At the end of an April week that promises the return of summer, Connie Jiang is trying to loosen a hydraulic filter from the underside of a giant red tractor while contemplating her future. Shaded from the high-noon sun and visible only from the waist down, Jiang jabs the blunt end of her wrench against the filter’s stubborn metal casing. A clang rings out against the tinny twang of the country classic “Something to Brag About,” which spills out of the whitewashed mechanic’s shop currently serving as Jiang’s classroom.

“Investigative journalism is always something I’ve really admired,” she says, giving the casing another smack. “If you have a government or some organization that’s, like, trying to hide something, for that to be brought out is important.” The casing finally gives and falls from the tangle of steel above into her oil-stained lap. “I’m kind of running into the same issue that I had in high school,” she says, half-heartedly wiping her hands on her Carhartts. “Everything is just so interesting.”

Jiang is a student at Deep Springs College, an experimental school in a remote California high-desert valley where “everything” does seem to mean almost everything. Since 1917, the two-year institution has taught students using a mix of cowboy grit and high intellectualism, a cocktail meant to prepare the world’s future leaders for a life of service to humanity. Twenty-six students at a time isolate themselves on campus, which doubles as a working cattle ranch. On top of a load of two or three seminars taught by a rotating slate of professors, students govern themselves and take on 20 hours of labor a week—either the hard, physical work required for life on a ranch or the paper-pushing needed to run a school. In addition to shoeing horses, branding cattle, irrigating crops, and milking cows, students choose the curriculum, hire faculty, and select the next class of Deep Springers. Drugs and alcohol aren’t allowed, and there’s spotty internet and little contact with the outside world. For the students who end up here, that’s the appeal.

“Isolation is great for self-reflection,” says Jiang, who came to Deep Springs after being disgusted by the cutthroat get-to-the-Ivy-League environment at her Philadelphia high school. “There were cheating rings and people went insane over this stuff. If you’re cramming Quizlet, that’s not learning, in my opinion, even if you get an A-plus.”

Despite its relative obscurity, Deep Springs is one of the most prestigious and selective institutions of higher education in the country. Students here have an average SAT score of 1500 and compete in a pool of 200 to 300 applicants for 13 spots a year. Graduates routinely transfer to schools like Cornell, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford to finish their bachelor’s degrees. Alumni have gone on to become prominent politicians, diplomats, journalists, mathematicians, and neurologists, and have been awarded MacArthur Genius Grants, Pulitzer Prizes, and Truman and Rhodes Scholarships.

The fact that Jiang is here, working under a tractor, stands out for one obvious reason: she’s a woman. Until 2018, Deep Springs admitted only “promising young men.” It took 100 years, decades of debate, and a five-year legal battle before women finally broke down the institution’s gates and let the modern world roll in. Now the question is, how much of this modern world will Deep Springs tolerate?

The post This Elite Cowboy College Finally Let Women In. But Don’t Say It’s Changing. appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

I was thousands of miles away from home when the Camp Fire ignited not far from where I grew up. It was November 8, 2018, and one month since I had moved to Berlin, where the day was cold and darkening. But back home in Butte County, California, it was hot and windy. At 6:45 A.M.,Ěýthe fear that permeates in that corner of the world was realized: a spark lit, and a blaze was born.

I’d spent my whole life in Northern California, where summers always carried the existential threat of wildfire. I’d seen a few pass through Butte Creek Canyon, where I grew up, slowly burning the ridges for weeks before simmering to a stop. But in recent years, climate change—and in this case, negligence on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which supplies the majority of the state with power—has been creating conditions that we’ve come to consider a “new normal”: wildfires that burn hotter, bigger, faster, later in the year, and less predictably than ever before.

On November 8, PG&E was supposed to shut off the power in Butte County, but it didn’t. A transmission tower failed in the Feather River Canyon, and within an hour, the ensuing flames were headed straight for the tiny town of Paradise, which sat on the ridge above the canyon where I grew up. Back in Berlin, I opened my laptop to gauge the threat on my home and watched the chaos unfold. I read accounts of people’s cars burning on the Skyway—one of the only roads out of Paradise—as traffic snarled their escape. I saw videos of fire lining the roads, civilians fleeing on foot. I heard about people trapped in their homes and those who didn’t make it out before their cars ignited. Not long after, the fire swept down into the canyon.

