A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
All right, if you're a frequent listener, you might know that I enjoy a good workout. Now, our next guest made a beat out of CrossFit. That's a high-intensity fitness program developed by Greg Glassman.
CALUM MARSH: If you do any kind of boot camp or functional fitness, you're taking the concepts that Greg had that changed the industry and they're, you know, helping you stay fit, even if you don't think of yourself necessarily as a CrossFitter.
MARTÍNEZ: That is Calum Marsh. He's the author of "The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story Of How CrossFit Broke The Rules, Made Millions, And Changed Fitness Forever." We started by diving into who Greg Glassman is and how he came up with the idea.
MARSH: Greg Glassman is a very interesting character. He was a personal trainer in the '90s in Santa Cruz in California. And he was in his early 40s, late 30s, kind of just trying his best to get by as a personal trainer with a very unusual, unique method of training people. So this was in the era of, like, ThighMaster and "Buns Of Steel."
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter) I remember that era.
MARSH: Yeah. So Greg's idea was, combine Olympic weightlifting, high-level gymnastics - so, like, handstands and using rings - and basic stuff like burpees. And doing all of it in a circuit, really fast-paced, on a clock, so as fast as possible. And at the time, it was, like, a level of intensity that very, very few people outside of collegiate athletes had ever done. And it totally revolutionized how people thought about fitness.
MARTÍNEZ: Did he know what he had on his hands? I mean, did he know that this was going to be a big moneymaker for him?
MARSH: It never occurred to him that it would be, like, a moneymaking venture. He was giving things away for free. He was a die-hard libertarian. And he had this idea that everything could be like John Stuart Mill's, like, free market, you know, put it out there. It was not a get-rich-quick scheme. It was, like, the exact opposite. It was a get-rich-maybe-and-really-slowly.
MARTÍNEZ: Did he think it was a big distraction? Did he just not want to maybe stay not focused on whatever he thought the goal of CrossFit was?
MARSH: I think it was almost like an authenticity claim. Like, we don't sell supplements. We don't sell stuff with CrossFit plastered on the side of it. We just have a great idea, and we're going to get you fit.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. Now, CrossFit, though, was too big and too big of an idea not to cash in on eventually. So, in 2011, CrossFit and Reebok got into a partnership. How did things change for CrossFit once Reebok got involved?
MARSH: Yeah, so they had corporations knocking on the door for a while because it was growing. And Reebok, at the time, was a $4 billion brand. So when they partnered, it was with very great reluctance. And it was only to the tune of, you know, tens of millions of dollars in a big check that they finally were like, all right, we'll do this. And initially, it was very little change because they were like, we're too rock 'n' roll, you know, we're too renegade.
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter).
MARSH: We don't want to become corporate. But inevitably, you put enough money into something, and it becomes a very different enterprise.
MARTÍNEZ: So once they got a partnership with Reebok and ESPN, they were able to have the CrossFit Games. The CrossFit Games was something unlike anyone, I think, had ever really seen, especially on a channel like ESPN.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Nearly 20 years later, what started as a backyard barbecue has turned into an unstoppable fitness revolution that culminates in the worldwide competition we know as the CrossFit Games.
MARSH: And that grew over the course of two or three years, once Reebok and ESPN comes in, from being a backyard barbecue to being stadium-sized, tens of thousands of people participating.
MARTÍNEZ: So at that time, I was also working for ESPN. I was doing a sports radio show in Los Angeles for ESPN radio. And one of the discussions that I would always have is whether the CrossFit champion can consider themselves the fittest athlete in the world. So what do you think? I mean, do they have a claim at that?
MARSH: Well, the actual claim was - it wasn't just a marketing gimmick. Like, they really did say, we are determining who is the fittest on the Earth. So their idea was fitness is defined as this broad range of skills - someone who's fast, strong, mobile, you know, has great balance, has accuracy. And if you look at all those skills, CrossFitters, they just come out on top.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. It's funny, like, because I would always kind of listen for the argument - fittest athlete, a very specific term, instead of best athlete, in which you'd have a stronger argument from a lot of people saying that maybe NFL players are better athletes or basketball players are better athletes. But fittest, I don't know, it narrows it down to, I think, something that I think people can live with.
MARSH: Yeah. And I think their whole thing was, any other athlete that you choose - like, if you got Michael Jordan at his peak and you got, you know, whoever you want to choose - they're going to have limitations because of the sport that they play. Someone like a basketball player is going to have really amazing power because they're explosively jumping into the air. But, you know, they're probably not sitting around working on, like, long endurance runs or back squatting, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pounds.
MARTÍNEZ: One thing I did notice, and it became a conversation about the people that joined CrossFit, that were part of CrossFit because it seemed like there was a lack of Black athletes, not just at the CrossFit games, but at CrossFit gyms. Why was that something that kind of was a thing?
MARSH: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say. I think this is something that they reckoned with a lot in 2020. But after the Black Lives Matter protests started and after the killing of George Floyd, Greg Glassman, who is the founder of CrossFit, he said that CrossFit as an organization wasn't mourning the death of George Floyd. He made a very, I guess he'd say, insensitive tweet regarding George Floyd and COVID-19. And so there was a ton of backlash along the lines of, like, hey, this isn't a one-off thing. CrossFit's always had this kind of, like, built-in level of racism. And it really - like, it created a huge reckoning within the organization. Greg stepped down and then was forced to sort of sell the company and get rid of it completely.
And tons and tons, like, thousands of affiliates - at the time, there were over 15,000 affiliates. Thousands of them decided they were going to step away, de-affiliate from the brand. A lot of those gyms still exist as sort of cross-training, nonbranded CrossFit gyms that are still doing the methodology, but are no longer affiliated with Greg or with the company. And that's just something - the company's never really recovered from that. But if he hadn't and if it hadn't gone that way, you can see them emerging from the pandemic maybe more successfully than ever or positioned to thrive where a lot of gyms were really, really struggling.
MARTÍNEZ: Where does CrossFit go from here? Is there an evolution, a stage that maybe we haven't gotten yet to when it comes to CrossFit?
MARSH: I have a very unpopular opinion about this, which is, if you look at the history of Pilates, Pilates was invented by this guy, Joseph Pilates. It was popular after World War II as, like, a method of recovering people who had been injured in the war. After his death - and it became popular again in the '80s and '90s, especially in New York - Pilates became a generic term that anyone can now use Pilates to open a Pilates studio. And you don't have to pay. There's no Pilates Inc. that you have to pay. And I kind of feel that if you really cared about the future of CrossFit in terms of, like, the future of the methodology and the idea, the best thing for it would be to go down that path.
MARTÍNEZ: That's Calum Marsh. His new book is "The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story Of How CrossFit Broke The Rules, Made Millions, And Changed Fitness Forever." Calum, thanks a lot.
MARSH: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
