Backblast: June 8th, 2026
AO: The Gauntlet – Rivercrest Park – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Carmen Sandiego
Coconut
Cybertruck
Five-Hole (FNG)
Flat Rate
Guardian
Irish Hoss
Lego
Lullabye
Mile High
Millivolt (FNG)
Quick Draw
Stark
Tarnished
Ukulele
Venom
Workout: Inaugural F3 Black Swamp Swole-y-ball Game
FNG’s: Millivolt (Photon)
Five-Hole (Carmen Sandiego
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: N/A
The “Thang”:
We played sand volleyball. With burpees. Well, not necessarily burpees, but flying squirrels. Overhead claps get a little dicey with sandy hands, and extra hops get a little dicey on uneven sand (or kitty litter in the case of the new Perrysburg courts).
PAX divided up into four teams of 4-5 PAX, trying to incorporate men of different skill/experience levels on all teams equally. Two teams then played sand volleyball to 15 using rally scoring rules with one exception. Every time a point was scored, the team who earned the point had to perform one flying squirrel for that point, and one additional flying squirrel for each additional point that they had earned in a row prior to that. So Two points in a row equals two flying squirrels after the 2nd point. 5 points in a row equals five flying squirrels after the 5th point. The idea was to prevent a runaway leader by exhausting the winning team through flying squirrels. Upon one of the two side-by-side games finishing, we swapped one team from each court with one from the other and played again. Each team played 3 games total.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 17
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Millivolt, so actually Stark as The Sixteen
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: 64 and dry. Couple of big learnings here. First: Perrysburg is not great at using our tax dollars. They spent all of this time deciding on a location, digging the courts, putting up these nice nets and lines…and they used kitty litter fill the courts. What a disappointment… Though we did all get a good feet exfoliation.
Second: Being in shape does not make you good at volleyball. Being good at swampball or softball also does not make you good at volleyball. As a whole, the PAX sucked! Like laughably bad. It should have just been called “Ball”, because there was no volleying going on.
Third: The atmosphere was great. The location of the courts is good, close to the COT. Allowed for PAX to go shoeless from the COT if needed. The time of year was fantastic: great light despite there being no lights at the courts. We didn’t even need the light up ball it was so bright out.
Fourth: Format worked relatively well. Hard to really gauge with the sloppy play, but I think the rally scoring with flying squirrels was adequate. Incorporating any burpees mid-play like originally envisioned (as opposed to after each point) would require significantly more skill from all players. I think I’d give the format another go before changing anything from a “rules” perspective.
A couple of playlist themes volleyed for position on the leaderboard for this one, and volleyball terminology ended up winning out over summer beach vibes.
“Serve It Up” – Schnockered
“The Bump” – Commodores
“Set It Off” – Audioslave
“Spike It Up” – Pepe Smith
“Serve It To Me Hot” – Chickenbone Slim
“Hump de Bump” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
“Pass It On, Pts. 1 & 2” – The Isley Brothers
“Here Comes The Hammer” – M. C. Hammer
All in all it was a good morning. Good fun, good fellowship, and we broke a sweat. This one may make its way back ever now and again during the high summer months.