Bottle Baby” – Edwin Birdsong
“Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” – Daft Punk
“Stronger” – Kanye West
“Time” – Hans Zimmer
This was a fun one that I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to running again. That said, I’m far more likely to rerun certain elements of the formula than the entire beatdown. It was a pleasure to make this dream a reality.