It was days before I knew that my sister’s home in Butte Creek Canyon had burned down, along with the majority of homes in that area, and that my childhood home had miraculously survived. It took weeks before anyone knew the total tally of the devastation in Butte County, but as November 8 drew to a close, 85 people were dead, 18,804 structures were destroyed, and Paradise had been wiped off the map. The Camp Fire would soon be known as the most destructive wildfire in California history.

News teams streamed into Butte County for months after the blaze, telling and retelling the gut-wrenching tales of those who survived and those who didn’t. But watching from so far away, I felt like I didn’t understand it, like I couldn’t get a full picture of what happened that day. What I did know was haunting, but what I didn’t haunted me. Until I read former San Francisco ChronicleĚýreporter Lizzie Johnson’s new book

Paradise, out this month, is a harrowing minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, combining on-the-ground stories from the town’s residents, first responders, and officials, with a complete picture of the environmental conditions, urban-planning missteps, corporate negligence, and bureaucratic failures that coalesced into this unprecedented disaster. By the end, I closed its pages with the paradoxical realization that the devastation this fire wrought was completely avoidable, but also that we’re doomed to see it repeated over and over again—and already are.

The book opens at dawn at fire station 36 in the Feather River Canyon, where California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) captain Matt McKenzie wakes to the sound of “ponderosa pine needles [falling] like the raindrops that refused to come.” An hour later, he’s forced to abandon the breakfast he’s preparing for his crew, when news of a nearby fire pings his phone. From there we watch in slow motion as the fire explodes, traveling an acre a second and cascading through the tiny community of Concow—where residents only knew of the fire when flames licked their homes—before bearing down on Paradise.

Johnson takes us through the chaos as emergency responders try to calculate the speed and threat of the fire, which moved faster than anyone could wrap their heads around. City officials stall evacuation orders, not fully comprehending the magnitude of the impending disaster. We see how vulnerable Paradise was: because the town is located atop a ridge with just a few routes out, evacuating all of theĚýnearly 27,000 residents at once was impossible.

In the end, it didn’t really matter how they timed the orders—due to a technological error and a low registration rate, the emergency alert system failed to send an evacuation notice to 80 percent of Paradise’s residents before it was too late. As the flames neared the town, smoke turned the sky a “bruised navy, then black” before a “hail of embers” like “millions of lit matches flutter[ing] from the heavens” bore down, starting hundreds of spot fires. The residents knew for themselves it was time to flee.

The bulk of the book takes place in the firestorm. Packed with so much suspense and detail that it sometimes reads like fiction, Paradise delves so deep into the experiences of every characterĚýthat we see the fire through their eyes, feeling the weight of their every decision, every close call. My heart pounded as flames closed in on Rachelle, clutching her hours-old baby in the back of a stranger’s car. My eyes welled as Tammy, a nurse at Feather River Hospital’s Birth Day Place (the labor and delivery unit where my niece was born one year earlier), called her family to apologize for past transgressions and say goodbye, not sure she would make it out alive. I had to put the book down several times to catch my breath—when Travis watched his friends get sucked screaming into the flames, or when police-department dispatcher Bowersox listened as elderly residents stuck in their homes cried for help, knowing no one was on the way to save them.

The details of these accounts are painful enough. But Johnson’s powerful ability to pull us so completely into the lives of each person makes them almost unbearable. We don’t just pick up with the characters in the midst of the flames; we get their entire backstory (sometimes excessively), learning how they ended up in Paradise and why they loved it. Beloved Paradise Unified School District bus driver Kevin McKay, for example, moved to the hamlet from Santa Cruz, California, when he was 12. After growing up and buying a house in Magalia, a small community north of Paradise, he enrolled in school and took a job that gave him the time he needed to study—driving the school bus. During the Camp Fire, McKay navigates a busload of children through the flames, asking the two teachers on board to make a manifest of everyone’s names in case they didn’t survive.

