In a short video on ReasonTV, a libertarian YouTube channel, featuring Glassman and deputy sheriff Greg Amundson of Santa Cruz, Cal., talking about CrossFit, we see the frontier myth, CrossFit edition. A man out west broke free of conventional fitness, economic, and physiologic institutions and forged his own way. He put up an outpost, and local sheriffs and special forces members, “a different kind of people,” found their way to him. They soon realized that this was the way, and it was predicated on being rough-edged, authentic, and willing to make violent sacrifices to prove their character and win “against the man.” While the frontier looks a bit different, the afterlife of the myth remains; the frontier is fitness, and CrossFit, as Roosevelt claimed of the Rough Riders, will take the mountain.
This ethos is part libertarian and part hard-core Navy SEAL. These men are modern-day frontiersmen, pushing boundaries of fitness and economic strategy, living lives that are part legend, part real-life hero, and cussing at, spitting on, laughing at, and getting in anyone’s face if they disagree. One could not make up caricatures of living hunter-heroes that so match the frontier spirit understood by Roosevelt and Slotkin if one tried. But the frontier is not just forged by hunter-heroes; yes, they are the tip of the spear, but they are not the pioneers or settlers who form the frontier outpost communities. If Glassman is the hunter-hero, then local CrossFit gyms are the settler outposts.
As noted, CrossFit gyms are spartan, with horse-stall mats (to be able to drop the barbells), squat racks, and pull-up bars (simply referred to as “rigs” in CrossFit gyms). They do not have televisions or air-conditioning. As we have seen, they are in garages, and used tires are flipped for exercise. In her book on the history of fitness, Natalia Petrzela calls the CrossFit gym the “anti-gym,” because it focuses so much on not being a typical gym with lots of machines, fancy accessories like saunas, or members who get on cardio machines for hours. There are thousands of CrossFit gyms in the United States and worldwide. As noted earlier, they have often followed the U.S. military to outposts in Baghdad, Qatar, and Afghanistan. But even the local ones, including the ones in New York City, perhaps as far from the frontier as one can imagine, come off as frontier-like. Take one in Brooklyn. According to its website, this is its origin story:
[We] started in November of 2007 in a small park below a subway line. After three months, we developed a small crew of five to eight people who trained together on the weekends. A fast-approaching winter forced us to find a space we could rent by the hour so we could continue teaching classes and growing the business. We ended up at The Brooklyn Lyceum, an old bathhouse, where we slowly went from two classes per week and about 10 members to classes five days per week and about 50+ consistent members. Many from that crew are still with us. We learned plenty of lessons through a trial-and-error approach as we found our voice as a gym and community. A little over a year later, we moved into our current facility just a few blocks down the street [in an industrial part of Brooklyn]. We [as a community workout] schlepped our equipment over and have been steadily building our program ever since. In 2014, we leased a 1,200 square foot annex space above us for additional offerings and in 2015 we expanded into a second location across the street, which gave us an additional 5,000 square feet …