Who Is Greg Glassman?
CrossFit is dying.
Admittedly, we haven’t always been the most ardent supporters, but we have always been fans. The company’s “across the grain” approach to fitness captivated us for more than two decades. We watched the company grow and mature as we criticized it heavily along the way—but we watched nonetheless. The key word being: watched. Whether we loved or hated it is irrelevant, we payed attention regardless.
This might come as a surprise to those that never checked the “blue screen” of daily death before the break of the 21st century, but CrossFit has little to do with burpees, and AMRAPS. That old website that explored insane ideas like a 1.5x body weight barbell walk around a 400m track (insinuating a said weight clean and jerk and back rack) was stating something different than other fitness authorities. It was UX absent, a lack luster webpage that made asinine assertions, like a 5km run being anaerobic. It was stabbing in the dark and it hit a nerve with many because it was more about confrontation than it ever was about fitness.
These days, CrossFit Inc. are scaling and organizing in a homogenous-venture capitalists wet dream, as they try their hardest to remove their history of controversy, and clean their image in the purity of social ambiguity. They have all but completely lost their ignorant and dated, flag waving defensiveness of our nations LEO and military, finding much more solace and growth potential in todays amorphous diversity and inclusion norms. But to those who feel warm and welcome by CrossFit, who might smile when they think about their last experience of happy box owners who offered them the latest functional fitness soda or protein bar after they got cheered, and hand clapped into a less-than mildly mediocre sweat angel, you have not done CrossFit.
The CrossFit that I know started with confrontation of self, painfully. It raised questions like “what do you think you can do?” And after a short stint of hypoxic exercise combinations, you could get your answer, which more often than not was: “I guess I can’t do much.” This meanness was so pervasive that the ideology of beating yourself with a barbell became the same abuse that Greg Glassman would later use to wallop lobbyists, gerrymandered regulatory bodies, and soda companies. The intensity that I know of CrossFit was not in exercise of the body but exorcize of corruption. They went after soda companies, health authorities, and the many that make millions off pacifying a sick and delusional population, Sadly, the CrossFitters of today know more about the history of Nobull shoe colorations than they do about a small libertarian company that took on some of the world’s most ethically inept organizations. Why we aren’t singing praises of the work that kept a nation full of professional trainers from needlessly paying the government thousands of dollars annually, so we could show someone how to squat is beyond me. We are free to practice and share the beauty of human movement all because one, semi-crippled man with a passion for flannels and sex workers felt a compulsion to take a stand and fight. And that motherfucker, despite his sins, is a hero.
You could stop and be angered by his personal choices of womanizing and alcohol abuse—most people today will, as they clutch their pearls—but it would mask an appreciation that might otherwise see that a single person is responsible for the first sport that paid and gave screen time equally to male and female athletes on a global level. Sports like cycling have had 100 years to do that and still haven’t. Our beloved professional team sports don’t even come close, and while most people will remember Greg for a tweet they didn’t even take the time to understand, his work in the fitness space might be one of the most influential of all time.
Don’t get me wrong, CF is not without its well earned criticism. The black box summit forever changed the shape of functional fitness, it is a scar that allowed all of us to see the glaring mistakes that HQ would repeatedly make as it chopped the heads of its teachers, coaches, and professionals that helped make the brand what it is. It spent 20-years innovating the potential of a human being, but also during that time it went out of its way to destroy the lives of its critics through unjust lawsuits, and vicious public attacks. The amount of bad blood surrounding CF, its founders, and flag waivers is in direct relation to the passion and risk with which the company was born and grown. It is one of the universe’s greatest mysteries, a truth that we must relearn about violent growth and un-manicured potential. It is the simple realization that cancer is not just an affliction of the cells, but a byproduct of organized life doing whatever it takes to satisfy that greed for growth.
The reasons why I would care about this company aren’t hard to recognize. I do not care about Glassman’s fall into cancel culture obscurity—a side effect of the world’s most profitable tweet. Nor do I lose sleep over Castro’s inevitable reentry into irrelevance. What I do feel is a void. An absence of vigor. A loss of appreciation for what it takes to fight a system determined to keep things the same. I miss being a witness to humans that are willing to confront themselves and others for a purpose. I long for our species to become aware of that fire that is stoked in the belly and shot from the vocal-chords. A fire that burns what we know to the ground, but gives us space to build what we need. The last thing we need is another company that is willing to be whatever its buyers are. We can appreciate living up to the ideals taught by the founder without becoming the fallible human he was, and that we pretend not to be.
Is that what you were missing? Another corporate white washing? Were you just so triggered by a fitness company bringing to light the inadequacies of our culture’s diet, lack of ability, and leadership that you cheered on—not only the beheading of its creator but the neutering of its principles?
I miss those that provoked my criticism. What do I think about CrossFit today? To quote the great libertarian Bible “I don’t think of it,” and that’s precisely the problem. They will sell more seminars, shoes, and bullshit than ever before, because they are optimized to do so, but they won’t get anyone to think, they will convince no one of better ways, or challenge current paradigms because they only serve the god of economic prosperity. Which is to say, they only serve themselves. Now the powers that CrossFit fought openly and bravely—for 20 years—will use it as a stooge to funnel green, sugary liquid complacency into those with their hands out and their mouths open. And all of you who were once convinced by confrontation—perhaps angered by its faulty stewards—but drawn to it none the less, those that still fly that affiliation banner are simply store fronts for a shoe company and an energy drink. My outrage is not about a tweet, I’m angered that we don’t care anymore, that our confrontation is not with self or standards, but with not knowing when the next shoe drop is.