The effect of these backstories is an intimacy that makes each escape feel personal. That’s the true feat of Johnson’s meticulous account: she humanizes a tragedy that is otherwise too big to fathom—even for those of us, like me,Ěýfor whom the tragedy was already personal anyway.

This humanization extends to the aftermath, too. After we see all of the characters escape the flames, Johnson takes us to the reckoning, where we begin to understand that, while climate change, poor infrastructure, and flawed emergency systems were all contributing forces, the real blame rests on the shoulders of PG&E. The fire was caused by a single hook installed in 1920 and then neglected, on a transmission tower that failed. It would have cost just $19 to repair. “It was the hook that took the lives, the hopes, dreams, the health, the sanity, the wealth, the happiness of a community,” Johnson recalls Butte County district attorney Mike Ramsey saying during the court proceedings against PG&E. “But etched into the very soul of this community is a concern: What will happen next? Will this happen again?”

Those questions are already being answered. Since the Camp Fire, wildfires across the West have exploded and consumed more towns whole. In August 2020, the North Complex Fire burned through California’s Butte, Plumas, and Yuba Xounties, killing 16 people and leveling the communities of Bery Creek and Feather Falls. As of press time, Butte County is —now the largest single wildfire in California history—which started just ten miles from the ignition point of the Camp Fire. Again, it looks like ,Ěýand again a handful of small towns are threatened.

In this landscape, it’s hard to land on a note of hope, and Johnson doesn’t try to. Like everyone else, she admits in so many words that the solution to this swelling problem is anything but clear. But before the book’s epilogue, Johnson brings us to the conclusion with an Indigenous legend from Butte County’s Konkow tribe, something she weaves poignantlyĚýthroughout the book. In the legend, a wildfire as destructive as the Camp Fire kills the majority of the tribe and displaces the rest, forcing them to wander for generations before finally making an exultant return home.

The modern-day residents of Paradise haven’t been so lucky. Just 2,034 of the town’s 26,500 residents returned to the ridge. Houses are being built as quickly as possible, but for every person who promises to return, it seems, there’s one who vows they never will. The memories of the fire are still too raw, or the price of building materials too high, or the insurance payment still pending. More than that, the Paradise they knew is gone. The beloved Johnny Appleseed Day parade, the weekly football games with residents piled into the bleachers of Om Wraith Field, the thousand American flags that lined the Skyway on Memorial Day. Gone, too, are the “balmy summer evenings at the drive-in movie theater, a mattress thrown in the truck bed” and “the air that smelled like heaven after the first winter rain or the first warm day of summer.”

For now, at least, these memories have been preserved. More than just a portrait of destruction, this book is a small act of restoration. Paradise will never look the same again, but Johnson captures its pre-fire charms with enough compassion that, for some, reading Paradise may feel something like coming home.

The post A New Book Examines What We Lost in the Camp Fire appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

It’s a hot August morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and Greg Glassman is sipping iced tea in an air-conditioned, glass-walled room perched above a preternaturally green field. Below, two dozen ripped athletes are hanging by their feet from bars, performingĚýupside-down sit-ups in sync while Kendrick Lamar’s “Loyalty” blasts from the speakers. The sun-warmedĚýbleachers are a blur of taut and bulging skin, fans already drinking beer and getting rowdy above signs that declare this event the “Ultimate Proving Grounds for the Fittest on Earth.” It’s the 2019 CrossFit Games, the annual competitionĚýthat brings together athletes from around the world to prove themselves worthy of thisĚýtitle. Here, the high-intensity workout regimen happening in nondescript gyms across the globe becomes a sport. And for the millions of CrossFit enthusiasts, it’s a big deal.

Glassman, the 63-year-old founder of this fitness phenomenon, doesn’t seem toĚýthink it’s such a big deal. From the glass room, the CrossFitters—now pushing massive, weighted carts across the field in teams of four—are hard to see clearly, and the TV meant to broadcast the games isn’t working. Glassman is unperturbed. He has turned his back on the action and is chatting with his ever present entourage about his new favorite topic: , the companyĚýinitiativeĚýpositing thatĚýCrossFit is the cure to chronic illness and the savior of the failing health care system.

