Breathtaker Challenge:
For those who don’t know, this is the Breathtaker Challenge:
- Wear a 20# weighted vest to 5 F3 workouts in a week
- Workouts can be in any region; can be a ruck, a run, a boot camp. If it’s an F3 workout (5 core principles!) it counts
- A week generally spans Friday-Friday. Pick up the vest after Cletus COT and return it the next week.
- There’s only one vest, so the opportunity to wear the vest will be auctioned off at COT. All the money raised by the auction will go to the charity of the month.
- The guy who wins the vest the first Friday of the month gets to pick the charity that month.
At the end of the year, all successful Breathtaker challengers will get a shirt that has their name and everyone else’s name who finished. If you do the challenge more than once, your name will be bigger.
Cool? Cool. Everyone understand how that works? Great. So, some more insight/ details.
Why Breathtaker? What was the Vision?
F3 stands for Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith. Faith being acknowledgement of a higher power and the connection/responsibility we have to those around us. Our region (SouthWake) kicks ass at Fitness. We’re so-so at Fellowship. But historically, we’ve had very little emphasis on the 3rdF. Guys were more than willing to chip in and help if someone needed it, but after several years, I don’t think we’d made a meaningful difference or impact on Holly Springs / Fuquay-Varina as an organization. (important note: I think the transformation each one of us has undergone has had a great impact on our families and our individual circles. But as a group, we have not come together to leverage that in an intentional and ongoing fashion)
So, back in December, a group of us discussed a vision of what a “Healthy 3rd F” would look like in SouthWake. Some of that sounded like this:
- The towns in which we lived would know that F3 was there to help if they needed it. Whether a charity, a church, a family, a school, whatever, when work needed to get done, the men of F3 would be there to help.
- The Pax of our region would have opportunity and inspiration to reach out to their brothers to get involved in projects about which they are passionate. If someone wants to make a difference, they would know they could say something and the rest of F3SW would show up in force.
- There would be a constant stream of opportunities available for men to get involved and make a difference (while doing our best to not overwhelm guys with too much!) Men come to F3 to get in shape. They stay because they are making a difference.
So how does Breathtaker Achieve that Vision?
F3 is, by definition, a starfish organization. There’s not a lot of “top down” leadership. So while we could have formed a small group that picked some charities to support, inevitably we would have missed something. So instead, we thought Breathtaker would allow men to pick an organization 12 times through the year. If someone felt strongly, they could step up and lead (which is what we’re all about!)
Our hope was that, of those 12, a few would really resonate and then next year we would organize the year around 3-5 “big” charity efforts — leaving more room for a lot of “one-off” efforts. One thing we recognized was that the “smaller” efforts would get swallowed up in the 12 “big” efforts. We decided it was worth it to get off the ground this year, but next year we would need to be more intentional about giving guys room to organize more opportunities.
We hoped that, by pairing something we were weak at (3rdF) with something we’re quite good at (1stF), guys would be motivated to think about how they could lead a 3rdF effort through wanting to achieve the Breathtaker Challenge.
So did it work?
By and large, yes. Through 3/4 of the year, we’ve done some great work. We’ve raised boat loads of money, but we’ve also had opportunities to become closer to guys through charities that are meaningful to them. While the $7500+ we raised for Meg’s in a month is incredible, I think the month where guys supported Skidmark and his mom’s battle with Ocular Melanoma to be very cool example of what 3rdF could be. Having a guy wear an eye patch at each workout was a great way for us to participate in a burden Skidmark carries that we probably weren’t all aware of. I think serving at the Food Cupboard was another highlight of the year for us —next year we will likely focus quite a bit of time there and would love to see us out with our 2.0’s a few times serving that community! I also hope guys are still getting together with their accountability partner to check deez nutz as per Banana Seat’s suggestion…
But, it wasn’t an unmitigated success. I’ve heard a few pieces of feedback that are worth highlighting and addressing.
The money flying around at auction is a little … much. Not a big fan. – A. Nonymous
So, on the one hand, part of what we’re trying to do is raise money. Raising money via auction has been a pretty solid way to do that. But, there’s something to be said about “Why should those who can donate a lot get to pick the charity?” (also, I don’t know what the 3rdF equivalent is to “bat flipping” in 1stF, but the auction is it, for sure). I’ll tackle the issue in 2 parts:
- Our initial vision included guys pooling their money to support a big effort. We saw that a few times when the FV / Fritter / 12 Oaks / Woodcreek guys pooled together and won the vest in a given week to let one guy wear it. Our hope was that if someone was passionate about something, they’d get a few guys behind it to support and make sure the money got raised. It happened one week organically when Bullseye threw his hat in the ring and we all chipped in a few bucks to make sure he could out-bid anyone else. So this was a feature, not a bug.
- The “bat flipping” at auction can be off putting. There’s no doubt about it and I won’t minimize this in the least. F3 is open to all men, regardless of everything and that includes economics. Some guys are scraping pennies to get by. Some guys are rolling in that BitCoin bubble. We are all here for a common purpose. I recognize the Biblical parable of the Widow’s Mite and that for some, giving $25 is heck of a lot more meaningful than another guy giving $100. I also recognize that, as much as I want to trip guys like Pikachu when they run effortlessly past me up a hill, if he didn’t run that fast, he’d be cheating himself. So to with donating money — some guys are learning to give sacrificially and that means they need to dig into their pockets and the auction is motivating them to do that.
With that said, it’s something we’ve tried to be sensitive toward at auction time and have not done the best job with. We’ll keep trying, but hopefully everyone understands we’re trying to raise money for good causes.
I can’t post 5x / week, let alone wear a vest!
I get it. I also have seen some guys step up and challenge themselves to post with Breathtaker who I never thought would want to take the challenge (Abe!!! You killed it man!) If you have a charity you want to support but can’t rock the vest — see the point above. Get a champion who’s willing to wear it for you! Share the load, brother!
So what’s next?
We’ve got 4 months of Breathtaker left. My hope is October/November guys will rally in support of meaningful holiday charities (keep in mind, if you want do do something for Christmas, it should be done before Christmas…) I hope guys are thinking about ways they want us to shoulder in and support the community.
Next year, we aren’t going to “run it back”. This was a 1-year experiment. There might be a vest to wear, but it’ll be a 1stF challenge, not 3rdF. We’ll probably take a few of the highlights of this year and dive deeper on them as organized 3rdF, but also give more space for things like the school mulching that 187 / Foghorn organized or the efforts Breach is putting together on 9/11. My worry is some of those got swallowed up in the bigger month-long efforts and we didn’t support them as well as we could have.
Most importantly, we’re Freed to Lead — we get together at stupid hours of the morning to do stupid fitness things, not just to get in shape, but because we want to be better men. Giving back and making a difference is a key component of that growth. So, how can you take this idea (Breathtaker) and use it to do something that you care about?
As always, hit me up with any questions. I’ll do my best to listen and address any concerns you might have.
~ Slide Rule
