1-15-26
Hero Training
Vespa-Q
Tackleberry
Quick Draw – 6
Manchester
Waldo
ISO
Bourbon
F3, mission, 5 core principles, credo.
Warm up: imperial Walkers, windmills, potato pickers.
Mosey to River: 4 minute plank while doing 150 circle merk.
Pair up for Dora work:
150 baby cows
150 squats
150 step ups
150 burpees
Pic
Mosey Back to COT.
Counto,namo, 6, announcements, LDP3, pray out.
Backblast: January 12th, 2026
AO: The Gauntlet – Rivercrest Park – Perrysburg, OH
PAX:
Photon – Q
Beretta
Big Spoon
Bourbon
Huckleberry
Longhorn
Mile High
Rumor
Workout: Run The Gauntlet
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
Side-Straddle Squirrel Jacks: 10
The “Thang”:
Moseyed over to the pull-up bars to perform 10 burp-ups.
Moseyed over to the basketball court to play some F3 ball. PAX split into 2 teams and lined up at the free-throw line. On go, one PAX from each team performed the 1 burpee buy-in in order to take a shot. After the shot, miss or make, the PAX ran back to the school wall and back in line. 1st team to 3 makes was the winner.
Moseyed to the parking lot. PAX performed cocaine bearpees across 20 parking spaces. PAX bear-crawled all twenty parking spaces, performing a burpee at every space.
Moseyed to the pavilion and performed 10 burpee box jumps OYO.
Moseyed to the hill. Ran 1 hill sprint and performed 1 burpee at the top of hill. Ran back down. Repeato, adding 1 burpee rep. at the top of the hill until 3 burpees.
Group mosey around the quarter mile loop.
Moseyed to the baseball diamond and performed the 7 of diamonds. All PAX performed 5 burpees at each base.
Ended with:
Count-O-Rama: 8
Name-O-Rama
The Six – Bourbon
LDP3
Ball of Man
Spreadsheets from the Gloom: So the Best of Black Swamp 2025 happened, and it was great. But there was one glaring problem: some of the data was wrong. Somehow, the best AO didn’t even make it into the final poll. No offense to The Armory, but The Gauntlet is the best AO in the swamp. Mile loop, ¼ mile loop, legit pull-up bars, a lit basketball court, baseball diamonds, massive parking lot, massive green space, a covered pavilion, and a hill. It appears as though the PAX have forgotten how versatile this AO really is…so I decided to remind them.
We hit as many as the amenities that The Gauntlet has to offer in a short, 35 minute stint. No time to run the full mile loop or utilize the massive green space, but we were able to explore nearly everything else. Even with the bouncing back and forth, we were able to stay warm and get some solid work in.
Speaking of solid, the playlist fit that bill.
“Have It All” – Foo Fighters
“Welcome To Paradise” – Green Day
“Everything You Want” – Vertical Horizon
“Have It All” – Jason Mraz
“Paradise City” – Guns N’ Roses
“I Have Everything” – Meredith Brooks
Unfortunately, the people who need to know all that The Gauntlet has to offer weren’t present for this one, so the magic will continue to go relatively unknown. But let’s be honest, if we were relegated to only a single AO that we could utilize in the swamp, we’d get the most bang for our buck out of The Gauntlet.
1.14.26
PAX
Footloose – Q
Thor
Rumor
Isosceles
Big Spoon
Photon
Bourbon
Huckleberry
Callahan
Purdy
Nitros
Ladder Ball
Ladder
3-6-9-12
Ladder sprint, then do the reps at each cone of the exercise for that round. Sprint to cone 1, then do 3 reps. Sprint back to start. Sprint to cone 2, do 6 reps, sprint to cone 1 and do 3 reps. Sprint back to start. Continue this to cone 3 (9 reps) and cone 4 (12 reps). Wind sprints after each exercise.
WARM-UP:
Ball-a-vator
EXERCISES: ALL WITH A BASKETBALL
1. Flutter Kicks
WIND SPRINTS
2. Marionnettes (3-pointers). Ball over your head. Come up to a sit-up then touch ground on left then back down. Next sit-up ball touched between legs. Next sit-up ball touch right side
WIND SPRINTS
3. Decline merkin with feet on the ball
WIND SPRINTS
4. Side lunge jump squat
WIND SPRINTS
5. Lunges
WIND SPRINTS
Echo-Q
Dutch
Coconut
Big Spoon
Rumor
Mile High
We ran back and forth across the bridge to River Road in Maumee to the light going into Perrysburg.
Closing and Geppetto was 6
Ascending Ruck
Pax:
Armstrong
Deliverance (Q)
Fallout Boy
Raven
Ruck to the observation tower w/ jogging on the boardwalk out and back. At the tower each pax selects an exercise. The person selecting after them determines the reps. Ended up with 12 Muricans, 15 squats, 18 Rows, 24 Lunges (12 each side). Went out and returned to the tower 2 more times and Ascended, adding to our rep count each time.
Backblast: January 13th, 2026
AO: The Commons
PAX:
Operation (FNG)
Wario
Gold Star
Arcy
Red October
Piggly Wiggly
Ponzi
Frankenstein
Miley (transfer)
Anchor
Carmen Sandiego (Q)
Our mission is to plant, grow and serve small workout groups for men for the invigoration of male community leadership.
Five principles are open to all men, always free, always outdoors, always led by a member of the pax. Only you know your medical history so modify if needed. End in a circle of trust,
Credo is leave no man behind, but leave no man where you found him.
Workout name: Luck of the draw
Warmup: swimmers, star grabbers, Willie Mayes Hayes
Another level legs exercise by larceny. Squat jacks until you hear the word level in which you do a Bonnie Blair.
THE THANG:
Brought out the F3 deck. Each person pulled a card for an exercise. If it was just a number, we added 10. If it was a Royal we added 25, an Ace 100. Turned out we barely used a coupon and did quite a few sprints.
Ended with Freddy Mercury’s Song 2 workout.
FNG: Yes, Operation.
Count a rama: 11
Name a rama
Sixth: Miley
COT
Ball of man
Meatloaf – Q
Longhorn
Guardian
Sven
Huckleberry
Van Wilder
Geppetto
Isoceles
Ruck
1/13/26
PAX:
Footloose – Q
Landslide
Djibouti
Mercy
Lonzo
Norm
Viper
Fat Amy
Rudy
We Murphed. No Rudy left behind.
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.
Armstrong Beatdown
Pax:
Armstrong (Q)
Fallout Boy
Modified Murph at Starr school and back. Pull ups / Push ups / Squats.