This is all Glassman wants to talk about these days, and he’s ready to raise his voice—from this VIP glass house or anywhere else—to ensure his point is heard. The problem is, he’s having a hard time convincing the world that the same sport pitting scary-buff jocksĚýagainst each other could also be the very thing that saves ordinary people’s lives.Ěý

At a press conference the day before, Glassman bickered with a roomful of CrossFit-loving journalists about this very point. When a reporterĚýasked about much discussed changes to the games’ structure this year, which someĚýbelieve lowered theĚýbar for qualifying athletes, Glassman ignored the question, going off on a tangent about CrossFit Health. He concluded with a harsh takedown of the very event everyone was there to cover. “This isn’t the miracle, and this sure as fuck isn’t the business,” he boomed as the room went still. Later, while being escorted across town in a rented black Escalade, he beamed with pride. “Did you feel how awkward that room was?” he asked, craning his neck to flash a feverish smile.Ěý

Glassman is known for this style of gleeful antagonism. In 2015, when musician Nick Jonas criticized a CrossFit tweet linking Coca-Cola to diabetes (Jonas is a type 1 diabetic), Glassman started hisĚýĚýwith a succinct, “Fuck Nick Jonas.” When Facebook deleted (then reinstated) the group Banting7DayMealPlan in 2019, which promoted the CrossFit-approved low-carb, high-fat diet, Glassman deleted CrossFit’s Facebook and Instagram accounts and Ěýdamning the tech giant. He’s sicced his CrossFit constituents on anyĚýreporter, scientist, or layman who doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with his agenda. And it’s not just outsiders that get him riled up; he has unleashed on those inside the CrossFit community as well. In 2012, an affiliate owner criticized a nominal choice by the company on a CrossFit message board, and Glassman Ěýto revoke his affiliation, though he later walked that back.Ěý

“There are whole communities, they just hate my fucking guts,” he tells me later. “And, you know, that’s something I’m proud of. Why? ’Cause they’re losers. They’re fucking idiots. Obvious idiots.”Ěý

Glassman was a teenager living in the suburbs of Los Angeles when he first started developing the foundation of his high-intensity strength and conditioning program. Despite a childhood bout of polio that left him with a permanent limp, Glassman was always a natural athlete. In high school, after he took up cycling and joined the gymnasticsĚýteam, he found that he needed both cardio and strength trainingĚýto excelĚýbut questioned the usual practice of separating the two. This was the era of bodybuilding that favored machines and fragmented workouts, hitting the legs one day and the arms another. But Glassman believed that segmented training leads to segmented ability, thatĚýthe magic of fitness happens when you mash cardio and strength up into a medley of intense bursts of exercise that favor functional movements like steppingĚýand lunging. And thanks to his dad, Jeff Glassman, a literal rocket scientist, the younger Glassman was used to quantifying everything around him—including constructionĚýnails, which his dad made him measure to the exact millimeter in order to teach the lesson that “nothing counts if you didn’t measure it,” as Jeff told me. Glassman incorporated this quantification into his workout regimen, making measurement a pillar of .

It’s possible that that’s not what Jeff had in mind duringĚýhis lessons. But Glassman didn’t really want to do anything but train and coach. In the 1990s, after dropping out of six colleges, heĚýbegan working as a personal trainer in Los Angeles, where he became known for peddling his seemingly eccentric exercise methods. Instead of the usual workouts of biceps curls and an hourlong slog on the stationary bike, he would have his clients run backwardsĚýon the treadmill andĚýlift weights, all while competing against each other for the fastest time. He was intense, and maybe a little contrarian, but his clients were impressed. Glassman’s ex-wife and CrossFit cofounder Lauren Jenai, one of hisĚýfirst clients in Santa Cruz, California, saysĚýshe felt like she’d never worked out before training with Glassman. “I had just spectacular results,” she says. “My body started changing quickly.”Ěý

