Muscles and Meat: The Wes Van Dorn Challenge

What it is: 139 days of fitness. A commitment and a memorial to our larger than life friend. The goal is to workout everyday from January 8th to Memorial Day. You don't always have to crush yourself. Most everyone needs a recovery day now and then. We are mostly following CrossFit Endurance WODs, because the Van Dorn's often did. You can do anything active for your workout--CrossFit WOD, run, swim, yoga. It doesn't matter. Just workout, be inspired, and do it in Wes' name. That's the "Muscles".

Now for the "Meat". The end of the challenge will culminate with a pool party in Virginia Beach on Memorial Day (or you can organize one wherever you are). We will have a meat off!! A smoked meat challenge with multiple entrants, judges and a winner. This will most importantly be a celebration of Wes' life and all of our hard work in his name.

How it started: It started with a core group of three neighbors the day of Wes' funeral. We were sad, missing our friend and looking for a way to memorialize him. Inspired we talked about some of our favorite and most recent memories of Wes. Hanging out at the pool, putting us all to shame with his Adonis-like physique, and his love for smoking meat. This was it.... Muscles and Meat. We started Monday January 13th. We ran, we lifted and we fought through our grief together. We wanted to make our friend proud, we wanted to inspire his wife and we wanted to set an example for his boys. Wes was a HARD WORKER and we are attempting to live by that example each day. Our workouts thus far have begun to bring us healing, health, and deepened friendships.

As the past month has worn on, others have joined in our commitment to honoring our magnetic friend. We are overwhelmed with pride to hear how many of you are interested in joining as well. SO PLEASE DO! Start today. Go workout. Go be a better person.

Do it for J Wesley Van Dorn.

T-shirts and donations: Would you like a Muscles and Meat shirt? We are selling them through this Booster.com site and the proceeds/donations will go to an already established education fund for Jaxton and Maddox.

This page: In conjunction with this Booster.com page, we have launched a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/musclesandmeatwvd). Please use the Facebook page to say "I'm in!!". We would love to see you post your daily workouts and use this forum to motivate each other. We have dubbed Wednesday as WESDAY!!! Please wear your Muscles and Meat shirts each WESDAY and post photos of your workout in them!!

Thank you all for loving Wes and for keeping his memory alive! WVD!!!!!