When cultural and psychological anthropologist Katie Rose Hejtmanek set out to study Crossfit, she knew she had to throw herself into it fully. For seven years, she traveled to “boxes” around the world while committing herself to her local Brooklyn box. What she uncovered was a rabid fan base that deeply values community and a business model that offers a refreshing response to unfettered capitalism—as well as the misogyny, racism, and militarized Christian themes that inform this beloved and despised fitness regimen. She joins Derek to discuss her new book, The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon.
Show Notes
The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon
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Fit. I never really put it together, but reading Katie Rose Hatemonic's new book, The Cult of CrossFit, Christianity and the American Exercise Phenomenon, it just kind of clicked what that cross really entails.
Although, as you're going to hear in our interview today, it's not always that, but...
It is that.
And she would know, having spent seven years devoting her life to CrossFit and working out in the boxes.
So I really enjoyed this conversation.
I won't give too much away.
As always, you can find us on Instagram and Threads at ConspiritualityPod, and we're all individually on Blue Sky.
And if you are so apt and have the means to do so, you can support us on Patreon as well as via Apple subscriptions.
Katie Rose Haitmonick is a professor of anthropology and children and youth studies at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
She's the author of Friendship, Love, and Hip Hop, and Ethnography of African American Men in Psychiatric Custody.
She's also the co-editor of Gender and Power in Strength Sports, Strong as Feminist.
And importantly, both for this conversation and the book, and of course in life, she's a world and national champion in Masters weightlifting.
I'm Derek Barris, and this Conspirituality Brief is just taking the name of her wonderful book, The Cult of CrossFit.
Now let's get into it.
Katie, even though I've known about CrossFit for a very long time, I always just assumed, I think like a lot of people, that the cross meant cross training.
So when I received your book, it was sort of a moment of like, oh my God, and duh, it's right there in front of you.
What is the cross and how did you come about realizing what...
Excellent question.
Perfect place to start.
Somebody else asked me if it meant angry, as in cross and angry.
And I think it takes on all of these things.
I think overtly CrossFit is about cross training, but it taps into all these other kinds of what I call cultural Christianity, cultural Christian underlying codes in the American society that kind of reveal how so much of it is predicated on Christian values,
like a lot of things in the United States.
But this idea that, you know, you would get done with a workout and, you know, lay splayed on the ground, arms perpendicular to the body, almost Christ-like on the cross.
Or if you worked really hard on a pull-up workout, you would have holes in your palms like stigmata.
And that stuff was really celebrated.
And then even the pain and suffering in a fitness regimen, but like in a community, can trace its roots back to Christianity and early Christianity.
Judith Perkins says that the suffering body and self has actually came into cultural consciousness through Christianity.
And CrossFit is nothing if not about the pain and suffering
You write about, later in the book, about the sacred pain aspect.
Is that part of Perkins' framework?
Or did you come about that elsewhere?
I mean, she talks about early Christian narratives.
She's like a pre-modern scholar.
She was just looking at really kind of this idea that...
Through Christianity, she compares it with Stoicism and Galen's medicine, that this new body that was specifically pained and suffering came through Christ's teaching.
Other scholars of religion have looked at the way in which different religious traditions mobilize experiences of pain, and that pain in religious tradition compared to, say, in medicine or chronic health or acute health, pain is not something to be endured.
It's something to be intervened upon.
But in sacred spaces, it's something to be cultivated, it's meaningful, it's transformative, that it moves you from a one state to a higher, purer state.
And so there's great, you know, religious traditions on that kind of stuff.
But Christianity, Gluckman, Ariel Gluckman, the guy on Sacred Pain, and Judith Perkins really look at.
That Christianity is the community and the kind of self and body are both predicated on pain and suffering.
And CrossFit really just kind of taps into that.
Really appreciate.
For example, I have done peyote once and there was a sweat lodge before and after and it was very intense.
I can understand the function that that sort of mindset and practice, why it would be a rite of passage of sorts.
