I haven’t seen bodies like these since I quit porn. Maybe there were approximations in swimsuit editions or Fast & Furious movies, but it’s never been like it is here, where I can watch the sweat bead and the muscles quiver and the legs go for miles. They call this place a fitness festival. It looks like Gomorrah.
Over 35,000 human figures are on display at Wodapalooza 2017, the largest functional fitness competition outside of the CrossFit Games. The Games are rigid and corporate-minded, but Wodapalooza—named for CrossFit’s Workouts of the Day—packages a downtown Miami beach party to go with its pump. There’s music and grandstands and an ocean of near-nudity, but make no mistake, people aren’t here for the imminent carnal pleasures. They’re here to work out as long, hard, and heavy as they can. They’re here to support each other and be in community and share their fitness message with the world. This is paradise without sin, Eden before the apple.
There are plenty of CrossFit stereotypes—the zeal, the frat stars, the injuries—but Wodapalooza funnels many sorts past its pulsing entrance. Ponytailed yogis wrap their arms around gargantuan goths. Bespectacled geeks exchange bro-hugs with barrel-chested wrestlers. Dads herd lean, greyhoundish children while their wives tongue water bottles and wear tiny tops and make you think about adultery. There are 1,550 athletes in total from 52 countries, and everyone seems to know each other.
What Gives Them Strength
One prophet couldn’t lead so many disciples, so Wodapalooza has two. At the heart of the festival are co-founders Steve Suarez and Guido Trinidad. Suarez is 37 and Trinidad is 36, but you’d ballpark each at 30. They have Latin accents, firm handshakes, and smiles that make me want to follow them anywhere.
“We believe in what it does to your body, but CrossFitters truly create a community, and that’s what’s so brilliant,” says Suarez. His eyes match the ocean behind him. “I’m sure you get people that say CrossFit is too culty, right? It has that stigma, but there’s something special about this event. You’ll feel it.”
The drug of choice at Wodapalooza isn’t sex or booze or even HGH, it’s the endorphins, the high from ripping a PR on an overhead squat or jacking 21 straight pullups. It sounds clean, but in practice, it’s a horror show.
To the naked eye, all the rumors about CrossFit workouts seem to be true. At Wodapalooza, athletes score points by completing each of the festival’s nine workouts. The faster you finish, the more points you earn, and in some cases there are one-rep exercises where you can go for your max weight and earn additional points for big numbers. At the end of the weekend, the person with the highest total is declared champion. This is to say: These competitions are intense—less jazzercise, more gladiator pit.
Wodapalooza workouts are violent. Faces contort and strain and flood with blood and the air fills with shuddering screams. Sweat sprays the ground with every lip-biting grunt and the crowd holds up phones and takes videos and covers their mouths with their hands. Veins rise to the surface and throb thick. The movements—jerky pullups and trembling lifts—are graphic and frightening. You wait for something, anything, to pop or break, and when time’s up and the spent bodies fall to the ground they all splay there for a while and shake with relief. When the athletes finally rise and begin to walk, you imagine the first mammals crawling out of the sea, fully evolved. All thoughts of fellowship evaporate: No community is worth such suffering.
“What I love most is the effect CrossFit has on you and your character,” says Trinidad. “We live in a world where everything’s about comfort, comfort, comfort, yet a CrossFitter lives in a world where they get uncomfortable very often. No shit; it’s scary. To suffer so much, just to see how good you can be, is a rare quality in a human being.”
Paradise to these people is the sensation they have when their muscles go numb and every breath feels like it’s coming through a wet towel. The ripped body isn’t the point, it’s what the ripped body represents: accomplishment, exertion, complete devotion.
What Gives Her Strength
They start you young, too. CrossFit has a youth group. The smallest division at Wodapalooza is packed with stringbean 10 to 12 year olds. The kids line up in front of the stage and put on determined looks for their parents, who stand right behind the railing and shout advice and pump their fists. The kids cover yawns with their hands. It’s 8:00 in the morning.
An announcer patrols behind the row of children. He has a shaved head and he shouts a lot. “These kids could be at home eating cereal or watching cartoons or playing their PS4s, but they’re here putting in work!” he says. A few parents cheer.
The kids’ challenge: Row 1500 meters as fast as they can, then run 1500 meters as fast as they can. A mile is 1600 meters, and the total time allotted for the workout is 16 minutes. I wonder if I could do it.
“3…2…1…Go!”
The kids all take off from the stage and up a little hill toward a line of rowing machines. They sit down and grab the handles and start tugging. Parents bound after them, phones out, screaming and waving and ducking each other’s arms. One kid can’t figure out how to work his rowing machine and he slumps his shoulders while the Wodapalooza attendant scrambles and shoves his thumb into the buttons on the console. The announcer booms, “Do you want to have anything left at the end of this? No you don’t!” The kids row faster.
The first athlete finishes his 1500-meter row and runs back down the hill, looking like he would enjoy nothing more than to be at home with his PS4. He clambers on the treadmill and pushes off and starts running, his eyes glued to his progress screen.
As the other children join the first, something horrible happens: One kid takes his shirt off. He peels it away from his chest and flings it behind him and a couple parents cheer and then another kid is taking his shirt off and then it’s like a giant chain reaction of little kids stripping their clothes off in the middle of the workout. A girl takes her shirt off, too.
Not a single kid finishes all 3,000 meters. The announcer yells for time and the children crumple like husks and their little shirtless bodies quiver and heave. Two kids step down from their treadmills and puke all over their clothes and equipment. One kid is crying. The crowd is still yelling.
