Does CrossFit Have a Future?

Early on an October morning, I met Eric Roza for a workout at a CrossFit gym in Boulder, Colorado. Roza, who is fifty-three, was a few months into his tenure as the owner and chief executive of CrossFit, Inc., the preëminent gym brand of the twenty-first century. A typical class is an hour long, with a warmup and a cooldown bookending twenty to thirty minutes of punishing strength movements, Olympic lifts, gymnastics, and body-weight exercises. CrossFit is designed for general fitness or, as its disciples say, general physical preparedness for whatever life might throw at you, from helping a friend move a couch to competing in the Olympics.

I hadn’t been in a CrossFit gym in years, so I was relieved to find that the session would consist mostly of endurance work: three rounds of a five-hundred-metre row, a four-hundred-metre run, and thirty burpees. My goal was simply to keep moving and, of course, not to finish last. Rowing with a mask made the workout feel considerably harder, but voluntary hardship is the point of CrossFit. Its adherents believe that it leads to human optimization, and willingness to seek out physical adversity has helped build CrossFit’s fervent community. The workout of the day is tough, but everyone is pleasant and supportive. It’s competitive, but not ostensibly.

Boulder being Boulder, a National Geographic Adventurer who has climbed Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen finished first. Roza was third in our six-person class, limited because of COVID-19, and I finished a few minutes after him, but not last.

The pandemic accelerated a move in the fitness industry from physical locations to streaming, at-home workouts offered by brands such as Peloton, Apple Fitness+, and Mirror. Twenty per cent of CrossFit affiliate gyms closed during the pandemic, and, without a return to larger classes, even the most successful and popular ones would go out of business and stop paying fees to Roza’s company. But the pandemic wasn’t fully to blame for CrossFit’s troubles. Since its inception, in 2000, the company has been both heralded and derided for its intensity, in the gym and outside of it. Last June, in response to the killing of George Floyd, Greg Glassman, CrossFit’s founder, made statements that many people considered racist. Soon afterward, several former employees accused Glassman of sexual harassment. (Glassman denies being a racist and all accusations of sexual impropriety.)

The pandemic exposed flaws in the business plan. Societal turmoil exposed flaws in the leadership, and the allegations proved that, when Glassman needed the benefit of the doubt, it was no longer available. The math didn’t work, and he was forced to sell the company. Speaking publicly for the first time since the allegations were levied, Glassman told me, “I ran a gym I would join. Formed an affiliate program that I would participate in, wrote material that, had I seen it twenty years ago, we’d all be a whole lot fitter.” He added, “CrossFit succeeded because I was willing to tell the truth that no one else would tell. The world’s changed and I haven’t.”

Now Roza is in the process of attempting to reassemble the company’s early success. It’s difficult to see why Roza, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford, sees any promise in the brand. The answer comes from CrossFit’s long, checkered history of providing life-changing experiences for hundreds of thousands of people.

In 1972, when Greg Glassman was a teen-ager, his father bought him a Ted Williams weight-lifting set, so that he could train for gymnastics, a sport that he had become obsessed with. Jeff Glassman, a scientist at Hughes Aircraft, stressed the importance of math and the scientific method to his son.

In an attempt to simulate the way in which a difficult ring routine left him gasping for air, Greg combined a barbell-thruster exercise with pullups, twenty-one repetitions of each, then fifteen, then nine. Pressing the pace with an eye on the clock caused him to work so hard that he threw up. Then he recruited a friend to try the workout. He threw up, too.

After becoming a serial college dropout, Glassman took a job at a Gold’s Gym in Venice, California. He began putting his clients through circuits—which were made popular in the mid-seventies by Arthur Jones, the founder of Nautilus—using free weights instead of machines. This, he thought, was a way to get strong and build cardiovascular fitness simultaneously, while leaving him with measurable variables: force, distance, and time. But it went against the standard protocol: clients weren’t supposed to drop weights, rush between exercises, monopolize equipment, or climb ropes hung from the ceiling frame. Glassman found that he was also at odds with gyms’ business arrangements, which saw most employers take half of the client’s fee. He bounced between gyms and was often fired, but his clients became remarkably fit.