But as someone who worked in fitness for a long time, as someone who still practices a lot of things, but also taught for a long time, I don't hate on any workout, but I've always had a distant sort of weird relationship with CrossFit.
So in one level, a lot of my students who went to...
The first thing that we talk about is community and how amazing it is.
And I really appreciate that.
So I never completely discounted CrossFit.
But what made me skeptical was, for example, reading the New York Times reporting with Greg Glassman, the founder and former CEO, where he talks about how rhabdo was sort of a rite of passage.
And that made me very skeptical.
So how did you deal with, you know, as someone, and we'll get to this in the next question, but as someone who practiced and really got embedded in that community, how did you deal with that relationship to pain and pushing yourself?
That's a really good question.
It was a little challenging for me.
Because I came from a place of being an athlete.
And as an athlete that's training for something, you work out hard, but the idea isn't to kill yourself every day or to put yourself in tons of pain every day.
You work really hard and you condition yourself so that when the event comes, it's somewhat easier.
And so this idea that you would submit to all this pain all of the time, I mean, professional athletes do, it's a whole other topic, but this idea that you would just kind of continue to beat yourself up so much that maybe you'd have to go to the...
Hospital and get on dialysis was something that I really personally kind of resisted.
And I had come from sprinting, so I wasn't an endurance athlete.
I was running the 100-meter dash and then moved to CrossFit and was all of a sudden doing short workouts, Fran, and that's like a couple of minutes if you're really good.
And then Murph is like...
40 minutes or whatever.
And so I had to change.
I committed to doing the practice.
The anthropology I use, the theory is like embodiment.
I have to put my body on the line as much as someone else who does the practice because CrossFit culture isn't just out there in the stories or in the gyms and boxes, but it's in the way everybody moves.
And the community is predicated on both stories and learning the different kinds of exercises and just submitting to that.
And so I did.
I pushed myself really hard.
I don't think I ever got rhabdo.
There was a time when I did a workout.
Where I couldn't move my arms.
I was like T-Rex for like a week.
I was in Morocco and I didn't go to the hospital.
I really tried to sort of commit to some of the workouts and push myself really hard.
That was challenging because it kind of flew in the face of my sporting training.
And that's part of the point of CrossFit with its military background.
This idea of training for the unknown, unknowables that Grassman likes to say that it does.
You never know what you're going to get so you just have to train hard every time.
As an anthropologist, You embedded yourself, as we've mentioned, in this and you did CrossFit for years.
What was that moment that you realized that this was something you wanted to pursue?
Was it personal?
Was it academic because you knew you wanted to eventually write a book or was it both?
I was racing track and field and a colleague said you should study the track team.
And I didn't think the track team was very interesting.
And if that's the kiss of death for an anthropologist, exactly, like, that's it.
All of a sudden at this time, it was like 2016, I kept seeing these new mannequins, these new female mannequins that had more muscles.
It was like right when this strong is the new sexy was coming out.
And as somebody who's really kind of built, has always been built with a lot more muscle, I was a...
I kind of thought that was really interesting because that's not the...
Most women want to be lean and tone and skinny.
And so this idea that women were interested in strength was...
Something I was interested in.
So I started actually doing four strength sports.
I went to a strongman gym.
I participated in a couple of powerlifting clubs.
I participated in weightlifting, the sport.
And then I joined some CrossFit gyms.
And so for like three months, I did all of those.
And it was so clear how quickly that the first three were more sports.
And people did them, they liked them, they loved them, they were really into it, but it didn't change their life.
It wasn't this lifestyle framework, it wasn't this, you know, people were saved by it.
As an anthropologist, I was like, that's really interesting, that there's this collective, this community that is really interested in, through physical practice like exercise, changing people's lives.
My first workbook was about, I lived in a mental institution for children.
Kids had been taken out of school and their homes and placed in what I call psychiatric custody.
And then they go to school there, live there, and everything is organized around psychiatric principles.
And then they have to prove that they're healed using these new frameworks.
And so I looked at involuntary self-transformation community.
And so this was more of a voluntary self-transformation community.
