Learning to Breathe Fire Quotes

“Hero WODs are meant to take an athlete outside himself. They’re supposed to put you in the Hurt Locker. They put you on the ground. You feel like you’re about to die. Then you get up, and remember some incredibly strong, brave young guy who didn’t.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“The thing you dread should be your first priority. Because if you’re not willing to find the chink in your armor, the Hopper, the Unknown and Unknowable, the randomness of life, will find it for you.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“CrossFit firebreather eventually discovers: the chief competitive advantage in this sport is the ability to endure discomfort. The willingness to sacrifice comfort is what makes all the other gains possible.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“A lot of the data in the athletes’ notebooks is quantifiable evidence of progress. But some of it, by design, is intangible. “What’s happening between the ears,” Amundson says, “in the heart and spirit of the athlete—it’s a combination of mind, body, and spirit. Everything is interwoven. The movements, we’ve been doing since the beginning of time. We’ve forgotten them, but our ancestors were deadlifting rocks to build homes. There is definitely something magical about intensity—pushing past your perceived limitations. It gives you a tangible reference point, and we judge ourselves from that new reference point forevermore. No pull-ups to five pull-ups becomes a reference point. The goal then is to continue to push those reference points in our lives further and further out into the horizon.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Every athlete is required to keep a notebook and record all his workout results, but also responses to CrossFit Amundson’s Question of the Week. “We’re contemplating why we were brought to this earth,” Amundson says. “What are we here to do?” The questions are scrawled on the whiteboard before Monday’s workout. They’re all calls to action. “How can I contribute to the betterment of the world today?” “How can I be of service to other people?” “Who do I need to thank in my life today?” Athletes write in their notebooks. Sometimes they team up in groups of two or three to discuss their answers. Then they start the warm-up and the workout, which is probably some couplet, triplet, or chipper designed by the Glassmans and performed by the original firebreathers ten years before, to the day.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Amundson never coaches movements by telling athletes what not to do. He believes that even if the error is presented as a caution or correction, the phrase still lodges in the athlete’s mind, and that the athlete is so focused on the phrase that he unconsciously follows it as a direction. On a deadlift, most CrossFit coaches say, “Don’t round your back.” Two of those words, “don’t” and “round” are negative. Amundson won’t use those words. He’ll say something like “Maintain your lumbar spine.” If an athlete says, “I want to work a bit light on the deadlift because I don’t want to get hurt,” he can scale down the load. But he has to rephrase his request: “I want to stay light to protect my back.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“CrossFit’s ten attributes of fitness—Endurance, Stamina, Speed, Strength, Balance, Accuracy, Coordination, Agility, Flexibility, Power. And then, in continuous fashion, Courage, Confidence, Perseverance, Virtuosity, Resilience, Service, Faith.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Amundson’s let his hair and beard grow out. It gives him a bear-like, almost cuddly appearance, in contrast to the sharp, clean-shaven jaw and shaved head of his early photos. His times and weights have not devolved from youthful high-water marks—they’ve gotten better. He’s very conservative in his training, striving for tiny improvements at the margins. He gets to the box at five in the morning and leaves at nine at night. He spends the whole day interacting with athletes, setting goals, teaching private classes, or leading an advanced class where he works out as well.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community. At the end of his two-month woodland retreat, Amundson realized two things. The first was that it doesn’t matter how much of a firebreather you are if you can’t cut any slack to the important people in your life. The second was that all his macho law-and-order jobs had defined him, and if he wanted to stop being That Guy, he couldn’t work that kind of job.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Everything about his life that wasn’t about being an elite badass was imploding. There seemed to be only one sane option: get the hell away from other human beings. Amundson took a leave of absence from work, bought an Airstream trailer, and leased a parcel of land in the mountains near Santa Cruz. For two months, he lived in the woods and rolled back the tape on the last fourteen years of his life as a SWAT team cop, Army reservist, DEA gunslinger, and husband. He wrote an after-action review of his marriage, Your Wife Is Not Your Sister, a self-critique so detailed and unstinting that it could have been subtitled Confessions of a Knuckle-Dragger. The book, lovingly dedicated to his ex-wife, is filled with recollections of moments when he thought he was justified but later realized his behavior was thoughtless, myopic, toxic. At the end of each chapter are concrete “Action Steps” to prevent fellow knuckle-draggers from repeating his mistakes. It’s been well received in the law enforcement community.