GRID LEAGUE

(Is Faster Really Better?)

Hello. It has been two years since my last post where I more or less totally predicted the birth of the National Pro Fitness League GRID League. You're welcome, Tony Budding.

Production-wise, what the NPGL has been able to accomplish is stunning. I was in the stands in Phoenix to cheer on my beloved Rise, and looking around I was super impressed with how slick and professional everything was. The graphics on the scoreboard, the clip packages showcasing the athletes… very admirable. No cheerleaders yet, but give them time.

Flashy graphics on large screens!

It looked and felt like a really well produced arena sporting event, but in order for the vision I had of something coming along that would eat CrossFit®'s zone-portioned lunch to fully materialize there is a major issue the NPGL needs to address.

Substitutions

The GRID League allows for limitless substitutions. The instant an athlete begins to wane, they are sat on the bench and replaced with a fresh body. I’m not talking about switching athletes in between the eleven workouts, I’m talking about right in the middle of the workout one guy will fall off just a little and he’ll be pulled out so someone else can hop in and start banging out reps.

We were told that this would add a new dimension of speed and strategy to what was previously a boring affair filled with athletes huffing, puffing and staring at the barbell.

The problem is that the current limitless substitution rule obviates all the drama inherent in reaching down deep to overcome adversity. Just when something gets hard, just when grit and determination should factor in as much as strength or skill, the athlete is replaced by someone else and we, the audience, are robbed of watching them struggle through the rest of the course. It’s a shame, because it is in that struggle that we are most able to see our own labors and thus relate to as an audience.

Simply put, watching athletes taking turns performing reps at high speed is simply not that entertaining. There is no human drama, no compelling story line. Work capacity has been removed from the equation, so races are more often decided by how the judges call the reps than by the performance of the athletes themselves.

When the sport's greatest drama and most decisive moments are provided by the referees, that sport is facing an existential dilemma.

Tony Budding has said that he loves the 400m dash, but the GRID is too much like a 100m sprint. 

Each event should feel more like a horse race, where things get truly interesting as they come into the final quarter lap. Everyone stands up and cheers because it’s still possible for their horse to reach down deep, turn it on, come from behind, and race past the exhausted leader who might have pushed himself just a little too hard.

Retooling the current substitution rule wouldn’t guarantee a scintillating storyline, but it would at least set the stage for the athletes themselves to emerge as heroes.

The Fine Line Between Protecting Your Brand and Being A Dick (or: How To Save CrossFit®)

A lot of people have something negative to say about what will, unless HQ changes their combative attitudes, be called ‘competitive exercise’ (or CompX®, a competitive exercise tournament coming to a city near you!).

It’s not a good strength program, many say.  Kipping pull-ups will kill you, and if they don’t kill you they will shoot you in the fucking face.  Achilles tendons are, per force, obliterated by all the box-jumps and if you do more than 8 at a time you are definitely going to die.  Rhabdo is so frequent, CrossFitters brag about their “coke piss”.  It’s a cult.  Glassman is drunk (he grabbed that shelf, you know, in that one video?).  It’s not being good at anything, it’s just being good at exercise.  Main Site programming is terrible.  They wear boardshorts like assholes.  HQ is acting like a total dick.

There are more, I’m sure, but the only existential threat to CrossFit as a brand, currently, is the last one.

Kenny Powers will fuck you up.

It’s an exceptional strength and conditioning program, let’s be honest.  Greg Glassman might have borrowed from some previous writing and research, but what he put together was a comprehensive and precise method for reaching an individual’s overall athletic potential.  I’m not here to defend CrossFit as a strength and conditioning program, I think its founding documents and dickrickulously fit practitioners do a good enough job at that.  

The question isn’t whether, in the coming years, more people will be in bare gyms with Rogue rigs and bumper plates.  They will.  The question is which organization will be the premiere vendor of that experience, and right now the obvious answer is CrossFit.

Problem is, CrossFit doesn’t own the copyright on barbell lifts.  They don’t own pull-ups and double-unders.  Nike could just drop a hundred million tomorrow and establish their own tournament, start their own brand (“Nike/EXT®: Extreme Cross-Training”) and take away CrossFit’s near-monopoly of the biggest fitness evolution since aerobics.  That’s what CrossFit HQ is scared to death of - and for good reason.

The question isn’t whether CrossFit will face competition in the DIS/GFB fitness market (drenched in sweat, gasping for breath), but when.

Perhaps sensing this, HQ recently released an article encouraging readers to “police their friends” in an effort to protect the CrossFit brand, castigating those who would use crossfit as an improper noun (“We are CrossFit, registered trademark, a unique brand of fitness services” = actual quote).  Critics find their facebook accounts closed for daring to question the leadership at HQ, find that they’ve been de-affiliated, or are subject to a “Glassasination”. For a movement built on an “open source” doctrine that attracted fringe, elite and revolutionary individualists in its early days, it’s striking some as unbecoming and undignified.

For every person that emerges from the inevitable yearlong honeymoon, HQ’s aggressive and imperial practices serve to precipitate the stark question of which brand they want to affiliate with.  For the time being CrossFit is, in all her trademarked, copyrighted glory, the sole choice.  But what happens when an alternative emerges? What if a term evolves into the public domain describing the practice of expanding work capacity across broad time and modalities?  Will gym owners still want to (literally) affiliate with a brand that is quickly becoming synonymous with hostility, cruelty and general dickery? 

What if a coach started a “cross-training gym” where he had gymnastics rings hanging from the ceiling, taught clients the Olympic lifts and encouraged them to cut back on sugar and cereal grains, and no-one had a problem that he hadn't paid the $3,000 affiliate fee?  It would mean CrossFit has become a victim of their own success, especially when word gets out that putting the CrossFit trademark over your door means absolutely nothing (except that whoever paid the affiliate fee passed their L1 test).  When CrossFit’s bastard improper noun is calved, HQ will be left holding a very shaky business model unless they focus on the things they have going for them, and their logo is not one of them.

The certifications are solid weekends of good information, the Games are becoming the Coachella of fitness, and Reebok is dropping huge dollars to promote the sport.  Perhaps they should be setting themselves up to be a premier professional league like the NFL or the UFC (which has licensed gyms in 5 locations, hint hint), not aggressively protecting the word “CrossFit”.  I’ve seen MMA guys come unglued when someone calls it ‘ultimate fighting’, after the UFC, instead of 'mixed martial arts'.  Insisting that “CrossFit® is a brand” is uncomfortable for those of us who are turned off by corporate consumer culture which, in the crossfit community, is probably most of us.  HQ should develop a brand for their Games or their lecture weekends, not ask me to dickslap my friends when they text me with “Xfitters r douchebags dude, why u do that shit?” 

CrossFit is at a crossroads, that much is clear.  The movement’s visibility has never been higher, but like Romney, the negatives are high as well.  The Glassmans, the founders of the company, have divorced and the spectre of international finance looms large on the horizon. We’re at a tipping point my fellow crossercisers.  Change is coming, competitors will emerge and we will all face the same question:

What brand do you want to affiliate with?

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