And then I looked at some of the research on CrossFit.
There's some academic stuff.
There's some popular, like it's been in the New York Times a lot and men's health and Christianity Today and all kinds of stuff.
But I noticed that the academics who did study it came from CrossFit first and then started to study it.
I took a perspective where I was interested in these kinds of things.
I was already an athlete and I had recovered from a major orthopedic problem when I was a kid.
And so I kind of came to it fresh with an anthropological lens, just curious about.
What kind of community takes people in and they voluntarily submit themselves to it and then change their lives.
And so that's kind of how I got to it.
And I was a little concerned that people who did do it first and then wrote on it maybe missed some things.
Because they loved it.
People love it or they hate it.
And CrossFitters love it.
And so I wondered if that kind of colored their glasses.
Right. In the beginning of that, you mentioned the mannequin thing.
It's something I think about often because I started as an instructor teaching yoga, which was the predominant amount of my career.
But later on, I ended up teaching kettlebell training, strength training, studio cycling.
I really got working at Equinox, just really expanded my palate, both as a movement.
And one of the trends watching over the years, which I think is wonderful, is more women doing strength training.
And you'll see instances, and there's people I follow on social media, just incredible lifts going on, incredible physiques, and incredible attitudes around it, which I love.
And yet, there's a lot of misogyny in these spaces, and you write about the misogyny due to the end, specifically about Glassman, who ended up having to leave CrossFit due to that and some other racial reasons for some private messages that got out.
How did you feel in that space, where you're in a space where there's men and women getting stronger, doing all these incredible strength training exercises, but then...
Men are always going to win at CrossFit.
It's set up that way specifically.
So how did you navigate that space?
As an anthropologist in this space, People who wanted to talk to me first were all the women.
And a lot of them were like the older women who wanted me to know, write this down kind of situation, how empowering CrossFit was for them.
That they had never been able to do a pull-up before in their life and now they could.
Or they'd never been able to squat a barbell and now they could do their body weight.
They could deadlift 1.5% of their body weight.
And it was just so liberating.
And I think CrossFit has done that.
It has transformed the fitness landscape.
Now you can walk into a Crunch or a Lifetime or an Equinox.
And you can find a functional fitness space that has barbells and they are expecting you to deadlift.
And I was squatting at a lifetime the other day and I got a high five for having 115 kilos on the barbell because people were like, yeah, that's strong.
And yet, right, this idea that, you know, that...
Kinds of strength that's cultivated is a very sort of masculine strength.
It's like an in-your-face, I will out-fitness you, I will race you, I will be stronger than you, and the strength is sort of a masculinized fitness.
There's nothing about, like, can I get stronger to raise my children or caretake others?
And one of my colleagues even said, she asked me early on, like, that first summer I was starting my CrossFit research, I was telling her about it.
And talking about some of the apocalypse narratives that I had been hearing.
And she asked if people were going to rescue their wheelbound chair neighbors during the apocalypse.
And I didn't have the answer at that time, but I didn't think so.
And after, you know, seven years of investigating CrossFit, that wasn't the story.
It was just kind of a lot of other able-bodied people.
You know, who are going to kind of be and step together, being healthy, being fit.
You know, you can be really strong as a woman and they encourage that and they love that.
In the gym, there were always a handful of women who were stronger than, like, the majority of the guys.
And that was okay.
But, like, the guy, the best guy always had to be better than the best girl.
I referenced this article that's in a collection that I edited called Gender Empower and Strength Sports.
It was like a CrossFit Games broadcast and there was an event where a woman actually won.
She beat all of the men.
There were two or three of them.
The broadcasters, the announcers were kind of unsure how to navigate that.
Instead of praising the woman being like, yeah, Tia won, they ridiculed the man.
It's just kind of this undercurrent of misogyny.
They couldn't praise her.
They had to ignore her and talk about how sad the guys were doing.
Oh, that's terrible.
So I want to stay on this theme, but I want to wrap in something else because we've long discussed cults on this podcast.