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Amundson joined a boxing gym and a Brazilian jujitsu school, two more sources of CrossFit recruits. His wife found a local ranch where they could buy horse stall mats. Glassman had discovered horse mats back in Santa Cruz as a less expensive alternative to roll-out rubber matting. “There’s something about a cement floor covered wall-to-wall in black horse mats that just fires me up,” Amundson wrote in a CrossFit Journal chronicle of his mom-and-pop garage gym.2 On the walls, they hung framed T-shirts from their favorite CrossFit affiliates, photos from their days at CrossFit HQ, a whiteboard, and a six- by ten-foot American flag. For a husband and wife, coaches at heart, it was a perfect pint-size box.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Forestalling defeat is different from fighting for victory. It requires a more tenacious effort. Everyone at CrossFit Oldtown saw this, and it sheared them of their excuses. If Mike could show up and give the WOD his all, what excuse did anyone else have to do less? He spurred the others by example, as firebreathers always do. Their presence makes people push to ignite the same fire inside themselves, by mimicry or osmosis.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“He ditched the plasmapheresis treatments. He kept going to CrossFit with his brother and sister, and got his dad to join. For everyone else at CrossFit Oldtown, the Unknown and Unknowable was tomorrow’s workout. For Mike, the Unknown and Unknowable was how much of his nervous system had been nipped around the edges since the last time he’d done the same WOD. Workout loads were going down from heavy to moderate to lightweight, and then to only bodyweight. The mission was simply to push his body as hard as it could go, with its corroded wiring, to make the system remember its repertoire of full-body movements.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Sacrifice demands purity, and isn’t worth as much without it. This is why people get so pissed off when athletes get busted for performance-enhancing drugs. If sport were merely a competitive quest for excellence, pharmaceutical augmentations would be considered an innovation, and their side effects would be considered the price of doing business. We would feel the same way about doped-up athletes that we do about doped-up musicians: it might make them better at what they do. It’s part of the world they live in, although it’s a shame when they overdose or die. But if deep down, we know that sport is the sacrifice of a hunter’s energy, then doping destroys the purity of the ritual, and that’s what leaves us feeling robbed. It also spurs people to cheer for younger elite cyclists like Taylor Phinney, who conspicuously eschew not only banned substances but milder performing-enhancing measures like “finish bottles,” the crushed-up caffeine pills and painkillers that riders gulp down in the home stretch.5 The nutritional taboos of the Paleo Diet mesh perfectly with this mythos. The living root of sport is why Jerry Hill does one-legged box jumps in the Games, coaching from the floor of the arena: no excuses. And it’s why, when we see Chris Spealler carrying a 150-pound ball across the stadium, it seems like one of the great, for-the-ages moments in sport.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“As rituals are drained of their intensity, their roots are buried in the sediment of years, centuries, even millennia. As the human movements that are meant to expend energy become easier, more comfortable, less intense—a leisurely tour through the Nautilus circuit, watching TV on the elliptical—sport becomes exercise. Without intensity, it’s not a ritual. It’s just a grind. Ritual becomes habit. The memory and meaning are lost. But the roots of the ritual are still alive. And when the habits, for some reason, are re-endowed with intensity, they become rituals again. Because the root of the ritual, sport as sacrifice, is still alive inside us, it feels like a memory of something. It is a new shoot from an old root that makes a Hero WOD come alive. It’s why, in a CrossFit box, you can be outrun or outlifted, but there’s no way to feel defeated unless you slack off. The visceral sense of sacrifice, of giving all of one’s energy up—underlies every WOD. Detonating all the fireworks means there will be more and bigger fireworks next time. Giving everything you have banishes regret.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“As rituals are drained of their intensity, their roots are buried in the sediment of years, centuries, even millennia. As the human movements that are meant to expend energy become easier, more comfortable, less intense—a leisurely tour through the Nautilus circuit, watching TV on the elliptical—sport becomes exercise. Without intensity, it’s not a ritual. It’s just a grind. Ritual becomes habit. The memory and meaning are lost.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“It became sport, which is itself a form of sacrifice,” writes Sansone. “For only if sport is a form of sacrifice can we explain its ritual associations. There is no other plausible reason to account for the fact that the Hurons played a game of lacrosse in order to influence the weather for the benefit of their crops. It is only because they engaged in ritual sacrifice that natives of the Sudan hold wrestling matches at the time of sowing and harvesting. In Homer’s Iliad the hero Achilles honors the death of his companion Patroclus with an elaborate funeral that consists of various kinds of sacrifice: hair offering; holocausts of sheep and cattle; libations of oil, honey, and wine; slaughter of horses and dogs; human sacrifice and athletic contests.”3 Once the ritual expenditure of energy was decoupled from the hunt, it didn’t especially matter how that energy was squandered. The rules and forms could proliferate a thousand ways, to accommodate the terrain and the materials at hand. The rules and conventions could morph and become subject to