The Foundry (Gateway Middle School)

One response to “The Foundry (Gateway Middle School)”

1. 

   Mike “Photon” Bauer

   August 26, 2025

   Edit

   Backblast: August 25th, 2025

   AO: The Foundry – Gateway Middle School – Maumee, OH

   PAX:
   Photon – Q
   Brass Tacks
   Coconut
   Dingo
   Echo
   Fat Amy
   Footloose
   Geppetto
   Guardian
   Gulliver
   Landslide
   Meatloaf
   Mile High
   Rudy
   Spaulding
   Stalker

   Workout: Runnin’ Down a drE-MOM

   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: N/A

   The “Thang”:

   A workout for time.

   PAX ran 10 laps around the track. There was a 1 minute eMOM timer running throughout the duration of the beatdown, and every time the timer went off (including at the start of the beatdown), PAX stopped wherever they were on the track and performed a number of burpees associated with the lap that they were currently on. Completing a lap reduced the burpee count by one rep. Workout was complete once a PAX completed the lap with 0 burpees. Rep counts were as follows:

   Lap # Burpees for eMOM Timer
   1 9
   2 8
   3 7
   4 6
   5 5
   6 4
   7 3
   8 2
   9 1
   10 0

   Ended with:
   Count-O-Rama: 16
   Name-O-Rama

   The Six – Meatloaf

   LDP3
   Ball of Man

   Spreadsheets from the Gloom: 50F and moderate. This is one of my favorite formats yet; truly diabolical in nature. The faster you go, the less overall work you do, but the harsher the toll on your cardiovascular system. You could call the run the “rest”, but the format still encouraged PAX to run as quickly as possible, which is not resting. That said, there was a fatal flaw to this beatdown. Unlike most beatdowns, this one has a legit barrier to entry. A PAX who struggles to perform burpees, or perform them quickly, can get stuck into an infinite loop where they never complete the first lap and instead do burpees endlessly. The way around this would be to invert the ladder and start the beatdown at 0 reps, increasing by 1 rep after each completed lap, and doing the workout over a specified time limit and recording distance instead of time. That’s not a perfect work-around, but it gives everyone an opportunity to hit their own wall on their own time.

   Outside of the fatal flaw, this workout was as awesome as it was difficult. Definitely tailored to those fast-holes with exceptional cardio. Coconut was able to get it done in 26:30 with YHC about a minute behind. And then there was Spaulding who did it wearing a vest…unreal.

   No playlist for this one, just you and your inner thoughts. And that damn beeping every minute. Which brings up another note on this format. The speaker used for the eMOM has to be LOUD. 400m track is pretty big and the beatdown can only work if everyone can hear the timer at any point on the track. The speaker used this time around was just barely loud enough. Any more wind or traffic noise would have been a significant disruption.

   This format (or it’s alternative) will be back…hopefully you’ll be there.

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