Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness - Softcover

Herz, J.C.

 
9780385348898: Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385348894 ISBN 13: 9780385348898
Verlag: Harmony, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

The absorbing, definitive account of CrossFit's origins, its explosive grassroots growth, and its emergence as a global phenomenon.
 
One of the most illuminating books ever on a sports subculture, Learning to Breathe Fire combines vivid sports writing with a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human. In the book, veteran journalist J.C. Herz explains the science of maximum effort, why the modern gym fails an obese society, and the psychic rewards of ending up on the floor feeling as though you're about to die. 
 
The story traces CrossFit’s rise, from a single underground gym in Santa Cruz to its adoption as the workout of choice for elite special forces, firefighters and cops, to its popularity as the go-to fitness routine for regular Joes and Janes. Especially riveting is Herz’s description of The CrossFit Games, which begin as an informal throw-down on a California ranch and evolve into a televised global proving ground for the fittest men and women on Earth, as well as hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals. 
 
In her portrayal of the sport's star athletes, its passionate coaches and its “chief armorer,” Rogue Fitness, Herz powerfully evokes the uniqueness of a fitness culture that cultivates primal fierceness in average people. And in the shared ordeal of an all-consuming workout, she unearths the ritual intensity that's been with us since humans invented sports, showing us how, on a deep level, we're all tribal hunters and first responders, waiting for the signal to go all-out. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J.C. Herz is a Harvard-educated former New York Times columnist as well as a former rock critic and tech writer for Rolling Stone and Wired. A two-time author and technology entrepreneur, she started doing CrossFit in a gym where white-collar professionals and new moms cranked through pull-ups and Olympic lifts next to active duty military and members of the presidential Secret Service detail.  Her favorite CrossFit workout is “Cindy.”

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Chapter 9

 
THE BLUE ROOM
 
Martial Arts Sublets and the Forbidden
Pleasure of Dropping Barbells
 
With a few barbells, medicine balls, pull-up bars, boxes, and kettle bells, and a nominal fee to CrossFit HQ , any certified Cross- Fit coach could become the proprietor of a CrossFit affiliate. In the economic hangover from the dot-com crash, this meant guys like Jerry Hill could sublet space, often from martial arts dojos, before they had enough athletes to afford a dedicated space. From Glassman’s early years in Santa Cruz to today, there’s been a symbiosis between CrossFit and martial arts, especially jujitsu, mixed martial arts, and Krav Maga. Part of this compatability is cultural, and part of it is architectural. The cultural part is a fundamental embrace of functional fitness. In martial arts, it doesn’t matter how beautifully curved your biceps are, or if you have six-pack abs. If you can’t hit hard, or if you’re easily winded, someone’s going to mess you up. Any kind of conditioning that makes you hit harder or breathe better in the middle of a round makes it less likely you’ll get messed up. So people who do hard-core-combat martial arts (as opposed to the beauty-of-grace-and-form varieties) are serious about high-intensity training.
 
The time domain of a martial arts match, a single-digit  number of minutes of all-out  effort, is on the same order as a WOD. The type of effort required—violent bursts of explosive effort under fatigue and
time pressure—is exactly what CrossFit cultivates. It’s competitive, high discipline, heavily male (along with a certain type of seriously kick-ass female). It demands the ability to suffer, and develops an athlete’s capacity to suffer and keep going—the quality of relentlessness.
 
CrossFit, in its early days, attracted MMA fighters with a geek streak. Guys like Josh Newman, who went to Yale, built and sold tech companies, and spent time getting his teeth knocked loose in Connecticut MMA arenas, invariably stumbled onto the CrossFit website and caught the bug. After winning  the state MMA championship in his weight class two years in a row, Newman was looking for an edge. As he says, “There’s nothing like getting the crap beat out of you to keep you honest at the gym.”1
 
When he checked out the CrossFit.com site, Josh thought the Workout of the Day was a joke: 400 meters of walking lunges. Then he tried it and, about 100 meters in, realized, “Oh yeah—I’m fucked.” The next day, he missed his stop on the subway because he literally could not stand up. He had to wait until the next stop, when a lady near the pole got off, so he could slide across the subway bench, grab the pole, pull himself to a standing position, and hobble onto the platform. If some- thing so simple and time efficient could incapacitate him, he thought, this was clearly the way to go.
 