contention, debate, wagering, and technical innovation”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“The theory of sport-as-sacrifice, argued convincingly by University of Illinois classics professor David Sansone in a provocative monograph, Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport, is that human beings developed sacrifice as a cosmic pay-it-forward strategy: you give something up so that your people can have that same thing in the future. When this ritual developed among hunter-gatherers, it involved the sacrifice of a hunted animal, so that there would be more animals to hunt in the future. In this ritual, two things were sacrificed. One was the animal. The other was the energy of the hunt, because it took a lot of work to kill that animal and haul it back home. When hunter-gatherers became farmers, they kept the ritual of blood sacrifice. They had animals—cattle, sheep, and goats—at the ready. They didn’t have to hunt them. But the fullness of the ritual was defeated by this very convenience. “It is not only that the life of the beast must be ‘taken’ in order for the hunter to survive,” Sansone notes. “The hunter must give of his own energy in order to get.”2 It was at this point that athletics, things like footraces, became associated with religious festivals. The animal was sacrificed, and the race—the energy of the hunt—was laid down alongside it. The energy of the hunt, the element that was missing from the sacrifice of a domestic animal, morphed and evolved into athletic ritual.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Perhaps it is the essence of any sport. If you peel away the modern mass-market spectacle that sport has become, and the history of sport, to its root—the genesis of sport—there’s ritual sacrifice. In the oldest chronicles of sport that we have, from ancient Greece, sport is sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of human energy. In the first Olympics, the ritual veneration of Zeus, the footrace began at the far end of the stadium. The athletes tore forward to a finish line at the footsteps up to the statue of their preeminent god. It was the winner who carried a torch to the top of the steps. At the altar, the torch was lowered to light a fire, not for the view of the crowd, but to consume the burnt offering of an animal. The champion himself was dedicated, although not literally sacrificed, to the god as well. His athletic performance was also an offering. It was energy, exertion, wattage, offered up alongside the animal. That athlete with the torch at the foot of the statue would recognize and understand what Rich Froning is doing in the arena in Carson, California.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“There’s going to come a time,” he says, “when you start to miss. Here’s what you do: when a negative thought starts creeping into your head that you can’t do this, just stop, look around you at the crowd and all the energy coming at you. Soak that up and use that. There is no better venue to snatch a 70-pound dumbbell.” In other words, it’s a good day to die.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“As Greg Amundson observed in the early days, it’s not so easy to distinguish between physical capacity and mental toughness. The ritual of movement executed at high intensity, the development of muscle memory, is a process of binding muscle fibers to neural circuitry. And differences in neural circuitry are reflected in, and caused by, cognitive changes—this is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety, depression, and addiction. In a physically intense, ritualized effort, it’s impossible to tell what is mind versus body versus spirit. When a gymnast vaults, or a sprinter rockets to the 100-meter mark, or a CrossFitter tackles “Fran” to the ground (or vice versa), these distinctions are not relevant, and perhaps they are not even real. They are real only for spectators.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“In the flash of violent effort it takes to jump a bar from floor to overhead, the central nervous system fires electricity into large muscles. The torso pulls quickly under loaded steel. As the bar moves up, its knurled grip is telling the nerve endings in your palm that it is a weapon. And your nerve endings believe it, because this is how good metal weapons feel in the hand.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“The knurl-forming process, he says, “is the machining equivalent of magic.” The diamond pattern is produced by two knurling wheels that cut intersecting troughs in opposite directions. Each wheel is like a tractor plowing furrows in a farm field—when it moves to an adjacent strip of field, it needs to fall into the exact same groove in the area of overlap, or the tracking will be off. For that to happen on a knurling machine, the wheels have to match perfectly. A discrepancy of two-thousandths of an inch can create double-tracking, which compromises the grip value of the knurl. Knurling wheels sold as identical typically vary by five-thousandths of an inch.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“When you see a Rogue bar next to a bunch of other bars, it stands out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It projects an aura of quality. It makes bars costing twice as much look tinny. Part of this is the finish. Rogue has its raw steel cylinders ground and polished to a fine finish, so coatings don’t reveal any imperfections. They use more expensive coatings, higher-quality chrome and zinc that clads the steel in bright silver or all-business black. Rogue’s most expensive bars are coated with satin chrome, which is four times as expensive as any other coating. It has a matte finish that’s less forgiving of surface imperfections than a black or shiny surface treatment. Its velvety smooth sheen communicates the precision of its manufacturing, the same way a MacBook Pro does. Henniger claims it gives a lifter more feel on the bar.