Backblast: January 12th, 2026
AO: The Gauntlet – Rivercrest Park – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Beretta
Big Spoon
Bourbon
Huckleberry
Longhorn
Mile High
Rumor
Workout: Run The Gauntlet
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
Side-Straddle Squirrel Jacks: 10
The “Thang”:
Moseyed over to the pull-up bars to perform 10 burp-ups.
Moseyed over to the basketball court to play some F3 ball. PAX split into 2 teams and lined up at the free-throw line. On go, one PAX from each team performed the 1 burpee buy-in in order to take a shot. After the shot, miss or make, the PAX ran back to the school wall and back in line. 1st team to 3 makes was the winner.
Moseyed to the parking lot. PAX performed cocaine bearpees across 20 parking spaces. PAX bear-crawled all twenty parking spaces, performing a burpee at every space.
Moseyed to the pavilion and performed 10 burpee box jumps OYO.
Moseyed to the hill. Ran 1 hill sprint and performed 1 burpee at the top of hill. Ran back down. Repeato, adding 1 burpee rep. at the top of the hill until 3 burpees.
Group mosey around the quarter mile loop.
Moseyed to the baseball diamond and performed the 7 of diamonds. All PAX performed 5 burpees at each base.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 8
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Bourbon
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: So the Best of Black Swamp 2025 happened, and it was great. But there was one glaring problem: some of the data was wrong. Somehow, the best AO didn’t even make it into the final poll. No offense to The Armory, but The Gauntlet is the best AO in the swamp. Mile loop, ¼ mile loop, legit pull-up bars, a lit basketball court, baseball diamonds, massive parking lot, massive green space, a covered pavilion, and a hill. It appears as though the PAX have forgotten how versatile this AO really is…so I decided to remind them.
We hit as many as the amenities that The Gauntlet has to offer in a short, 35 minute stint. No time to run the full mile loop or utilize the massive green space, but we were able to explore nearly everything else. Even with the bouncing back and forth, we were able to stay warm and get some solid work in.
Speaking of solid, the playlist fit that bill.
“Have It All” – Foo Fighters
“Welcome To Paradise” – Green Day
“Everything You Want” – Vertical Horizon
“Have It All” – Jason Mraz
“Paradise City” – Guns N’ Roses
“I Have Everything” – Meredith Brooks
Unfortunately, the people who need to know all that The Gauntlet has to offer weren’t present for this one, so the magic will continue to go relatively unknown. But let’s be honest, if we were relegated to only a single AO that we could utilize in the swamp, we’d get the most bang for our buck out of The Gauntlet.