Parents start to trickle onto the stage. The apples don’t fall far—a lot of moms in form-fitting pants and a lot of dads with high-and-tight haircuts. They hand out water bottles and the children suck at them like calves. The parents beam and smile and extend fists for dapping. Some kids dap back. It’s hard to tell if they believe in what they’re doing or if they do it because it’s all they know.
The word “family” is everywhere in CrossFit. People say it all the time at Wodapalooza. “It is Type-A people who probably have some type of addiction, but it’s totally a family,” says Becky Conzelman, a five-time CrossFit Games athlete. “It’s shared suffering.”
The species of competitor at Wodapalooza is an all-or-nothing breed. CrossFit isn’t merely a portion of your identity; the gym is meant to be your foundation, your rock, the central pillar of who you are. It’s a near-universal attitude here, but there are apostates.
Chris Spealler is much shorter than you would expect—just 5’5”—and his reputation is second-to-none. He’s a celebrity, a seven-time CrossFit Games athlete. People constantly interrupt him to catch a photo, grab an autograph, or ask his advice on fitness. It makes me think of the crowds that pressed upon a teacher by the Sea of Galilee, and Spealler, too, takes time to talk to everyone. Even in the sunshine, he doesn’t put on shades. His eyes are blue.
“CrossFit wasn’t designed for sport. It was never designed to be this.” Spealler waves a lithe, seven-time-Games arm out over the bystanders. “CrossFitters are really Type A, so they’re very driven. They tend to be people where if a little bit is good, more must be better.”
His mouth forms a line. “What I see happening is people start to get into competition, and they look to the best in the world and try to emulate their training. They just can’t do that. Those are professional athletes; all they do is train. When people feel like that is what they have to do, they lose purpose. It’s ridiculous—CrossFit makes people jacked. But you get into an atmosphere like this, it’s a circus.”
Pure CrossFit, according to Spealler, keeps to itself. It’s humble. Spealler’s demeanor is calm and even, but his words are doomspeak. He’s right: Everybody is the same here, and if everybody is the same, how does CrossFit grow? How does it adapt, change, defeat its critics?
“Here’s the thing,” says Trinidad. “We have to minimize the negative publicity—injuries, things like that. CrossFit has created a fitness revolution. People were going to be worse than injured, they were going to be obese, have diabetes, be self-conscious, insecure. We want to let the rest of the fitness world know that CrossFit is a good thing. Hell yeah we like to look good, but that’s not our purpose. We train for functionality. The definition and perspective in the eyes of people who don’t do CrossFit needs to change for it to grow.”
CrossFit, on a corporate level, doesn’t mass advertise. Regulations are few and far between, and that means individual gyms are left to their own devices when it comes to promoting themselves. On one hand, this underlines the homegrown, familial environment that CrossFit works so hard to maintain, but on the other hand, it secludes the organization from the rest of the fitness world. When press leaks out, you can count on CrossFit disciples to track it like watchdogs. Positive press is affirmed and shared. Negative press is ripped to shreds. The biggest problem in this community, for all its welcoming and invitation, is insularity.
“[CrossFit] doesn’t do a lot of things a traditional organization would do to maximize [growth], and I think the community takes its cues from that,” says Blair Morrison, three-time Games athlete and co-host of the functional fitness podcast Beyond the Barbell. “Be a little more insular, a little more protected. The message doesn’t really get out of that bubble.”
It feels like that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Everything at Wodapalooza is designed for a specific community. CrossFit is in the food (you can try protein-rich Power Pizza at the food court), the clothes (everyone—everyone—walks around in the new Reebok Nano 7s), the drinks (the beverage brands FitAid and Kill Cliff are its Coke and Pepsi—they taste like emergen-C mixed with Hawaiian Punch), and the matrimony (buy a $20 silicon wedding ring from Qalo and “make your marriage cool again”). The functional fitness space is filled to capacity with CrossFit products, brands, and gimmicks. Is there room for anything else? Anyone else?
I watch the final workout from the stands. The athletes are as gorgeous as ever, but it’s clear that Wodapalooza bodies aren’t instruments of pleasure; they’re gleaming, covetous participation awards. This place is illogical. No cheap-beer day-drinking. No back-alley steroids. No people missing workouts because they were banging in a port-a-potty. This place is as impressive as you would expect and as pure as you wouldn’t. Nevertheless, for all its wholesome familial emphasis, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that non-believers don’t belong here.
“CrossFit is easy to get addicted to,” says three-time Wodapalooza champion Noah Ohlsen. “People become fanatics. If you don’t understand it, you’re kind of rubbed the wrong way by it. Unfortunately, I think people don’t really respect CrossFit. I hope that people who thought negatively about it would have their mind changed.”
Then he looks right into my eyes. “I hope you sense the good energy from everybody. As [CrossFit] slowly seeps out of that bubble, I think more and more people will respect it.”
He’s challenging me, but I don’t know if I can respond the way he wants. I like the people here—they’re genuine and passionate and charismatic—but I would never join them. You can’t just dip your toe into CrossFit; it will force you under and hold you there until you stop struggling. It will make you sorry.
But then, CrossFit will pull you back to the surface. You will taste the air and the water will clear from your eyes. You will see the disciples all around you, beaming, proud, and they’ll open their arms and pull you close, and you will feel swaddled and wrapped in their beautiful bodies. They’ll carry you to shore, and you’ll feel safe there, secure there, birthed and welcomed home.
