Backblast: December 19th, 2025
AO: Nightmare – Perrysburg Municipal Park – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Carmen Sandiego
Spaulding
Ukulele
Workout: The Nightmare Before Christmas
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
Chainbreaker: 10
Willy Mays Hayes: 10
The “Thang”:
This beatdown had absolutely nothing to do with the movie “Nightmare Before Christmas” as YHC had never seen it. Instead, it was the first true entry to the AO namesake from this particular Q. My best shot at making a true Nightmare beatdown. Premise was simple. At the start of the 15 minute timer, all PAX started AMRAPing SSH in cadence indefinitely. As long as a PAX was performing SSH, they were still awake. The second each PAX had to take just one rep off, it signified them falling asleep. Once a PAX fell asleep, he was transported into his own personal nightmare. The nightmare was that individual PAX’s least two favorite exercises. AMRAPing and switching when necessary. That’s it. You fall asleep and you are forced into performing your two least favorite exercises for the remaining 15 minutes. There was only one way to escape your own nightmare…to be woken up and freed by another PAX who then jumped into your place in that particular nightmare. The freed PAX then had to run a lap around the concession area before freeing another PAX from HIS nightmare and jumping into that particular nightmare. This way PAX could continue to cycle through each others nightmare, with the pool of nightmares increasing the more and more PAX fell into the nightmare state. At the end of the 15 minute timer, all PAX woke up in a cold sweat by performing a 2 minute Al Gore hold. But the night wasn’t over. After the Al Gore hold, we REPEATOd with another 15 minute timer and the exact same premise. SSH until you can’t, then AMRAP your two least favorite exercises.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 4
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Spaulding
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: Cold and ridiculous wind put a thin layer of ice on almost everything. A number of fart-sackers as a result. But for those who showed up, what a beatdown this was. First of all, this beatdown does not scale well with low numbers. It forces guys into a very small rotation of exercises to perform during the AMRAP portion. This gets exacerbated by any/all PAX who refuse to fall asleep and enter the Nightmare state. When planning this, I didn’t think that anyone would go past a couple of minutes of SSH, and that I would eventually bow out just to get into the Nightmare rotation, but that was a poor assumption. Ukulele had other plans on this particular morning. He didn’t want to do his American Hammers with a block just as much as I didn’t want to do crabsolutions for 10 minutes. So we hopped. And we kept hopping. 100. 200. 250…that was the previous record at The Armory. 300. 400. There goes the 15 minute timer. But we weren’t stopping until we hit it. And 16 minutes in, we did…500 straight 4-count SSHs in cadence. Meanwhile, poor Spaulding and Carmen Sandiego were dragon walking and burpee-ing for about 12 minutes straight. And to make things worse, when Spaulding fell into the Nightmare, he chose not to break Carmen Sandiego out of his personal Nightmare (due to a lack of clarity on the rules), which forced both of them into their own nightmares for the duration of the 15 minute timer. At least Spaulding had No Surrenders, and Carmen Bonnie Blaires, to break-up the monotony of their number 1 least favorite exercises. I cannot imagine doing pull-ups and crabsolutions for 12 minutes like that…
So after the first round we all took our 2 minute Al Gore break before diving back in. Carmen fell asleep earlier, Spaulding held out about the same, and Ukulele…got bored maybe? He dropped out a few minutes in, but he jumped into another PAX’s nightmare to increase the rotation. Meanwhile, YHC performed SSHs until time was called. Counting stopped as mumblechatter increased, but the second round was probably 300-400 more 4-counts. And yes, that means that other than the warmup and the 2 minute Al Gore hold, YHC performed SSHs for the entire beatdown. My calves are falling off just recalling it here.
The original plan followed the same premise, but instead of running a lap when going into the nightmare state (or getting rescued from the nightmare you were in), a PAX would quickly run to the pull-up bars and perform 3 pull-ups…representing the Q’s nightmare that everyone was in.
Would I change anything here next time? Yes. First I’d run it as intended, with the pull-ups. I would also more accurately describe what happens when a PAX falls into the nightmare state in order to avoid the problem that we ran into the first round when Spaulding didn’t free Carmen. Finally, I would make it as nightmarish as I had originally planned and NOT had any music playing. Due to the cold and the ice, I opted to play some uptempo 90’s rock this time around.
Was definitely a pleasure. And special thanks to Ukulele for pushing us to that 500 SSH feat! Excited to Co-Q “Hop Til You Drop”!