The following is an excerpt from The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story of How CrossFit Broke the Rules, Made Millions, and Changed Fitness Forever, a new book about CrossFit’s history that features reporting and interviews with the people involved, including Greg Glassman. AT 1:45 PM on Saturday, November 21, 2009, a few dozen trim, healthy-looking men and women in their twenties and thirties were gradually returning to the aluminum folding chairs that had been arranged in the middle of CrossFit Central, having just finished a light lunch provided by the local Austin health-food chain My Fit Foods. A roughly five-hundred square-foot gym housed in a former body shop on Burnet Road in Brentwood, a flat, oak-lined neighborhood a few miles north-northwest of the Texas capital, CrossFit Central was founded in 2006 by Carey Kepler and Jeremy Thiel, siblings and former collegiate athletes who had been running boot camps in parks around the city before opening a place of their own.
The air was mild but the slate-gray sky looked ominous—like a storm was coming. Most of the people present were themselves gym owners operating CrossFit gyms—known in the business as “boxes”—in cities all around the country. Impressively muscled and swathed in athleisure, they had come to Austin at Thiel’s invitation to attend what had been dubbed the Black Box Summit—a three-day gathering of CrossFitters intended “for affiliates, by affiliates,” in the program’s official description.
It was like an Apple keynote with an audience of Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Thiel had put together the weekend with Dutch Lowy, a fellow Texan who owned a CrossFit box across from Texas A&M University in College Station. The event was inspired by CrossFit’s weekend seminars—conducted by CrossFit founder Greg Glassman and held at the original CrossFit box in Santa Cruz, California—which certified coaches in the methodology.
The idea was to embrace the brand’s “open source” philosophy by pooling resources and sharing information, like a fitness-based meeting of the minds. The other was that CrossFit gym owners desperately needed help. Glassman was a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian with ties to the Cato Institute, the free-market think tank founded by Charles Koch.
In business, he favored the “least rents” model in which a company would claim “a shrinking slice of the pie in a rapidly growing ecosystem.” CrossFit, Inc., charged prospective gym owners only a nominal fee for the rights to use the CrossFit name—just $500 in the early years—which Glassman boasted was a fraction of the capital required to open a Planet Fitness. But in exchange for this miniscule payment, box owners got nothing: no merchandising, no marketing materials, no business plan. Other than having a link on the CrossFit website, these budding entrepreneurs were on their own.
Granted, most people involved in CrossFit in those days appreciated the hands-off approach, at least conceptually. The price was so low that it was easy for boxes to justify, and the informality only added to the brand’s laid-back, renegade air. People were going out and sticking a flag in the ground and—boom— they were CrossFitting.” At the same time, the total absence of support meant that box owners—many of them former coaches without any real experience running a business—were struggling with standard operating procedures and best practices.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
