The Spirituality of CrossFit?

 The spirituality of CrossFit.

This phrase has captured my attentions for over a year now, instigated by one coach’s question into my day-job as a spirituality scholar. Conversations with another coach, curious and energized by the wonderings, grew on me enough to invest in some of the older and more recent research into CrossFit. I began to peruse, meander, listen, and write. I landed in an unexpected conviction into what I’ve learned in my now eight years across three different ‘boxes’ of CrossFit here in Ohio. I see potential and possibility, an andragogy/pedagogy for human beings hungry for the wholeness and connectionalism I know today. Why not? I began to write…

I also serve as an Editorial Board member for an academic journal that I thought might be open to such interdisciplinary weavings–and some homage–to a rigorous-methodological resonance between spirituality and CrossFit. So much common ground. Just enough differentiation that each contributes to the other. What I learned? Not so much interest, as it turned out, with not a little surprise. CrossFit has a particularly polarizing and ambivalent presence today. Additionally, academic disciplines often err on the side of cognitively presumed rigor so not to lean into the messiness of practical application or connectionalism. Particularly in the face of traditionalism’s griefs, declines, and  hierarchical-masculinist insularities. C’est la vie. I thought I would let it go… 

But then not long after the refusal, I learned about an open-source publishing possibility. I heard myself wondering aloud if my interest-passion might be more a book than an essay anyway, with more interest in reaching interested folks instead of trying to persuade academics to be interested in healthy living, deepening community, and embodied practice(s). 

Here we are, then. Let’s see what emerges!

What does the phrase “spirituality of CrossFit” bring into your imagination? Are you familiar with Crossfit at all? Do you have any reaction–attraction or aversion–to the word spirituality? What stories you bring into this meander will be more significant than anything I might share or argue, after all. If you are holding a hammer, whatever you’re looking at begins to look like a nail, right? The stories you are bringing will shape what you hear, see.

Spirituality is a word that attracts some of us while repelling others. Those interested in a bit of distance from the words religion or tradition yet interested in intentional living and making sense of today’s insensible challenges are often drawn to the word. It grants a mystery in being human many of us find more compelling than dogmatic or doctrinal proclamations. You may recognize the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” Scholars can become averse as we struggle with the multiple and diffusing definitions of the word spirituality. It can be used in so many contexts to mean vastly different things so often that it becomes meaningless as a term for any rigorous understanding. You can see this at play in most any bookstore today: historical-traditional texts often smile at you from the shelf under “religions” while “spirituality” can harbor anything from new-age or pagan-speculative works to memoir to tarot to contemporary celebrities with wellness or meditation in mind. 

There is a very particular definition of spirituality that has undergirded most of my professional life in higher theological education. Being in the right place at the right time, I wound up as a Board member and then Editorial Board member in a guild-community that defines spirituality in both a grounded, philosophical sense as well as in an expansive, experiential one, conditioned carefully with self-implication (naming the why/how of the scholar’s location/interests) and attention to context. I love the word, therefore, and find it eminently powerful for deepening understanding and life transformation(s). I recognize that “going off the ranch” with this definition into more popularist prose is not something my academic colleagues would value. Deep bow to them and that, but the spirituality of CrossFit will not let me go.

CrossFit may remind you of summer media blitzes about The CrossFit Games, supposedly identifying the Fittest Man and Woman on Earth over a grueling 5 days of competitive events, both individual and team, now with age-brackets from youth into masters athletes, adaptive-athlete divisions, and more. Even those well familiar with Crossfit argue amongst themselves, emphasizing the facets they find most value: a niche market-brand, a community or a community of practice (which can be synonymous or not), a ‘sport of fitness,’ a cult, a fad, etc. Those who lean toward an objective, philosophical or human sciences approach to their lives eventually wind up seeing CrossFit as an empirically-grounded methodology weaving multiple facets of the human condition into a pathway for confronting obesity alongside other chronic metabolic health challenges increasingly rampant today (Level 1 Training Course).

I landed in my first CrossFit “box” – what the gyms are called, traditionally – in August 2018, finally aware that I needed to do something different in the face of approaching 50. A dear friend of mine faced hip-replacement surgeries, plural, and I woke up to the need to become more intentional about my own physical activity levels. I had worked off and on with a physical trainer who had woven CrossFit-lite into my workouts. I researched “CrossFit affiliates” and Dayton, Ohio in Oracle Google, landing on one I could visit on my way home from campus. They had Saturday morning “community workouts” which anyone could attend, member or not, so I just showed up, August 18, 2018. These eight years later, I can attribute much of my own life-transformation to the consistency, challenges, encouragements, and wisdom inherent to the CrossFit methodology as implemented by three different affiliate owners in three different boxes in my local area. Most of my professional work has been directed toward a return to the body as site of insight, learning, wisdom direly needed by so many of us today–religious, traditionalist, spiritual, secular.

So a spirituality of CrossFit goads me to name the promising contributions I see a dance or conversation between these two terms could offer:

• an antidote to our epidemic of loneliness

• a regular gathering within which individualists can re-learn community as gift, practice

• a daily-weekly regimen of practices–overseen and guided by trained coaches–best suited for redressing health toward becoming fit–returning to one’s own body with care, delight, enjoyment

• a communal pathway for aging well, with intention and conscious choices

• an option for spiritual-but-not-religious to find, offer and receive the gifts of community in some challenge to traditionalist organizations

• complementary wisdom to offer for traditional organizations wrestling with adaptive change

Most people think CrossFit is just a gym or a fitness routine. I find myself persuaded it could be so much more…even as it can also be just that and nothing else. Both/and.