Backblast: June 20th, 2025
AO: The Rabbit Hole – Whitehouse Library – Whitehouse, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Astro
Bourbon
Doubtfire
Fancy Feast
Fat Amy
Mercy
Rudy
Vespa
Workout: The Heartbeat Of The Summer Solstice
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
Willie Mays Hayes – 10
Piano Keys – 14
Mosey to the hill
The “Thang”:
Jacob’s Ladder
For a given round, perform 1 hill sprint up and down the big hill. After descending the hill the last time in a given round, perform a 30s walk away from the hill to the cone and back to the hill. After each round, increase the number of hill sprints by 1 for the following round. Repeat until time.
After the mosey back to the flag, we finished with 10 burpees in cadence…because Photon.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 9
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Fat Amy
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: 60F and dry, but a thick layer of dew on the grass, making this one even more fun. This beatdown was an audible. More importantly, it was a response. A comment was made that a DR post in Cincinnati saw more hills in a single beatdown than in all The Black Swamp. And having lived in Cincinnati for 5 years as a young lad, I know that the area does have a lot of hills. But they don’t have our hill. And they don’t have our PAX. We go hard. Borderline stupid at times. We’re the type of guys who will run 5 miles BEFORE doing 400 burpees. Or run IPC Week 0 BEFORE running Bourbon’s Lucky 7’s. Hell, some of us will Murph 8 times in 7 days. Or do 1475 burpees in 7 days. Or even ruck 50 miles in ONE DAY just because. We’re the type of guys who will bearcrawl through snow down Main Street in (-20F) windchill to celebrate our brother’s 69th birthday.
I’m sure the PAX in Cincinnati are great. I’m sure their beatdowns are hard. And I’m sure that the same can be said for all of the regions in F3 Nation. But the men in the swamp are just built different. It’s contagious…the type of peer pressure that would actually make your parents proud. There’s a reason they called this area “The Toledo Miracle”…it wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to flourish, let alone work at all. But it did…because of the guys who step into that circle every morning.
So thanks to Gold Star for giving me the inspiration to try something hard (borderline stupid), and to the other 8 guys who took on the challenge with me. As far as I know, the current record for hill sprints at The Rabbit Hole is now sitting at 23. And I hope that some fired up PAX with a passion for punishment crushes that number sooner rather than later.
Playlist (as well as the workout structure itself) was an ode to The Summer Solstice as today was the last day of this year where the days are still getting longer.
“Long Day” – Matchbox Twenty
“It’ll Be A Long Time” – The Offspring
“Daylight” – Coldplay
“Everlong” – Foo Fighters
“The Boys Of Summer” – The Ataris
“Foreplay/Long Time” – Boston
“The Sun” – Maroon 5