As Glassman’s reputation as a highly effective trainer grew, gym owners didn’t always approveĚýof his methods. “Greg would be pushing the edges as to the etiquette of the gym,” says Jimmy Baker, a CrossFit affiliate owner who started training with Glassman in 1998 at Spa Fitness Center in Capitola, California. He remembers hearing storiesĚýabout Glassman’s clients dropping weights (a big no-no) and using the equipment in unconventional ways. But even though Glassman leftĚýevery gym he worked at, his ripped disciples always followedĚýhim out the door. “The ease with which I could go a mile and a half down the street and take everyone with me was just amazing,” Glassman says. When he parted ways with his last gym,Ěýin 2000, Baker and another client gaveĚýhimĚýtheir credit cards and told him to open his own establishment. He taught classes under the CrossFit name inĚýaĚýjujitsuĚýstudio before opening his first official “box”—CrossFit lingo for gym—in a converted auto shop a year later.ĚýAround this time, Glassman and Jenai launched Ěýto post the method’s free foundational Workout of the Day, or WOD, which quickly attracted fans all over the world. Soon after, two trainers from Seattle approached Glassman to open their own box.

In 2007, one of Glassman’s friends hosted an event on his ranch in Aromas, California, where a few CrossFitters made the WOD into a competition—or “[ran] around trying things,” as Baker put it. This was the start of the CrossFit Games, now a major international event that has aired on ESPN.

With word-of-mouth proliferation and zero marketing, the company grew from that small garage in Santa Cruz intoĚýa worldwide phenomenon. There are now an estimated 15,000 CrossFit gymsĚýin more than 150Ěýcountries. The business is structured in a Glassman-approved libertarian fashion—each box is independently owned and operated, with little say-so from CrossFit HQ, for a —and it’s becomeĚýthe largest fitness chainĚýin the world. Though the company’s revenue figures aren’t public, Forbes Ěýin 2015Ěýthat CrossFit pulls in over $100 million a year.ĚýGlassman sums up this success simply: “I didn’t want the first box. The first one wanted me, and that’s true of number 15,000.”Ěý

To think that one of the biggest fitness trends started as a flukeĚýand grew by the force of its own obviousĚýsuperiority is a compelling story. It’s also one that Glassman likes to push as he oscillates between his idea of what modesty sounds like and his less filtered smugness, twoĚýmodes that often overlap in confusing and telling ways. Although Glassman told me several times that he never wanted to run a chain of 15,000 affiliates, andĚýin factĚýgives credit toĚýothers for thisĚýimpressiveĚýgrowth,Ěýhe also repeatedly referred to those independent offshoots as “my gyms,” despite the fact that he has no ownership or direct influence over any of them. And while he says CrossFit is not about elite athleticism, he also tells me he loves “making gods and goddessesĚýout of mere mortals.” At timesĚýhisĚýphrasing becomesĚýespecially bold. “I take credit for this like I chiseled themĚýfrom stone myself,” he says. “I feel like my name should be on the bottom of their fucking foot.” Humility is a relative concept when you’ve literally changed the world—or at least believe you have.

A week before the games, I meet Glassman at his home outside Santa Cruz, where he lives with his second wife, 35-year-old Maggie Robinson,Ěýthe youngest three of his eight (soon to be nine) children,Ěýand their two dogs. The big house sits on 16 acres off a long, tree-lined road in a gated community. When I arrive, it’s chaotic and full of people. Christie Mountain—Robinson’s brother’s girlfriend and the family’s personal assistant—is simultaneously showing Glassman cement samples for the driveway repaving projectĚýand helping Robinson write down questions for a potential nanny who will arrive soon. The youngest child, Riley, is roaming around in a Grateful Dead T-shirt, playing with a music box.

The walls of the house are stark white and towering, the ocean view and sparse furnishings accented with sealike abstract paintings and family portraits taken on the beach. Glassman, on the other hand, presents a less polished image. He’s dressed in an old zip-up hoodie, a T-shirt, and jeans, his graying wavy hair swept back beneath a backward baseball hat. Scruffy and not exactly a mass of muscle, he looks more like a guy who enjoys a good burger than any CrossFit buff or business mogul. But when he speaks, this air of unpretentiousness dissipates. In a spacious breakfast nook off the kitchen, Glassman and Robinson interview the future nanny next to a large whiteboard scrawled with CrossFit notes—half-erased ideas for workouts and rest-day posts for the website, the latter of which are always a poem or a painting or a short story, something for the mind. During the interview, Glassman can’t seem to break his habit of orating. At one point, he stands up from the table to announce that he has figured out why his youngest son wants to wear the same outfit every day: “He wants to be in control.”