You told me before we started recording, you're an OG listener.
So Matthew and Julian were both in cults.
So it's something that we've discussed a lot of.
What that term means has been debated.
And usually a cult traditionally has a charismatic leader.
But one of the things I found interesting about the book is that in certain boxes, in certain spaces...
Greg Glassman was sort of seen like that, but in a lot of places he wasn't.
I mean, the gym you write about, the box you write about that you went to, was very diverse.
It was very trans-accepting and racially accepting much more than other ones you visited.
And Glassman didn't factor in as much.
And then you also write about going traveling internationally, as you mentioned, and going other places.
And he wasn't seen as that sort of figure.
You named the book The Cult of CrossFit.
What aspects of a cult do you think it...
It maintains and retains in terms of your experiences studying it.
The title was actually, was not my original title.
It was the title that NYU...
I wanted to publish what I wrote under.
Because I am very conflicted about calling CrossFit a cult.
It's written about all over the internet as a cult.
And in fact, I posted an epigraph of Glassman kind of telling us how he was mad that it was called a cult.
But I guess it is a loving community, and he's like, fine, we're a cult of the caveman.
But this idea of reconciling it because of the long tradition of a cult being a pejorative word, like that reference Jim Jones.
Violent suicide and like crazy people having their minds taken over.
When you're from the outside looking at CrossFit, people from the outside might even say like, I lost my friend or my spouse to CrossFit.
They started doing CrossFit and they divorced me and left their job and are now, you know, a coach.
And then also I talk a lot about testimonials in the book and people take on this idea, this identity.
And so I think it really resonates with people, but not in the pejorative way, kind of in the new branding, rebranding.
Oh, we want to be really cool.
We want to be a cult brand.
This idea of a business wanting to tap into something that people become hashtag devoted to.
In fact, I had a conversation with Nike a couple years ago, and they were like, how do we become a cult?
How can we mobilize that, what you're talking about with CrossFit?
It happens.
Because of a number of things.
But I think CrossFit not only had a really charismatic leader, but it tapped into really sort of deeply rooted American cultural values that people already felt called to or compelled.
It's like these moments where you hear a beautiful national anthem and you don't think of yourself as a nationalist or a patriot and all of a sudden you get goosebumps.
And you're kind of like maybe weirded out by that a little bit.
It taps into like these really deep things that were pretty...
We're pretty unconscious of this cultural stuff that's moving through the world that we're just not as discursive or talking about as much.
And so I think that's how it works.
And then what I think happened in CrossFit is I talk about it as a beloved community in a different way than a cult.
Beloved community, the term is associated with Martin Luther King Jr., but he uses it from a philosopher, an American philosopher who coined the term at the turn of the 20th century named Josiah Royce.
And Josiah Royce was talking about How do people find their purpose in the world?
And how do they live out a meaningful life?
It wasn't just about the self, like a lot of the psychologists thought it was.
It was like finding your own true self.
He said, no, there's something beyond the self.
There's a beloved community that people are loyal to.
And they find redemption, salvation, and meaning through something that they can commit to, like a beloved community.
It's maybe a little bit of a biker gang, so you have to be a particular kind of person to be.
And I found it so fascinating that...
He doesn't do any of the workouts of the day.
He doesn't do any of the workouts.
We probably don't know if he can do them.
I mean, it's actually quite common in cults that the leader doesn't practice what they preach.
But in this specific circumstance, usually in fitness, you're inspired by watching people do something that you want to attain.
And this has none of that.
So how did the real devoted...
Practitioners square that.
People that I know who knew Glassman kind of like in the early days, he was kind of rough and tumble.
He may not do a workout, but if like the Jeep got stuck out at the ranch in the mud, he would help push it out.
So there were like these little instances.
There was like the lore that he did all these workouts at one point in his garage with his friends.
There was also the discussion that he had hurt himself doing this stuff.
Like he had actually hurt himself as a gymnast, which is why he has a limp or whatever.
He had built up the lore that he could embody all these workouts by the story, the origin story of CrossFit.
