The Weekend’s Aftermath: A Unified Community

Ben Garves Podcast: Fitness, Nutrition, and Activism

See full show notes at WODDITY: https://woddity.com/the-weekends-aftermath-a-unified-community/
If you sat me down with a pen and some paper and told me to write down the craziest 72 hours I could imagine in the world of elite fitness sports that would result in over 250 gyms de-affiliating from CrossFit, I could not have come up with, in a hundred tries, on hallucinogens, what has transpired over the past three days.

Tired of reading the comments yet? I am. But let me say this. We all woke up this morning feeling lost. Feeling unsure about what the future looks like as the brand we’ve built our lives upon crumbles around us. Here’s my piece of advice. Do what you do every day. Go do your workout. Go provide your critical service to the people in your community. Go be a good human. Don’t get drowned in the tidal wave of questions about the future. You can control the now. It’s why I’m recording the podcast episode right now. I don’t want to say the word “CrossFit”, let alone the 19 times I’ll end up saying it over the course of this episode. But what I do here is bigger than that brand. What you do is bigger than that brand. I don’t care if you’re some guy in his basement or the owner of thirty gyms. Your work matters and your work goes on.

Good morning and welcome to the WODDITY podcast for news about elite fitness sports. We are a daily podcast, Monday through Friday, doing fitness news in five minutes or less.

My name is Ben Garves and today is Monday, the 8th of June, 2020. Don’t forget, links to all of these stories are in the show notes of your friendly neighborhood podcasting app, as well as on WODDITY.com.

A quick summary of events, in case you’re lucky enough to have dropped your phone in a lake or something. The world has been speaking up about racial injustice in the United States. Notably silent was CrossFit, Inc., even when major affiliated brands, like Reebok, LifeAid, and Rogue weighed in on the topic. As gym owners and community members reached out to CrossFit to ask for moral leadership, an email surfaced from founder and Chairman Greg Glassman calling a gym owner in Seattle evil, and saying he believed COVID had made her delusional. In the midst of the uproar on Friday, Glassman coyly tweeted “FLOYD-19” to a group studying racism as a health risk for black Americans. At this point, gyms started to announce de-affiliation with CrossFit. On Sunday, I weighed in with a video talking about our community’s relationship with race, and stating WODDITY would no longer be CrossFit-adjacent, while de-affiliation gained momentum.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBJCSoggKmJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

As of now, there is a list being circulated with 245 gyms, representing over $730,000 in lost annual revenue for CrossFit. Major sponsors like Reebok, ROMWOD, Rogue, and LifeAid Beverage Company have stated they’re ending their relationship with the brand pending ongoing conversations about CrossFit’s leadership behavior and existing contracts.

On the list of gyms ending their relationship with the brand include 12 Labours - the gyms behind the Strength in Depth Sanctional, Invictus - with a longstanding history of competitive teams and athletes, NCFit - a gym and online training platform built by 2008...