Before long, he’d roped in a buddy who did Brazilian jujitsu (and later founded CrossFit Virtuosity in Brooklyn) to work out in Central Park. They showed up with medicine balls and kettle bells and did pull-ups on the playgrounds. People joined, and pretty soon ten of them were getting in trouble with the park police for doing box jumps on benches or stringing gymnastics rings up on the trees. This went on for six months, until it got cold. Then they moved into, and got kicked out of, six gyms in the space of two years. Because they did things like rig treadmills to see how fast they could run without shooting off the back. Or bang out so many pull-ups in a personal training gym that clients would simply abandon the hard body trainers who’d brought them there to Feel the Burn and maybe move the peg down one notch on the machine. At a Chinatown kickboxing gym, the manager saw Josh and his pals doing high-volume barbell WODs, marched over, and barked, “What you guys are doing looks really dangerous.”
 
Ten feet away guys were punching each other in the face, which was, apparently, not really dangerous.
The absurdity, and the hassle of it all, was just too much. So in 2007, Newman  rented a 1,000-square-foot  place in the Garment  District, “The Black Box,” which refers to CrossFit’s empirical discipline of measuring inputs (the workouts)  and outputs (athletic  performance)  from the training method. In a lovely stroke of irony, the term is also drama- world jargon for a small, bare-bones experimental theater.
Newman needed thirty  members to cover  the  rent,  and  he had twenty people. “There are not thirty people in New York City who are going to do this CrossFit thing,” he thought. “This is just going to be an expensive gym membership for me.” That year, the Black Box grew from thirty members to over a hundred. Newman got kicked out of his first Garment District space when, during a WOD, a barbell someone dropped from overhead crashed straight through the floor into the space below. It was after hours, but the landlord wasn’t so thrilled. When the Black Box decamped to a larger space, also in the Garment District, Newman and his people pulled up the mats to move. They had broken literally every tile.
 
The tiles were broken because CrossFitters, left to their own devices, regularly dump heavily loaded barbells from overhead onto the ground. There is a legitimate reason for this: safety. If an athlete is going for maximum effort with a load he’s not sure he can propel all the way up to his shoulders, or all the way overhead, it’s essential that he be able to fail safely. And failing safely on a one-rep-max Olympic lift or overhead squat means dropping the bar. Also, it’s fun to drop barbells. The ability to instantly jettison a serious amount of weight gives strength workouts the quality of play, no matter how strenuous the effort. If you can’t do the lift, you can eject. And if you do manage to launch a heavily loaded barbell over your head, and your heart is pounding with the hot-damn-I-did-it victory beat of a personal record, it is sublime to simply release your fingers from the bar and have all those bumper plates suddenly not compress your body. The spine springs back to its full length. Muscles no longer brace. There, I did it—I’m free. That sense of victory and freedom, the sudden lightness of releasing a heavy burden, is like getting a cast taken off. It’s like getting a cast taken off your soul.
 
When it’s synchronized, the ritual of dropping barbells is even more intense and satisfying. So for instance, in an every-minute-on-the-minute set of heavy snatches, every sixty seconds a clock ticks down, and your coach bellows, “Three, two, one, GO!” The lightning of electrical impulse courses through each athlete’s nerves and muscles at the same moment. Every barbell flies toward the ceiling. There’s a slight variation in speed, depending on each athlete’s height and strength. Then, within a few seconds, all the barbells come crashing down, and the boom of dozens of twenty-five- and forty-five-pound rubber bumper plates hitting the ground is like war drums. Thunder. It’s beautiful. This is why every tile in the Black Box was broken. It’s also why CrossFit boxes outside industrial areas tend to have unhappy neighbors and grouchy landlords.
 
So Josh Newman was sent packing by his first Garment District landlord. He was also nearly arrested in Times Square for sprinting up
41st Street wearing a weight vest—the kind of vest that’s black nylon, with rows and rows of tiny pockets to hold one-pound lozenge-shaped weights,  and...

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Verlag
Harmony
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385348894
ISBN 13 
9780385348898
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
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