And then he quickly...
And I don't know if this happens in other cults, but he quickly created a little crew around him who were special forces people.
Green Berets, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, all of these guys who were like the tip of the spear of the U.S. military.
And so they kind of like did it for him.
He didn't need to do them, but everybody in his small circle who listened to every word he said was just the fittest person around.
So I think that kind of helped.
Keep the curtain enclosing the wizard a little bit.
Yes, it is common for leaders to find what they lack and then surround themselves with that, but still maintain their place is very important in the hierarchy.
Let's talk a little bit about capitalism because that plays a role here too.
And specifically, you said...
Earlier, something to the effect of the type of people that come to CrossFit, but you write that it's mostly affluent people.
I think average income is over $150,000 and it's predominantly white.
Why are those the features of people that are drawn to CrossFit?
Yeah, it's 86% white at the last statistic I could find, which is...
A lot.
That being said, fitness in general in the United States is usually pretty white as well.
Sports have a different story.
There's some really cool histories of fitness.
People called it physical culture or the early strongman stuff like at the circuses or early bodybuilders, Eugene Sandahl.
Sandow, Bernard McFadden, these guys, and they sort of embody what it means to be fitness.
In fact, they have a lot of understanding about the body and fitness and health that I think the current administration has as well.
Yeah, kind of tapping into this way of being this particular kind of idealized white body sort of has worked.
For a long time in the fitness industry.
And then CrossFit kind of doubled down on this in an interesting way because it kind of labeled itself this idea of the sport of fitness.
And then it had an annual competition, international competition called the CrossFit Games that then crowned the winner, the fittest man and the fittest woman and then the fittest teams on earth.
You know, there were early fittest events during the eugenics movement.
It was white bodies, white Christian bodies that were competing for, like, the fittest family, and they were actually at, like, state fairs.
And so it kind of tapped in, whether consciously or not, to this sort of long history of linking Herbert Spencer's notion of the survival of the fittest and the eugenics movement with this new sport that is predominantly white and has this, like, really sort of intense hyper-masculine intensity with this idea of being the fittest.
If you watch the CrossFit games, you might see a token person of color.
There's been some cool research written on various CrossFitters who are people of color.
But it's almost exclusively white.
So all the podium...
Finishers are white people.
And it's expensive to join a box, so I guess that would account for the higher income levels of the people who go there.
Yes. Some of the other, like, high, so Equinox, that has always been expensive, and Lifetime's expensive.
But the idea that you're going to a box that is stripped down, there's no amenities, there's no televisions, there's no saunas, there's no, you know, Natalie Prezzella called it the anti-gym.
It's like this garage space, maybe without showers, that you pay, you know, hundreds of dollars for.
That is a different kind of payment than going to this spa, country club-y kind of place.
Right now, this idea of boutique fitness landscape is changing.
But back when CrossFit first started, it was one of the most expensive places to go.
And my research, I had to be funded in order to pay for the CrossFit gym.
I was at Chelsea Spears Sports Center.
There was only one.
And I paid $125 a month, which I thought was exorbitant.
With a teacher discount.
And my average was $2.75 with a teacher discount for the CrossFit gyms.
But then you go to other places around the country and you could find it might be a little less, but it definitely was more than Crunch or other kind of fitness centers.
And so the participants were really kind of elite.
But then the cost of creating a CrossFit gym was so low compared to a fitness franchise like an Equinox, which I don't even, like hundreds of thousands of dollars to outfit a gym.
I'm like Equinox with all of this saying...
It's in the millions, each one.
Yeah, exactly.
In the millions to have your own Equinox.
And so this idea that you could pay $2,000...
Once a year to CrossFit and then you had to like get your certification, your CrossFit level one every five years and that was maybe $2,000.
So your average like cost to like have your own gym, you didn't have to outfit it any way you could.
A person could exchange their monthly membership by cleaning the gym or making some fitness equipment or all of these different kinds of barter mechanisms that I saw in the CrossFit gym that allowed CrossFit gym owners to not.