PerhapsĚýin his son, Glassman was recognizing a quality of his own—certainly, he’s attempted toĚýdirectĚýthe narrative around his own empire. As CrossFit ballooned into an international sensation, an undercurrent of negative press dampened its reputation. Reports surfacedĚýabout the potential dangers ofĚýthe workout, along withĚýrumors of its cultlike following. At first, Glassman brushed off the criticism. He even seemed proud of CrossFit’s intensity. “It can kill you,” he Ěýin 2005. “I’ve always been completely honest about that.” But he stopped being so blasĂ© in 2013 when the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), which licenses physical trainers and issues scientific guidelines around fitness training, published a studyĚýfrom researchers atĚýOhio State University claiming thatĚý16 percent of CrossFitters ended up injured. ThoughĚýcompared with other forms of exercise, thisĚýnumber is arguably modest—runners, for example, experience an injury rate of 46 percent—CrossFit’sĚýofficial response was to call the study fraudulent. “We recognized almost immediately that this wasn’t just a single paperĚýbut part of a much larger campaign to both harm the reputation of CrossFit affiliates through baseless and false claimsĚýand also to leverage that mythology about CrossFit being dangerous, to restrict both CrossFit affiliates and the commercial sector,” says Russ Greene, CrossFit’s former director of government relations and research. “That was an existential threat.”ĚýIt sued the NSCA for false advertising and unfair competition, alleging that it wasĚýpart of an attempt to edge CrossFit out of the fitness space because it was threatened by the company’s growth.Ěý

CrossFit’s response had all the classic signs of a baseless conspiracy theory. But Glassman and Greene ended up being right—at least about the falsified data. An investigation revealed that the journal’s editor-in-chief, William Kraemer, forced the study’s author, Steven Devor, a professor of exercise physiology at Ohio State, to add in fakeĚýinjury data. The study was retracted, and Devor resigned from Ohio State. And in December, a federal court in California ruled in CrossFit’s favor.ĚýJudge Janis L. Sammartino found that the NSCA “deceived and continue[s] to deceive the public and consumers regarding the safety and effectiveness of CrossFit training,” and orderedĚýthe organizationĚýto pay CrossFit a $4 million terminating sanction after determining that it interfered with the lawsuit’s discovery process.ĚýIn a statement, the NSCA said it “does not agree with the findings or conclusions in the December 4, 2019ĚýOrder. The NSCA is analyzing the Order in detail, and considering all of itsĚýoptions.”Ěý(The NSCA declined to comment on the 2013 study, CrossFit’s initial complaint, and Devor’s resignation. NeitherĚýKraemer norĚýDevorĚýrepliedĚýto requests for comment.)

The NSCA lawsuit accelerated CrossFit’s obsession with uncovering corruption in the health and fitness space. Around 2013, Glassman, Greene, andĚýa handful of CrossFit employeesĚýstarted investigating sports-training organizations in earnest,Ěýreporting on theĚýĚýandĚýtheĚý’s (ACSM) ties with the soda industry. (They found that the NSCAĚýwas partly funded by PepsiCo.,Ěýand theyĚýĚýa partnership between the ACSM and Coca-Cola.)ĚýCrossFit soon wentĚýall in in itsĚýfight against the ACSM,ĚýNSCA, and Big Soda,ĚýĚýĚýfor warning labels on sugary drinks in CaliforniaĚýand working ĚýtoĚýfacilitate conversations withĚýlawmakers aboutĚýwhy federal contracts shouldn’t go toĚýthe NSCA.ĚýBy taking onĚýtheĚýgreedy, manipulative, and willfully deceptiveĚýmainstream health system, CrossFit cast itself as the keeper of truth. The company—along with its fearless leader—became something of a martyr, the underdog just trying to make America healthy while corrupt fat cats lined their pockets with the exorbitant cost of chronic illness.