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“I still want the normal guy to be able to purchase our equipment. It shouldn’t be a $1,000 bar no one can afford. You should be able to buy it for your garage and have it last forever,” Henniger says. He lines up a series of what he calls “bad bars”—ranging from $200 to $1,200—alongside Rogue’s standard $290 barbell, and points out every flaw or evidence of sloppy construction in his competitors’ products. “If you put our bar against a $1,000 bar, our specs are as high as a $1,200 bar. It debunks the myth that you need to charge $1,200. I want a lot of people to have them.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Each of the factory’s welding stations can make any piece of equipment Rogue manufactures. “We don’t have single-purpose machines where the guy pushes the green button,” Henniger brags. “There’s five hundred jobs you can put on these tables.” On the welding floor, no one works on one kind of job for more than half a day before switching to a batch of something different. If you don’t vary the task, he says, “you wear people out.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“As Henniger conducts a tour of his factory, he brims with pride. He points to the ventilation system that sucks air from fourteen welding tables through tuba-size funnels into a series of Willy Wonka pipes overhead. “Most welding shops are dirty,” he says. “Ours isn’t. I put in a whole system to pull out the dust so these guys have clean air to breathe.” He leans over and sweeps his index finger across the floor. It comes up spotless. Henniger smiles, and casts his gaze across a continent of polished concrete. “You can see it shining,” he says. “We have a Zamboni going around the floor all day.” One can only imagine what kind of Christmas morning moment must it be for a thirty-something guy to take delivery of his own Zamboni.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“Maybe the answer isn’t trying to get there by inches. Maybe the answer isn’t HR wheedling employees into changes they’re told are easy. Maybe the real opportunity is to say: We’re going to try something crazy difficult, something really intense. Everybody who steps up to do it is going to feel like they’re about to die, albeit for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, tops. Strong people and not-so-strong people will see one another’s heroic efforts. And in the end, we’ll be more than faster, more powerful, harder to kill, and generally more useful.7 We’ll be a group of people that knows it can do crazy difficult things. Reebok’s CrossFit logo is a big equilateral triangle pointing up—the Greek letter delta, the mathematical symbol for change. If the wellness nudgers can’t save us, if comfortable solutions won’t make us strong again, maybe intensity—the willingness to get comfortable with discomfort—is the only thing that will really make a difference.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“The sheer numbers associated with chronic disease, the magnitude of the medical and financial iceberg, make a mockery of this approach. The toll of the seven most common chronic diseases, in costs and lost productivity, was $4.2 trillion in the United States in 2012, up from $1.3 trillion in 2003.4 Chronic diseases account for more than 65% of corporate health-care costs. In a single year, there were almost 0.5 million new diabetes diagnoses for Americans ages twenty to forty-four, and 1 million new diabetics aged forty-five to sixty-five. Those are just the people who felt bad enough to see a doctor. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 79 million Americans are pre-diabetic, which means their bodies are teetering on the edge of a disease that leads to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, and limb amputations if it isn’t controlled.5 Those people can be pulled back from the brink to some kind of normal future if they decide to make some significant changes in their lives. Unfortunately, 65% of employers in a large 2011 survey cited the difficulty of motivating employees to change their behavior as their top health-care challenge.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness

“But pleas about cost savings don’t get people to change their behavior. Neither do voluntary assessments that are supposed to scare people straight. The people who’d be most scared don’t show up for the assessments, because they know the assessments will tell them things they don’t want to hear. And the people who show up, unless they’re told they’re going to keel over within a year, figure they can make marginal changes and be fine. It makes you wonder whether the conventional corporate drive toward “wellness” isn’t just ineffective, but also a huge missed opportunity. The reigning assumption in the world of HR managers, large insurers, and policy wonks is that changing behavior is hard, so people need to be nudged toward healthy behaviors by making that change seem easy and palatable. “Gamify” it. Give people points for reading informative online articles about nutrition. Count pedometer steps. Make the healthy choices seem just a little bit different than the choices that result in chronic disease. Make the change seem smaller, so that people can follow a bread crumb trail of small adjustments to a better life without really changing their perspective. There are a lot of snazzy mobile apps and candy-colored motivational posters that push this approach. There are a lot of single-serving snacks with low calorie counts, sold as healthier-but-you-wouldn’t-know-it. They’re packed with sugar, so they end up making people hungrier and fatter.”
― J.C. Herz, Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness