Stella models last year's costume.

As you probably know by now, every year at KSK we take a week to raise some money for a good cause, and I end up sweaty and nearly naked as a result. This year’s fundraising effort raised over $34,000 for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, which helps out the families of wounded special ops servicemen and gives full scholarships to their children should they be killed in combat. It is a wonderful, wonderful charity, and your generous donations made me the #1 fundraiser out of 15,000 people who registered for Fight Gone Bad. The readers of KSK may like dick jokes and name-calling, but you’ve once again shown that you’re an exceptionally strong and caring community. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for giving a shit.

Of course, you didn’t donate SOLELY out of kindness. There were stakes involved. Stakes that I regret, and that you will too once you scroll down and witness me struggling through Fight Gone Bad in nut-hugging faux-denim boxer briefs. The video is below, followed by pictures. Be advised: the pictures, though technically safe for work, are probably not what your boss should catch you looking at, for any number of reasons.

This year’s video was shot and cut by commenter The White Boom Boom. Man, he really got right up in there, didn’t he? (I’ll swap this out with HD video later tonight. I’m sure you can’t wait.)

Unveiling:

And now for pictures of the workout itself. I’d appreciate you not clicking on these thumbnails.

There’s a minute of rest between each of Fight Gone Bad’s three rounds. This is me after round two:

And using the puke bucket after round three:

P.S. New avatar, guys!

Here at Kissing Suzy Kolber, we’re dedicated to making the crudest, cruelest, and most profane jokes — usually about the NFL, but sometimes about other subjects in order to spread the hate around. We tell fistfuls of dick jokes. We call things “gay” even though we know we shouldn’t. We get accused of misogyny. We’re horrible people for doing what we do, and you’re not much better for reading it.

That’s why we do KSK Kares. For one week a year, we pick a good cause and try to raise some money for it. It’s a karmic Hail Mary — right now, the score at KSK is 51 weeks of evil to zero weeks of good since the last football season started, and we need a big score.

And so, like last year, I’m going to participate in Fight Gone Bad, which this year benefits Livestrong and the Wounded Warrior Project. (You’ve no doubt heard about Livestrong thanks to Lance Armstrong and Nike; the Wounded Warrior Project is dedicated to helping injured veterans adjust to life after war through advocacy, counseling, and various programs.)

However, KSK wouldn’t ask for you to give money without offering something in return. This year, I’m offering readers two different kinds of incentives:

1. Prizes to individuals who donate the most money, and
2. Fundraising benchmarks that increase the public humiliation I subject myself to. I’m talking embarrassment like I’ve never experienced before. And I’ve been filmed in a public park in my underwear.

Interested? Read on for an instructive FAQ.

Q: So what is Fight Gone Bad, anyway?

Fight Gone Bad is a CrossFit workout that was originally developed for BJ Penn to simulate the physical exertion in a UFC fight. It’s three five-minute rounds of grueling exercise with one-minute rest intervals between rounds. Here’s a nice tutorial:

Over the last couple of years, some enterprising and generous masochists decided to harness the gut-wrenching evil in this workout and use it to raise money for cancer research and veterans’ programs.

I’ll try not to stand on this soapbox for too long, but I want to make it clear how important veterans’ advocacy groups like the Wounded Warrior Project are to me. You know how you occasionally have those dreams where you show up to school, and you’re not ready for the final exam? Or you have to go onstage in front of a lot of people, but you’re not wearing pants? It’s a specific kind of dream about being unprepared that makes you wake up in a cold sweat.

Veterans have dreams like that, except they’re about war, and they’re colored with traumatic memories of split-second decisions that led to the death or disfigurement of others. When I have them, I’m usually trying to stop my fellow Marines from shooting when children are caught in the crossfire. My short combat stint ended seven years ago, so the dreams are rare enough, but it’s an unpleasant way to wake up, and the dream always haunts me for two or three days after I have it. But I realize that I’m lucky; many others have those dreams every night, and many more have the constant reminder of a missing leg, a missing arm, the loss of vision, chronic pain from bones replaced with steel rods, or endless surgeries to fix the nerve damage that hot steel causes when it finds flesh.

So yeah, I think I can give a couple of dollars to people who’ve been permanently handicapped because they volunteered to fight America’s wars while we’ve been sitting on our asses and talking about Katy fucking Perry.

Q: What’s in it for me?

Scientists have actually proven that our brains’ pleasure receptors benefit from the act of generosity. So it feels good to donate money to worthy causes like cancer research and veterans’ causes.

However, if it’s tangible gifts you’re looking for, good news! Because I’m prepared to give away my favorite belongings and a bunch of swag to people who donate money. For example, if everyone donates enough money this Labor Day weekend, I’ll win an iPad. And as much as I really want a fucking iPad, I’d rather give it to the person who donates the most money between now and the end of Monday.

Other things I’ll be giving away to top donors:

• The History Channel’s “WWII in HD” on DVD and Blu-Ray.
• The entire series of Y: The Last Man (volumes 1-10).
• The entire series of DMZ (so far, that is: volumes 1-8).
• Garmin eTrex H handheld GPS.

Also, anyone who makes a donation of $150 or more receives an open invitation to my Brooklyn apartment, where I will make you two drinks of your choice and give you any four books from my beloved library.* I’ve moved my books all over the country for ten years, but inevitably all they do is sit on the shelf and wait for someone else to read them. Better that they find a new home for a good cause.

Anyway, you can sit at my bar, and I’ll be more than happy to discuss literature or fantasy football with you as my charming Rottweiler mix Stella vies for your affection. That sounds weird, but I promise that Stella and I will do our best to ensure it isn’t awkward. (Photos: most of my fiction, most of my nonfiction/military books, Stella, AWWWW)

*On the off chance that enough people do this to drain my library, the offer is good while books last. Fortunately, I never run out of booze, so applicable donors are still welcome for drinks.

Q: What’s Ufford willing to do to humiliate himself?

I’m glad you asked. Last year’s KSK Kares raised over $8,300. I expect to raise at least that much this year, and I’m placing incentives to take the total higher. Here they are:

$8000:

At eight grand, I hire someone to record and edit an unflattering video of me doing Fight Gone Bad. Last year, I promised to try my best to make myself vomit from exertion; this year, I’ve taken the added step of making my final event rowing, an exercise that my body hates and responds to with physical illness. It’s much more likely that I’ll throw up this year; don’t you want that caught on film and posted on YouTube? I certainly don’t, but I’ll do it for the right price.

$9000:

For nine thousand dollars, I’ll shave my head before Fight Gone Bad. In the years since I left the Marine Corps, I’ve come to love my beautiful head of hair, and at 32 years of age, I’m no longer certain it will grow back. Oh well.

$10,000:

This is the goal that I dread. At ten thousand dollars, I will do Fight Gone Bad — a brutal workout that taxes even the fittest people alive — wearing nothing but sneakers and these shorts:

I don’t own these dreadful shorts, but I’m willing to pay $45 for them if you people can raise $10,000 on my Fight Gone Bad page. I get to choose the color, though.

$11,000 and up:

YOU get to choose the color. Yes, leopard print is an option. God help me.

Q: So how do I donate?

It’s crazy easy. Go to my fundraising page and you can donate via credit card, PayPal, or even check. Then you’ll get a confirmation email from RapidGiving. If you want to be eligible for a prize, forward that confirmation to me. I’ll have updates throughout the week, and all KSK posts will be appended with the link to donate. Let’s fucking DO THIS.

(Or not. I’d be happy to not wear those shorts.)

THIS GUY.

For those of you who are late getting to the charitable party, the astoundingly generous KSK community raised $8,346 dollars for my participation in Fight Gone Bad IV, which just so happened to be the second-highest total of the 5000 CrossFit athletes who participated, an effort that helped FGB raise over $1 million for the Wounded Warrior Project and Athletes for a Cure. You are all to be commended and rewarded, and the only way that I can reward you is by offering up my sweaty, imperfect being for your satanically cruel scrutiny.

After the jump is my Fight Gone Bad experience in words and pictures, as promised. Be warned: male shirtlessness and vomit ensue.

Saturday morning. I’ve been fearing FGB for weeks, and much of it comes from the fact that the damn blog readers have donated so much money, which has changed me from a middling/below-average member of CrossFit South Brooklyn to something of a celebrity among the little community of people who could appear on the covers of fitness magazines. “So how did you raise so much money?” they ask. “Blog? How many readers to you guys have?” “And you just asked them for money?” And so on.

Of course, there’s the additional pressure of feeling like I need to get pictures of myself vomiting in order to justify all the money that was donated. I have to puke. WHAT IF I DON’T PUKE? People have paid good money to see me throw up, I damn well better follow through. But it’s not all about raising money and puking: I also want to perform well for my own, you know, physical well-being.

In case you’re unfamiliar with Fight Gone Bad, it’s a workout in which one performs three cycles of five different exercises in one-minute increments. Five minutes of going through each station, one minute of rest, five minutes for the next cycle, one minute of rest, and five more minutes. What are those exercises? Let’s have a look:

1. Rowing

Rowing fucking blows. It’s the bullshit exercise in Fight Gone Bad, because your score is determined by how many calories you generate, whereas every other exercise gets tallied by reps performed. Rowing magically saps your body of any and all energy you may have stored in your body. It taps into your mitochondria’s power reserves and runs the air conditioner on high.

A few days before Fight Gone Bad, I rowed 2000 meters. It took me eight minutes, and I threw up afterward. Rowing is an asshole.

2. Wallball

Wallball sounds like a fun game children might play. It is not. You take a 20-pound medicine ball, squat until your hips are below your knees, then stand up and throw the ball at a target on the wall ten feet in the air. I actually dislike wallball more than rowing.

3. Sumo Deadlift High-Pull

A deadlift is when you lift a bar from the floor to mid-thigh level by bending over, then using your back and hips to stand up with the weight. The high-pull part comes when you add raising the bar to your clavicle. That way, it’s twice as much work, plus it wears out your shoulders and traps as well as your lower back and hamstrings. Whee. (For FGB, the prescribed weight is 75 pounds.)

The clock in the picture depicts me at two minutes and 23 seconds into FGB, which is about 30 seconds before I realized that there was no chance of me puking in this workout. I could tell this because I was suddenly VERY close to losing control of my bowels. You see, rowing, wallball, and SDLHP all involve a lot of squatting and then exploding into full leg and hip extension, and that, my friends, is a whole lot of — I really wish I had a better phrase for this — colonic massage.

So, I had to use some of the energy that should have been spent moving weight clenching my sphincter instead. Because I was willing to vomit bananas and blue Gatorade for KSK, but shitting my pants was not part of the deal. You hear me? SHITTING MY PANTS WAS NOT PART OF THE DEAL.

4. Box Jumps

Oh, this is a nice one. This is possibly the worst picture of me ever taken. Stupid look on the face? Check. Unflattering stomach exposure? Absolutely. Sweating like Drew going up the stairs? Indeed.

And yes: the shorts. The shorts are silver. People are going to make fun of those. For Christ’s sake, it’s just a shitty pair of shorts to work out in. But I should know better:

“I dream of a day when a man will be judged not for the content of his character, but for the color of his shorts.” –The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Great man. King also envisioned LOLcats, but that’s another story.

Anyway: box jumps. You’re just jumping onto a box that’s 20 inches high. Sounds easy, right? And yet. Ohhhh, and motherfucking yet.

Sure, the first five are easy. Ten are easy. Then you have to put more and more effort to land on top of a wooden box. Then you don’t measure your jump right and you catch your toe on the edge of the box and your shin slides down the edge of the box and you’re bleeding.

Fucking box jumps.

5. Push Press

Like the deadlift high-pulls, this is with a 75-pound barbell. Now, pressing 75 pounds over your head isn’t that difficult. Doing it as many times as you can in a minute? Well, that’s considerably tougher. Doing it as many times in a minute while completely out of breath with aching shoulders from wallballs and high-pulls? Well, that’s misery. Sheer misery.

At the end of each five-minute sequence, I’d take the bar off the rack, crank out a couple reps, and unceremoniously clank it back on the rack, gasping for air, muscles begging me not to pick it up again. But everyone around you is yelling at you to get back on it, more reps, that’s enough rest, so you take a big gulp of air and have another go.

…and that’s one cycle. Do that two more times and this happens:

Am I crying? Maybe. I blacked out, so it’s hard to say.

Several minutes later, I regained the power — if not quite the desire — to stand up. I spoke to a couple people about how it felt (‘Wow, that sucked“), and then I felt a late-surging unhappiness in my guts. To the trash can, Batman! We have dry-heaving to do!

