Backblast: January 5th, 2026
AO: The Foundry – Gateway Middle School – Maumee, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Big Spoon
Coconut
Doubtfire
Guardian
Landslide
Meatloaf
Norm
Rudy
Rumor
Workout: Tug Of War(m)
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
Windmills: 10
Piano Keys: 10
The “Thang”:
All PAX AMRAPed flying squirrels for one minute. PAX then paired off by the number of flying squirrels they completed. Top two rep counts were paired up, then the next two, and so on and so forth. That was your opponent for that round.
Setup was simple. At go, you and your opponent both perform 10 reps of a cardio exercise OYO. Once you complete your reps, you start running around the track in OPPOSITE directions. When you meet up again, you both stop and perform another 10 reps of the round’s exercise and continue to run in the same direction in which you started running. This was repeated until the “meeting” point had shifted more than ¼ of the track for one pair of PAX. So it was like a tug of war where the knot in the rope was the starting line (and opposite end of the track), and as you ran and completed reps, the knot moved to and from the starting line until one PAX was victorious. Once the round was over, all PAX met back up at the starting line and re-seeded teams based on winners and losers. Winners moved up a spot, losers moved down. The formula continued for 3 rounds and the exercises were as follows:
Round 1: SSHs
Round 2: Flying Squirrels
Round 3: Plank Jacks
After the completion of Round 3, all PAX circled up and performed 10 reps of a new exercise, in cadence: The Side Straddle Squirrel Jack. The SSSJ is an 8 count exercise that sandwiches a flying squirrel between a plank jack on the bottom and a SSH at the top.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 10
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Doubtfire
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: Cold and icy, but not too slick to run. This was a burner. It’s not too often that a beatdown format really encourages guys to run hard, but this one fit the bill. Trying to hold your ground or advance the knot towards victory brought out some extra effort that I don’t necessarily always see. That said, there are improvements that could be made. First off, it was a big loop, with a long way to go for victory. That meant few, long, taxing rounds. It might be better to have shorter rounds with more frequent switching of opponents and exercises. Or not, it’s hard to say. The long rounds were brutally exhausting, which maybe is the point. Either way, you can’t really go wrong with the format. It could be modified in a number of ways with different MOTs and exercises.
There was a playlist strategically put together for this, but honestly, there was so much running that you only heard the music 1 out of every 4 minutes. I guess that could be the other potential downside to this beatdown. It was extremely run heavy. Basically all running for the most part. Most guys probably expect that at The Foundry, but those more impartial to running may have had a rough morning.
All in all it was a good beatdown that I’d love to try again. Was a pleasure to lead.