That Time CrossFit Died
So back in the day before everyone was born, [TW: fitness cult jargon incoming] I was on the CrossFit mainsite checking out the WODs and Fran came up. A shockwave reverberated around the cult at the discovery that Speal's Fran time had been knocked off the top spot by AFT, using a butterfly pullup instead of the standard kipping pullup.
At the time, there was heated debate about this technique. Nowadays, if you aren't doing it you're obviously not getting after it hard enough. Don't quit chalk up blah blah fuck off.
Back then there were lectures on virtuosity - the perfection of movement - and a general feeling that CrossFit was a strange egalitarian collective intent on using the decades upon decades of knowledge from strength and conditioning, gymnastic, anat and phys, nutrition SMEs + Dave Castro (?) to bring about a tectonic shift in health across the globe.
This was until AFT broke Speal's Fran time.
It was at this point that an entire complex system of interconnected relationships evolved in a way that could not have been predicted, and with it, died it's original objective.
People could argue until they hyperventilate it followed the intended path, but they'd be apologists with koolaid stained lips. The day wee AFT tweaked an exercise technique to get a better time at another exercise, CrossFit became self-referential. Inward, not outward facing. It became a competition with itself. Not an attempt to improve anything worthwhile (any longer). Very few people actually noticed.
After that obv we know about anyone credible moonwalking out the door or getting thrown out by Castro then injury rate papers then CrossFit games, then brand deals then lawsuits then etc etc.
This is a Drift into Failure. An unintended but accepted consequence everyone is oblivious to until the system looks absolutely nothing like it did. The original intention of creating a broad, inclusive, general fitness or whatever died on the table. People have been animating the corpse since.
I've been thinking about this recently because (see below for the other reason) my training for the past few years has essentially been CrossFit the White. Indeed CrossFit, one might almost say, CrossFit as it should have been.
The idea here is to be biggish, strongish, fastish with a broad adaptive capacity in both physical and mental domains, emotional regulation, contentiousness, empathy all baked in. It's also built to improve movement fidelity (CrossFit 'virtuosity' circa 2004) and protect against injury. Imagine.
The final piece is to have what I term a "survival BMI" - this is considered overweight by conventional BMI standards, with enough muscle and fat mass to protect against any premeditatio malorum that hits.
This is counter to the way CrossFit moved - it became overwhelmed with lean physiques and minimal caloric intake. There is a theme here - inward facing, self referential reductionism. An obsession with physique shows a lack of understanding a system - it's reductionist. A reduction to component parts. An attempt to simplify something complex, showing a deeply lacking comprehension of the system itself.
When I got into CrossFit, it was because I thought they had cracked the code. They talked a good game. I didn't realise at the time they were playing with two dimensional newtonian / cartesian concepts in a three dimensional world.
It has taken me almost two decades to get to this point of understanding, but I'm glad I'm finally here.
/eof
Lore for Today
Newton and Descarte were idiots.
Sidney Dekker's book 'Drift into Failure' is a very worthwhile read if you want to hate everything about the way everything is done, especially everything.
I was moved to think about all this recently because CrossFit must have discovered they had an email list of subscribers they hadn't talked to in like 10 years and so I started getting marketing emails. I tried to unsubscribe a few times but they kept coming. One was "how are we doing" survey. I let them know.
I was going to translate all the cult talk but can't be arsed shrugemoji.
Oh, and SME is a Subject Matter Expert in case you didn't know