Backblast: June 1st, 2025
AO: The Pump Station – Hood Park – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Carmen Sandiego
Cybertruck
Echo
Guardian
Huckleberry
Irish Hoss
Meatloaf
Nitrous
Piggly Wiggly
Radio
Shepherd
Sherbert
Tarnished
Workout: BURPwEEk Day 1 – The Eclipse
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
SSH (2 is 1) – 10
Piano Keys – 10
Mosey over to the bottom of the hill with rucksacks.
The “Thang”:
Goal was to complete 120 total burpees over an undetermined number of rounds in a choose-your-own-adventure type beatdown.
First round consisted of a buy-in of one hill sprint (from bottom of hill to the halfway point) followed by 10 burpees before continuing on to the next round.
The Rules
1.) Each set of burpees had to ECLIPSE the previous rounds’ set in terms of difficulty (except upon reaching the bottom of the difficulty ladder and cycling back up to the beginning). Every time a PAX cycles back to the top of the ladder, they add +1 permamant hill sprint to the buy-in.
2.) Can skip UP one burpee level at any time by reducing the buy-in sprint total by 1 for that round, except when skipping the Dirty Man-Makers, which results in +1 sprint for that round.
3.) Can revert DOWN one burpee level at any time but must permanently increase the buy-in sprint total by 1.
4.) Each completion of a set of 10 Dirty Man Makers counts as 20 total reps towards the 150 total.
The Burpees
1.) Flying Squirrel (No Merkin)
2.) Burpee
3.) One Legged Burpee
4.) Kraken Burpee (3 hand release merkins at bottom)
5.) Dirty Man Maker (With a ruck, 3 hand release merkins at bottom & 3 squat thrusters at the top)
6.) Return back to 1.) and increase round by in by +1 sprint
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 14
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Guardian
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: 43 and dry, but it certainly wasn’t cold. BURPwEEk started off with a bang with 14 strong for The Eclipse, a perfect intro to the week of pain. Overall, the tweaks made to this run through made the duration just about perfect as Shepherd, Irish Hoss, and YHC achieved the 120-rep milestone and then some. It will probably need to be ramped back up to the 150-rep count as a result. That said, I think it’s time to concede that this beatdown is just too confusing to explain to PAX 3 minutes prior to running it. There were still tons of questions, and ultimately most ended up running it straight through without any thought…and many still ran it incorrectly. Apparently, choice is bad in the gloom. It’ll be back anyway, though, because it’s awesome. Confusion be damned!
I decided to go all out this year and tailor the playlist to the beatdown theme for every beatdown of the week. This saw the playlist from the original Burpeeclipse rise from the ashes into the airwaves, with a very minor tweak.
“Shadow Of The Sun” – Audioslave
“The Dark Of The Sun” – Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
“Paint It Black” – The Rolling Stones
“Staring At The Sun” – The Offspring
“Blinded By The Light” – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band
“Black Hole Sun” –Soundgarden
“When The Lights Go Out” – 5ive
“Eclipse” – Pink Floyd
What a great start to BURPwEEk with The Eclipse proceeded by a brutal, similarly themed run from Echo. A devastating 1-2 punch that left PAX on empty by 7:00am. This will always be a favorite of mine despite the confusion, and it will always hold its place in BURPwEEk.