After training a client, Lauren Jenai, to what she called “spectacular results,” Glassman married her. In 2001, the couple opened their own gym—which they named CrossFit, for cross-discipline fitness—focussing on group classes. After Glassman posted the workouts on the Internet, so that clients could stay in shape while travelling, they began to spread through police stations, special forces, and military outposts.

Coaching is a confidence game, and it would be an understatement to say that Glassman is self-assured. He calls the name brands of the workout business “globo gyms” and argues that their business model is predicated on people signing up but not showing up. Even when people do show up, CrossFit acolytes claim, they don’t get in shape, because most gyms’ programming relies on exercise machines with pulleys that isolate and strain individual muscles but fail to properly train functional movement patterns.

CrossFit ushered in what the physical-cultural historian and author Daniel Kunitz calls the “New Frontier” of fitness. “The New Frontier athlete trains for life—to improve how she meets it and to deal productively with its pathos,” he writes. There is a “widespread embrace of suffering for something other than religious reasons.” Glassman has called CrossFit “a religion run by a biker gang.”

In 2002, a former powerlifter and research biochemist named Robb Wolf found Glassman’s Internet posts, and he and two friends began incorporating the designs into their training regimen. The group e-mailed Glassman for advice, visited him in California, and eventually asked to open the first affiliate gym—CrossFit North, in Seattle. Glassman told them he’d be honored and charged them a five-hundred-dollar annual fee to make it official, then promptly waived the payment, knowing the group had limited funds. He developed a training curriculum, which he began teaching across the country. Hundreds of aspiring trainers paid a thousand dollars to be certified by Glassman. “We told a profound and elegant truth about performance, metabolism, and chronic disease,” Glassman said. “It was like throwing a lit cigarette into dried grass.”

To open a Gold’s Gym, there are investment requirements of more than two million dollars. The initial franchise fee is forty thousand dollars, and there’s a long list of monthly expenses owed to the franchise. CrossFit affiliates, by contrast, pay only a yearly fee of three thousand dollars for the right to use the name.

By 2005, more than fifty affiliates in twenty-one states and five countries had opened, in warehouse spaces called “boxes” for their lack of gym flotsam. To this day, most CrossFit gyms remain simple, utilitarian spaces, without up-sell displays, mirrors, or rows of machines. By doing CrossFit, “you’re saving your life,” Glassman once said. “It’s health. . . . The fitness is a Trojan horse.”

Wolf became the brand’s nutrition guru, and taught the CrossFit community the supposed benefits of eating a diet that would be recognizable to our ancestors. His 2010 book, “The Paleo Solution,” became a Times best-seller.

When CrossFit began, few women were doing Olympic lifts at their local gym. The workouts effectively removed the chromosome-based gym division, where women work on cardio machines and men strain under barbells. Affiliates promoted female athletes, often pitting them against the men of other workout regimens. They mocked the expectation that women who work out should be concerned only with how small they can become. It’s not hyperbolic to say that CrossFit changed societal notions of beauty.

CrossFit also spawned innumerable businesses, as members started ventures in everything from insurance to nutrition. The Ohio-based gym-equipment manufacturer Rogue Fitness was launched to meet the demands of the new CrossFit gyms; it grew to employ hundreds of people. RxBar, which makes energy bars with ingredients that hew to CrossFit’s nutrition guidelines, sold to Kellogg’s, in 2017, for six hundred million dollars.

CrossFit’s ascent was not uninterrupted. In December, 2005, the Times published a piece titled “Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You,” which documented a CrossFit athlete who gave himself rhabdomyolysis, a condition in which muscle cells die from overexertion, resulting in possible renal failure and death. Glassman told the Times, “It can kill you. I’ve always been completely honest about that.” In fact, CrossFit had chosen as a mascot a muscular puking clown named Uncle Rhabdo.