In 2017, CrossFit launched CrossFit Health and hired Jeff Cain, cofounder of American Philanthropic, a fundraising consultancy for nonprofits, as CEOĚýto handle theĚýday-to-day operations of the business. AnĚýoverhaul of the company’s image began in earnest that same yearĚýandĚýincluded a Ěýof the CrossFit websiteĚýin 2019. Images of bulging CrossFit competitors were replaced with average people just trying to get in shape: instructional videos show older adults doing tricep dipsĚýoff a vintage kitchen counter or raising bags of dog food off the floor. Normal people, functional movements, total health—that’s the new CrossFit brand. (Cain resigned from the CEO position for unexplained reasons during the reporting phase of this story. He declined requests for comment.)

But if you’re still wondering exactly what CrossFit Health is, join the club. While Glassman projectsĚýconfidence about his ambitions,Ěýthe initiative seems toĚýlackĚýa clear objective. The website proclaims that CrossFit Health is “an investigation into the ills of modern medicine and the wilfulĚý[sic] abuse of the public’s trust in science,” a line Glassman reiterates repeatedly. But what exactly does that mean in action? Past coverage in Ěýand Ěýhas stated that the company is amassing an army of doctors to prescribe CrossFitĚýandĚýthat Glassman is working to completely overhaul the American health care system. ButĚýin the world of health care reform,ĚýCrossFit Health hasĚýbarely made a splash. When I reached out to threeĚýhealth organizations to get their take, most had not even heard of CrossFit Health,Ěýand all declined to comment. Unlike the American Health Association or the Commonwealth Fund, CrossFit Health is not a nonprofit or a foundation. It’s not even an independent arm of the company. Instead, it’s something like a collection of individual motives and ideas clustered beneath aĚýmission statement that I hear Glassman rattle off so many times, I could recite it in my sleep: “We sit in unique possession of an elegant solution to the world’s most vexing problem.”ĚýThe vexing problem, of course, is chronic illness and a broken health care system. The elegant and optimal solution is CrossFit—its workouts; its preferredĚýdiet of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar; and a commitment to unearthing the truth behind mainstream medicine and health research.

Glassman isn’t wrong in his assessment of America’s health problems. According to a 2019 HarvardĚý, nearly half of all American adults will suffer from obesity by 2030. Another , published inĚý2018, found thatĚý70Ěýpercent of deaths in the U.S. areĚýcaused by chronic illness.ĚýIn Glassman’s mind, the answer is simple: “Off the carbs, off the couch.” It’s widely accepted that exercise and nutrition are fundamental to overall health and the prevention of illness, and there’s even evidence that type 2 diabetes can be reversed by Ěýand exercising. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that CrossFit is the only answer. Katie Heinrich, director of the Functional Intensity Training Lab at Kansas State University, has run several studies that show CrossFit workouts can reduce fat and increase muscle. But is CrossFit the superior workout, better than all the rest? “I wouldn’t say so,” she says, adding that it doesn’t mean it’s not a good option for some. The same goes for the CrossFit-approved high-fat, low-carb diet.ĚýJedidiah Ballard, an osteopathic emergency physician at the Augusta University Medical Center in Georgia, hasĚýsaidĚýit is, at the very least, better than the standard American diet. But like the workout, it might not be great for everyone. There’s also that carb-restricted diets might not be the healthiest choice (after all, carbs are a major source of energy) and that eating loads of is not only bad for the bodyĚýbutĚýfor the environment,Ěýtoo.