Have to be that wealthy to actually start a gym.
Yeah, it is.
And it's also fascinating that we're talking a little about capitalism, but Glassman...
I also set up a model where he made a ton of money, but he could have monetized it much further.
An example you bring up is Rogue Fitness.
I love Rogue Fitness.
I love their equipment.
It is pricier, but it is so well made.
They really lean on the made in America.
The COVID gym that my buddy and I built in his garage in Los Angeles where we lived at the time, we ordered all Rogue Fitness stuff.
It is fantastic.
I didn't know that its origins were in CrossFit, and that's not the only one.
There are other businesses that have basically...
He basically leaned on that community to monetize and Glassman took no cut in it.
He didn't fully go and try to get as much money as he could.
He actually called that sacred covenant that he made with the gym owners.
It was his moral authority over other kinds of fitness.
He was a rabid libertarian who said he wasn't going to do any kind of rent extraction.
And so he didn't want his cut of the pie.
He even talked about it as like, instead of paying me more, invest in a college scholarship fund for the people who coach for you or give back to your community or whatever.
And people loved that about him.
And he talked about it as a sacred covenant, as a moral authority, and that they were chasing excellence rather than increase money.
At the same time, in 2017, CrossFit was the seventh largest corporate chain in the world.
And Rogue is similar.
Rogue's small business.
And if you have a problem with that equipment, you call them up and tell them and they send it back and they send you a new one.
It's a non-exploitative business model.
And that's what Glassman did.
And that was really interesting.
And I think now that CrossFit has been sold and is up for sale again right now to private equity and to different places, that it has lost its shine.
For a lot of people.
In fact, it went from 15,000 gyms in its height to 9,000 at the moment.
So people are leaving and no longer maintaining the gym's affiliation around the world as well as in the United States.
And I think part of that is because this idea of a moral authority, a sacred covenant that people, that CrossFit gym owners had with Glassman and CrossFit HQ was broken.
And they felt really...
I have to say, I opened by saying I was always been conflicted about CrossFit, not knowing a ton about it, just from hearsay.
Having read your book, I'm probably more conflicted now.
So what you just talked about is a really good quality in someone.
And libertarianism is something in America that a number of people I've seen say they are, and then they really aren't.
So the laissez-faire, social attitudes.
Oh yeah, I'm this.
Oh, but people can't be transgender.
We see that a lot in tech entrepreneurs, for example.
One thing that did get me is you write about The aura of science and math that they give.
And specifically, I would love to have been a fly on the wall because you being an anthropologist and them promoting the paleo diet, which I've read before, does not stand up when you look anthropologically.
But how did you square it from the science level of going into these spaces and hearing the sort of rhetoric that was being talked about?
I don't think he does a lot of science.
I think Glassman and CrossFit like to say that they do science.
There's a number of physics, it's Newtonian physics and mechanics, it's writing things down and filling notebooks, and it's evolutionary.
And so I do have a chapter in the book where I investigate this writing down lots of numbers as a scientific method, which is, you know, it harkens back to Aristotle, and it's called the Aristotelian method.
And it's where you go and you observe and you write things down and then you keep going back and observing.
And then if you see something that happens and it's different, you take note of that.
That's what I do.
It's not the contemporary version of science.
It's more of philosophical tradition or observational research.
And then this idea of current understanding of science is Baconian, which is like the experimental science.
Have a hypothesis and then test it and control for all the variables.
This is the idea of things being valid versus reliable.
Things being reliable means you can get the same answer over and over again, but you can do things wrong and get the same answer over and over again.
And that's not valid.
That's not true.
That's not right.
That's not accurate.
And so you want to be able to get the right answer over and over and over again.
And so I think both of those kinds of ways of thinking about how to do scientific inquiry are both important.
And a lot of disciplines, physics, anthropology, kind of mobilize both of them.
But in CrossFit, they do a lot of number writing down that is what I call audit.
It comes from like an accounting tradition.
So you figure out something to measure and then you...