CrossFit members embraced a narrative of redemption through physical suffering. I heard from many adherents that the daily practice of hard work spilled over into their everyday lives, making them better people, or at least capable of setting goals and achieving them. But, interspersed with aspirational photos, the company posted sexually suggestive images on Facebook, among them images of a woman with her legs spread while climbing a rope, and a woman who tripped and momentarily had her head in position for a sexual act. Photos you wouldn’t post of your friends, basically.

Coaches and gym owners with flair or specialized knowledge became independently famous. But former employees told me that, whenever someone grew too big for Glassman’s comfort, he banished them. (Glassman denies this.) After a former CrossFit trainer named Mark Twight began working with Hollywood celebrities, including the cast of the 2006 movie “300,” Glassman accused him of stealing his intellectual property.

Wolf, who had a public altercation at a CrossFit seminar with a favored Glassman employee, a former Navy SEAL named Dave Castro, was fired. “You have to kowtow and not let your star shine too brightly,” Wolf said, in 2013, of Glassman. “He’s always had this tendency toward incredible kindness, but he also has this rattlesnake intensity and cruelty.” Gym-goers were undeterred, however, and by 2015 there were eleven thousand affiliate gyms. Forbes estimated CrossFit’s revenues at a hundred million dollars, and wrote, “CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman has turned the fitness industry on its head. He’s done it, I think, by making CrossFit a mirror image of himself.” That’s not entirely true; as many have pointed out, Glassman is less Adonis and more high-school gym teacher, who, at sixty-four years old, walks with a limp from a childhood bout of polio and a gymnastics accident years later.

“Once you brand and sell fitness, you have to try to prove your version is better than all the others,” Brad Stulberg, a performance coach who has taken heat online from the CrossFit community about his health-and-fitness writing, told me. In CrossFit’s efforts to set itself apart, its most pious members defended the brand with a mocking élitism that was modelled by Glassman.

Until CrossFit, the dominant accreditation body in the fitness industry was the National Strength and Conditioning Association. In 2013, the N.S.C.A.’s Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research published a study about CrossFit’s efficacy. Out of fifty-four people who undertook a CrossFit program for ten weeks, the research claimed, nine had failed to finish, owing to injury.

The study quickly spread through the fitness world. Outside published a piece titled “Is CrossFit Killing Us?” and with the subtitle “The CrossFit backlash is in full swing—led by a long list of injured participants.” The article touted the study’s sixteen-per-cent injury rate.

Glassman and his community were incredulous, and angry. In their nearly ten thousand gyms, they had never seen such injury rates. CrossFit sued the N.S.C.A. for false advertising and unfair competition. The discovery process revealed that management at the N.S.C.A. had essentially told the researchers to add injury data where there was none. In December, 2019, a court found in CrossFit’s favor and ordered the N.S.C.A. to pay the company four million dollars in sanctions. (The N.S.C.A. declined to comment, except to say that the matter was settled without any admission of liability.)

All physical pursuits come with risks. Of my personal obsessions, running has uniquely gruesome statistics. The numbers are imprecise, but it’s often estimated that between forty and eighty per cent of runners will injure themselves in a given year. In my experience, these estimates are likely low. But this does little to diminish the elegance of such a simple and effective mode of exercise.

I was injured during my second time in a CrossFit gym. In an off-season effort to regain some foundational strength I had lost after a decade of ultra-endurance racing, I paid to work with a trainer. He began by testing me. Baselines are important in the gym, and essential in CrossFit. We started by doing jump squats with a weighted seven-foot barbell across my shoulders. I didn’t notice that the weight was lifting off my upper back at the top of the jump and coming down on my spine when I landed. Neither did the trainer. The following day I awoke to neck pain and a bruise. More than seven years later, I can’t sleep on my stomach, lest I risk a day of not being able to turn my head.