But Glassman is not about to reconsider his beliefs. OneĚýof the tenets of CrossFit Health is the total distrust of mainstream health research,ĚýwhichĚýmakes it easy for him to dismiss any scientific evidence that counters his views. Over breakfast in Santa Cruz, he cited a well-known from Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis at Stanford that claims the overwhelming majority of published research findingsĚýare false. When I ask him if he plans to fund studies that would prove the efficacy of CrossFit or its nutrition plan, he tells me: “I don’t need a study. It’s my freak show.”Ěý

Still,Ěýhe is pulling as many medical professionals into this freak show as possible. After discovering that some 20,000 physicians were practicing CrossFit across the U.S., Glassman created a trainer-certification course specifically for doctors. That evolved into a mini-conference series featuring antiestablishment scientists that support Glassman’s views on health care. Though Glassman says the plan was simply to get these doctors to network with each other, a large portion of them have become converts, calling themselves the Derelict Doctor’s Club (DDC). Shakha Gillin, a pediatrician, said the DDC doctors “are now getting our patients better from what we’re learning.” Tom Siskron, a urologist and the owner of aĚývirtual CrossFit training platform, told me, “Greg Glassman and CrossFit saved my passion for medicine.” Last year, Glassman launched the , a one-day seminar for medical professionals and other interested partiesĚýthe day before the CrossFit Games. This yearĚýsome 200 health-truth seekers gathered at the Monona Terrace Conference Center in Madison to hear lectures from other health professionals on the disconnect between a diet pushed by public health officials and a diet backed by scientific evidence, the “great cholesterol con,” and more.

Glassman made sure to mention several times to me that he stands to make no profit off CrossFit Health. He offers the health conference to doctors for free and is spending millions on litigation and lobbying against the ACSM, NSCA, and Big Soda.ĚýBut it’s hard to imagine he’s not hoping for a return on investment. Convincing the world you have the ultimate answer and getting medical professionals to recommend it to patients doesn’t seem void of monetary gain. Although Ballard, the osteopath, says he agrees with CrossFit’s skepticism of mainstream health science, he’s unconvinced it’s all for the benefit of public health. “A massive for-profit organization like CrossFit has more effective marketing in being controversial, hitting viewpoints hard, and giving black and white answers,” he says.

In other words, Glassman has found a way to keep the intensity of CrossFit’s contrarian image,Ěýwhile presenting it as aĚýshiny, health-forward package—and he doesn’t deny that that’s lucrative. “We sell the truth for a living,” he says. “And it’s highly profitable in an age of mass delusion.”

On the first morning of the games, hundreds of ultrafit athletes line up for the opening ceremony. Before all 489 of them take a lap around the field wrapped in their country’s flag, Glassman makes his way down the line, shaking as many hands as he can. He steps out onto the field and waves to the cheering crowd before his security guard leads him to the VIP lounge. On the way, an attendee leans over a small barrier, yelling, “Coach! Coach!” Glassman reaches out and grasps his hand. “It’s an honor,” his fan says, then asks for a selfie. When he’s done, another muscled man leans over the fence for a selfie, and then another and another, a chain reaction of adulationĚýlining his way. For all of Glassman’s dismissal of the games, it’s clear he’s loving this. I say as much. “Oh, of course. It’s a lot of fun,” he says, before retreating to his glass box above.

After spending three days with Glassman, I’m tempted to believe that if he has changed so many lives, he must be doing something right. What he preaches has to have some real-world value. It’s this thinking that prompts me to let three doctors drag me to my first CrossFit workout in Madison during the games, where I perform burpees and rowing reps until I’m pouring sweat and can’t lift my arms. It’s what leads me to pose for a post-workout photo with a water bottle hovered over my open mouth as if I’m “drinking the Kool-Aid,” as the doctors put it.

Back home, though, I mull over Glassman’s immutable commitment to skepticism. Embedded in the CrossFitĚýbrand is the belief that we should always question the established order. SoĚýI have to ask: Is a multimillion-dollar company claiming exclusive access to the truth not part of the established order? If I drink the CrossFit Kool-Aid, shouldn’t I question the ingredients?Ěý

I’m still grappling with this a few weeks after the games, when Glassman asks me rhetorically, “Are we dangerous? Or do we sit in possession of an elegant solution to the world’s most vexing problem?” My own unsatisfying opinion is some conglomeration of both,Ěýneither,Ěýand who knows.ĚýBut I’m not sure Glassman cares what I, or anyone else, thinks. He already hasĚýhis answer. Anyone who doesn’t believe it is just another obvious idiot.

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