No, there was no actual vomit dispensed. And I bought the blue Gatorade just for you! I don’t even like the way it tastes!

But there’s a happy ending to this story. Happy for you, that is. One week later I did an all-rowing workout that culminated in five heats of 250-meter sprints on the rower. As with the 2000-meter row, the erg sapped my energy and poisoned my digestive system. Immediately after finishing my final 250 meters, I headed straight for the bathroom and fired off some violent projectile vomiting:

That’s coffee, coconut water, and the mostly digested remains of an egg sandwich. I apologize for not capturing the act itself on camera. I didn’t really have the time to grab my iPhone and explain to someone why they needed to come to the bathroom with me to photograph me getting sick. So, this grainy post-vomit shot will have to do…

…UNTIL NEXT YEAR.

“Hey, what’s goin’ on? … Me? Oh, not much. Just doing weighted squats with a kettlebell on the beach at sunset. Got some Uggs on ‘cuz it’s kinda cold.”

Well folks, although there’s still another week until Fight Gone Bad, but this post marks the end of our annual KSK Kares Kharity Drive. As I write this, we’ve raised $4,795 towards my goal of $5000, and so far your efforts have put me in 4th place in money raised to benefit the Wounded Warrior Project and Athletes for a Cure. That’s out of thousands and thousands of athletes competing.

If you’d like to help make a final push and help me attain (and exceed) my goal, please donate here. It’d be pretty cool to finish #1 overall and help out some veterans and cancer patients in the process. Otherwise, feel free to enjoy these lovely ladies of CrossFit.

UPDATE on the puking situation: For those of you who are donating only to see pictures of me vomiting, good news: I booted after a 2000-meter row last night. It doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily do it at FGB, but it’s certainly a good sign for you.

(this logo brought to you by Ed Hardy)

We here at KSK are awful people. We sit on our asses watching a violent sport, ingesting fried food and alcohol, and then we devote the rest of our week to telling the meanest, crudest jokes we can think of. We challenge each other to swear in new and inventive ways. We draw on racist stereotypes for cheap laughs and make casual assertions of homosexuality.

We’re all headed straight to hell.

UNLESS! Unless we can use our evil powers for good! That’s right, it’s the third annual KSK Kares Kharity Drive! In 2007, when our little blog was barely a year old, we raised $1565 for Fisher House, which helps the families of wounded and amputee veterans. Last year, even with the economy at its absolute worst, you fine readers went above and beyond and chipped in $2495 for charity.

This year, I, Matt Ufford/Captain Caveman, will participate in Fight Gone Bad, a brutally punishing workout that raises money for the Wounded Warrior Project (raising awareness and providing aid to severely wounded veterans) and Athletes for a Cure (fighting prostate cancer). That’s right: TWO charities! That’s twice the charities to brag about donating to at your next cocktail party!

What exactly does Fight Gone Bad entail? I’m glad you asked. On Saturday, September 26th, I’m going to head over to CrossFit South Brooklyn and perform three five-minute rounds of a sadistic combination of exercises:

1. Wall-ball: 20-pound medicine ball, 10 ft target.
2. Sumo deadlift high-pull: 75 pounds
3. Box Jump: 20″ box
4. Push-press: 75 pounds
5. Row

You don’t have any idea what most of that is, do you? Here’s what it looked like last year:

Nice place, right? It’s like working out in a dungeon with windows.

ANYWAY, here’s where you come in. For every thousand dollars donated via my athlete page at FGB, I’ll pay back your kindness by posting one picture of me at FGB in increasing order of humiliation. One thousand dollars and it’ll be me shirtless, which is only mildly embarrassing. Two grand gets you a photo of me making a stupid face and sweating. $3000 and you get me curled up in the fetal position, unwilling and unable to move. Five grand is my goal, and if we hit that you get the money shot: me vomiting into a trash can.*

So please, donate now. I’ve started us off with $50, so we’re already 1% of the way there. The sooner we get to five G’s, the sooner we’ll stop reminding you to please help us support wounded veterans while also fighting cancer. You don’t want the cancer terrorists to win, do you? C’mon, let’s humiliate me for a good cause.

*assuming I vomit, which I almost certainly will