My next foray into CrossFit was more fruitful. Down the street from me in Salt Lake City, where I was living, was a gym run by a former college-football player, Tommy Hackenbruck, who had a vibrant CrossFit community. Hackenbruck, a hulking yet gracious man, coached me to proper form and then provided me with workouts to do on my own. A combination of regular CrossFit classes and Hackenbruck’s individual programming worked well for me, and I became considerably stronger, more agile, and more confident in my athletic abilities that off-season.

On June 5, 2020, a co-owner of a Seattle affiliate, Alyssa Royse, posted to her gym’s Web site an e-mail exchange she had with Glassman. She had challenged management about what she considered their “moral ambiguity . . . in the face of both COVID and the massive social unrest the US is now reckoning with,” and added that her gym was likely to de-affiliate because of it.

“I sincerely believe the quarantine has adversely impacted your mental health,” Glassman had replied. “You’ve let your politics warp you into something that strikes me as wrong to the point of being evil. I am ashamed of you.”

The next day, during a Zoom call with a group of affiliates, an owner in Minnesota asked why corporate headquarters had remained silent during the national unrest over racial injustice. “We’re not mourning for George Floyd. I don’t think me or any of my staff are,” Glassman said, according to a recording of the meeting published by BuzzFeed News and reviewed by The New Yorker. “Can you tell me why I should mourn for him? Other than that it’s the ‘white’ thing to do.” He then mentioned a conspiracy theory about Floyd, who he said was murdered in an effort to silence him over his involvement in a counterfeit-money ring, citing inside information from the F.B.I. in the affiliate’s Minnesota neighborhood.

Later that day, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation tweeted that racism and discrimination were “critical public health issues that demand an urgent response.” Frustrated with what he saw as the I.H.M.E.’s role in shutting down the economy, which Glassman believed disproportionately harmed minority communities, he responded, “It’s FLOYD-19.”

Within forty-eight hours, a reported three hundred CrossFit boxes had pledged to de-affiliate. Some of the brand’s famous athletes denounced Glassman’s comments and said that they would withdraw from the upcoming CrossFit Games—the company’s annual competition to crown the “Fittest on Earth.” Reebok, which was nearing the end of a ten-year Games sponsorship deal, announced that it would not renew its contract.

On June 7th, one of CrossFit’s longest-tenured employees, Nicole Carroll, called Glassman and resigned. “I didn’t see a way forward that I believed in anymore, not on the mission level, but on a leadership level,” she told me. “I can’t align with Greg anymore.”

Two days later, Glassman stepped down as C.E.O. and announced his retirement on the CrossFit Web site. He handed over the chief-executive role to Dave Castro, his longtime lieutenant. But many people in the CrossFit community think that Castro can be as abrasive as the founder himself. Commenters on social media called Glassman a racist and Castro (who is Mexican-American) complicit. They demanded that Glassman sell the company to save CrossFit. “I equate being a racist with being stupid,” Glassman told me.

Soon, the Times published accusations of workplace sexual harassment by Glassman. Among the claims were an account of a former employee who was paid by Glassman in lieu of a sexual-harassment lawsuit, a lewd Wi-Fi password used in the San Diego CrossFit office (as well as in Glassman’s home, according to his ex-wife), and an environment in which the founder demeaned women, openly assessing whether he’d have sex with them.

Glassman denies any accusations of sexual harrassment, and explained to me that there was a sexually charged office environment that was “fucking one-hundred-per-cent consensual in all directions.” Glassman added, of the way in which he ran the business, “I’m proud of the way everyone was treated and the way I treated everyone. I have no regrets.”

A couple of months after our workout, I met Roza at the new CrossFit offices, a block from a Whole Foods Market in north Boulder. A row of standing desks is flanked by a kitchen and a mini-gym outfitted with new Rogue equipment. A conference room has a view of Mt. Sanitas, a popular peak named for the sanitarium, an early health resort, that once sat on its lower slopes.

In appearance, Roza is everything you’d expect from the chief executive of a global fitness brand. He’s muscular, with a shaved head; he drives a Tesla and has a subscription to The New Yorker but admits that he’s too busy to read it. A self-described “math guy,” Roza attended the University of Michigan, then worked in management consulting for Bain & Company and in the music industry before matriculating at Stanford.

His introduction to CrossFit is a familiar story. Caught up in the reinvigorated interest around long-distance running caused by the best-seller “Born to Run,” he hired a coach to get him to his goal of a three-hour marathon. He tried ChiRunning and ran in “barefoot” shoes, but ended up injured.

“I had magic the first time,” he said, of CrossFit. He was forty years old, but he found that the varied workouts made him resilient to many of life’s insults. It was such a dramatic, world-changing discovery that Roza started to think about buying the company. But, when he put out feelers, he said, “It was ‘There is no way in hell Glassman will ever sell the company.’ ”

Instead, in 2013, Roza opened a CrossFit gym in Boulder with his now ex-wife. At the time, he was the C.E.O. of DataLogix, a marketing data-analytics firm that he had founded. When the company was acquired by Oracle for more than a billion dollars, in 2014, he stayed on to run Oracle’s data-cloud business and brought CrossFit with him, opening two separate gym spaces at the corporate offices in Westminster, Colorado. Roza, who left Oracle in 2019, says that CrossFit improved the data-cloud division’s business relations by breaking down its hierarchy.

When Glassman stepped down, a friend of Roza’s named David Woods connected the two men. Now, Glassman was open to selling. He said that he had a number and that, if Roza could meet it, he would consider selling. The founder sent his chief financial officer and his private plane to bring Roza and Woods to Santa Barbara, where, for nine hours, Glassman pontificated, describing the business environment and what he felt CrossFit should focus on. “Business is the art and science of offering uniquely attractive opportunities for other people,” Glassman told me.

That night, in his hotel room, Roza felt that he was letting the opportunity slip through his fingers. He hadn’t said much during the meeting, and knew that he hadn’t made a significant impression on the founder. The next day he took the whiteboard marker from Glassman’s hand and laid out a plan for the brand with such passion that he teared up.

Roza followed up over text with an offer. Roza said that Glassman wrote back, “Yes!! Yes!! Yes!!.” In late June, Roza visited headquarters, met Castro and the team, then took calls with dozens of people who felt disenchanted with the CrossFit brand.

Glassman’s number was two hundred million dollars. He would keep the company’s two corporate planes, and he made it clear that there would be no negotiating. Buoyed by the community’s encouragement, Roza, backed by investment from the private-equity firm Berkshire Partners, signed the paperwork.

All of the CrossFit Games athletes who had denounced Glassman returned to compete this past October. Of the three hundred gyms that threatened to de-affiliate, less than half followed through. Nicole Carroll even returned to her role as the head of the CrossFit seminar business.

Roza has launched a diversity council and created a seven-million-dollar endowment to fund public-health programs in underserved communities. He aims to have a hundred million people doing CrossFit within ten years, a plan that depends on the success of the affiliate gyms. So far this has included more guidance about class management, along with a program that CrossFit calls “The Affiliate Roundtable,” in which a group of eight gym owners meet twice a week with a moderator, over Zoom, to discuss personal and professional issues in a confidential setting. “It’s peer mentorship, almost like a group therapy session,” Roza said. But it’s not mandatory. “We have a credo of tools over rules.”

Yet it’s still to be seen whether Roza can bring CrossFit back from the brink. Glassman ran the business without oversight and turned down innumerable opportunities—from CrossFit-branded fish oil to CrossFit weight-lifting chalk—that Roza may now have to consider in an effort to increase revenue and placate his investors. “I didn’t do this for the money,” Roza told me. “The reason I’m doing this is because I’m completely in love with CrossFit and I want to bring it to other people.”