Have a goal that you want people to achieve.
And so once you put that goal of achieving something, it no longer is science.
It's about, there's a moral codeness.
There is a striving to reach that.
I want to cross its definition is increase work capacity over broad time and modal domains.
And so this idea of an increased work capacity automatically makes it unscientific.
Because in science, you would just want to know what happens.
You wouldn't try to get better.
Grassman and CrossFit like to mobilize physics, but work capacity is not a physics term.
Work is, but you have to measure work using joules, and then you have to have something to measure joules, and then weight matters.
And CrossFit, you know, they don't weigh their athletes.
Unlike Olympic weightlifting, where you have a weight class, and then you compete against other people in your weight class, you're, you know, secluded, basically.
CrossFit doesn't do that.
They use an indirect measure by recording time.
So whoever gets done first or whoever works out heavier or does something heavier, it might be less your body weight than the person who's smaller, but you still won because you did more.
And so it has this aura of really being physics, but it's not.
And he says that it's like Newtonian physics.
And I asked a physicist about that.
And he was like, I don't understand the question.
Like, he was very confused.
And I was like, well, this is what it is.
And he was like, but everything that we know in our lives is Newtonian physics.
So, like, sitting here talking with you is like a representation of Newtonian physics.
And then the evolutionary stuff, that was really hard for me to not, especially as a professor who's usually lecturing people about this stuff, it took me a long time to just be like...
You know, as an anthropologist, I just want to listen.
I just want to learn.
And so I didn't want to lecture anybody.
So I tried to just do the, you know, like, tell me more about that.
And how do you know about that?
And who said that?
And who's the authority?
And so I cite a lot of people that I went to grad school.
There was, you know, faculty in my graduate program as well as colleagues in my graduate program who study this kind of stuff.
Primate and human, you know, locomotion.
How do we move?
And then also Neanderthal or caveman diets that the paleo is supposed to be perpetuating.
And there's no such thing as an original human diet.
And so this idea that there was this kind of one way, you know, you have to eat organs, raw livers and stuff with the liver king, like that just stuff, it taps into this idea that we are doing something primordial and good for us because it's evolutionary, when the reality is that it's not,
and that evolutionary science is pretty shoddy.
Absolutely. I just wrote about that with RFK Jr. and his romanticizing in America that never actually existed, and he gets the data wrong all the time.
Exactly. He's a great example of a similar character.
They're cut from the same cloth to good talking about what they know and what they think of science and having the scientific authority without it really being grounded in anything legitimate.
Yeah, absolutely.
So you spent seven years on this book.
What did you take away from your years personally?
Having done CrossFit for that long, what did you learn or what has it meant to you?
As they say, CrossFit, I increased my engine.
I got much better at endurance activities from being the sprinter that I was.
I got so strong.
I just almost squatted 300 pounds the other day.
I met a lot of really cool people who I felt like they were consciously We all have to compromise something in our lives.
And if CrossFit gave you your first pull-up and helped you ask for a raise and get a raise at work and empower you to make really difficult choices and stand up for yourself, you know, you're going to kind of...
Submit yourself a little bit to and ignore some of the negative stuff from that regimen and that community.
I never felt saved by CrossFit.
And I never felt like I was one of them because of that.
And I'm not, I think that's partially because I...
Tried to keep a little bit of a distance as a cultural apologist.
I think part of it was that I had my own understandings about sports and being a good athlete and excelling at a sporting practice that were in direct conflict with the CrossFit methodology.
So I didn't kind of trust it in that kind of sense.
Part of the misogyny and some of the white supremacy and the militarism that are undercurrents in the discipline were just not in line with my values.
And so as I stopped and I decided, I spent a little bit more time kind of researching it from afar to make sure that I got, and I interviewed people still, but I, as soon as I could finish doing it, I did because it...
It didn't mean the same kind of things that I think it means to devoted people that it did to me.
It was just something that I committed to as a, like I committed years of my life to it.
And I tried to really understand it and try to make sense of it and understand why people believed in it and loved it so much.
