Early CrossFit Adopter

Fitness Review

Editorial Note:

Recent guest of the Philosophy of Art and Science broadcast Nic Nakis is a health & fitness Coach and documentary filmmaker based in Sedro-Woolley, WA. More than two decades ago, he was one of the first 100 CrossFit participants in the world, and has since worked as a fitness professional for 12 years. He has also released two documentary feature films and is working on a third, about fitness competitions.

I have two impetuses for publishing this piece: Robb Wolf and New Year’s Day. In 2011, I survived testicular cancer, which struck me in my junior year of undergraduate studies and in the midst of my Rugby season in which we made the playoffs. There is more about the process I have said elsewhere and am willing to share at length here or elsewhere again if need be.

My mind raced to find an earthly cause of my ailment, and I landed on biochemist, powerlifter, and jujitsuka Robb Wolf’s Paleo Solution. My exercise routine was on point, but my diet was shit. Wolf fixed that. And Nic mentions him below. My running back / carpool driver in high school, and a friend on my collegiate Rugby team were CrossFitters circa 2008. They helped prime me to receive and implement the Paleo diet in my life, and Nic predates them by about five years. Everyone makes resolutions at the start of the year, and to the chagrin of gymrats everywhere this usually means crowding the gym in January. Johnny-come-lately or OG, you will benefit from this read, and hopefully complete your Winter Arc.

By: Nic Nakis

I was one of the first 100 people in CrossFit. I didn’t know that at the time and never would’ve thought to brag about that or put it on the front page of my website or anything. It was brought to my attention by Chris Wyant—one of the early CrossFit affiliate owners and competition organizers in the Northeast, who got his start with me at CrossFit North in the hangar at Magnuson Park in Seattle—and I was advised to put it on the front page of my website by James Fitzgerald, the first winner of the CrossFit games (given the title Fittest Man on Earth in 2007). I never made much of it, and I still haven’t put it on my website’s front page, but if you are one of the few people who might actually care about that distinction of “first 100 CrossFitters”, then I have a little story for you about the early days of CrossFit.

The Old Guys

CrossFit started in the year 2000 with a man named Greg Glassman in Santa Cruz, California. He was a former gymnast and a personal trainer who’d put his own spin on the existing phenomena of “cross-training” and “functional fitness” when he left his health club job, opened a gym for himself, and named it “CrossFit”. From there, he began defining a philosophy that wasn’t wholly original, but well-branded and novel. His concepts drew primarily from the sports of Weightlifting, Gymnastics, and Track & Field, taking the high-value movements from those sports and mixing them together with trendy fitness buzzwords like “circuit training” and “high-intensity interval training”. In 2001, Greg began posting his unique CrossFit “WODs” (Workouts of the Day) on his website, CrossFit.com. This was the spark that lit the wildfire.

Some of the first people outside of Santa Cruz to discover Greg’s WODs and experiment with them were a trio of training partners in Seattle named Dave Werner, Nick Nibbler, and Robb Wolf. Dave was a former Navy Seal, Nick was a cop, and Robb was a biochemist. They were all active on the Dragon Door message board, practitioners of martial arts, and proficient with kettlebells. Nick was the first of the three to discover CrossFit.com, and he got jacked from doing Greg’s workouts, so the other guys decided to give it a shot. These were three hardcore fitness nerds and their minds were highly stimulated by the ideas and techniques promoted by Glassman. Soon they were imagining grand visions for the future of their new obsession, CrossFit.

Robb came up with the idea of a CrossFit Affiliate program, kind of like the franchises of Starbucks Coffee that had spread out of Seattle in the 1990s and covered the globe. They pitched this idea to Greg Glassman, but he didn’t quite get it. Robb said that one day CrossFit affiliates would be on every street corner and the Seattle trio proposed to pay Greg $500/year to use his brand name on their own gym. Greg said he’d let them use it for free, but the Seattle boys insisted, and the first CrossFit affiliate gym in the world soon opened up in Dave’s backyard shed: CrossFit North.

Not long after that, CrossFit North moved into their second location, inside a decommissioned hangar at Magnuson Park, a former Naval base in Seattle’s Sandpoint neighborhood. They bought some second-hand gymnastics equipment from the University of Washington. Dave (the Engineer) fabricated some pull-up bars and squat racks (a prototype of the rigs later popularized by Rogue Fitness), and the gym was soon in business. In addition to CrossFit group classes, they also led training sessions for the University of Washington Hockey team, and hosted an Olympic Weightlifting club on Saturday mornings. Soon, the CrossFit North team originated another staple of CrossFit’s global business model—the CrossFit training seminar—when they invited Greg Glassman to come teach a workshop to their staff of trainers. All of this was related to me by Dave, my longtime Coach, a mentor, and sometimes employer. I’ve heard the stories many times, though I wasn’t involved yet at this early stage.

The Young Guys

I discovered CrossFit in the fall of 2003 when a close friend of mine, Gary Yetter, a semi-pro mixed martial artist training with Randy Couture’s Team Quest, introduced me to the CrossFit website. Apparently, John Hackleman, another famous MMA Coach, had demonstrated CrossFit to them while promoting his early CrossFit-MMA hybrid program “CrossPit”. Gary and I did CrossFit together at the University of Washington’s Intramural Activities Building (IMA) for several months before we discovered the CrossFit affiliate in our own backyard.

Of course, we weren’t only doing CrossFit in those days. Like all early adopters of this new “mixed-modal fitness” approach, we were already practicing both cross-training and functional fitness. We did a lot of calisthenics, weight lifting (especially the Big 3 power lifts), running at different distances, hiking & backpacking, rock climbing, Yoga, cycling… just a lot of different fitness activities, including the martial arts stuff, which he took very seriously, but I only dabbled in. At this point, we were often training for 4 hours a day: Maybe an hour of Judo or other mat work, an hour of lifting and CrossFit, an hour of rock climbing, and an hour of Yoga. After a session like that, Gary and I would do a tour of University Avenue, getting all we could eat (on the cheap) by going back for 3rds and 4ths at the Mongolian Grill (we got kicked out a few times), and scoring free ice cream from the girlfriends and admirers we had at two different ice cream parlors.

We did a lot of different kinds of workouts, both inside and outside the gym, and we didn’t always do all our training together. There was a lot that we did on our own in the early mornings or on the weekends. But, when we got together to do the CrossFit WODs and post the results on CrossFit.com, we were highly motivated to learn how to do these things properly and do them better than the others who were posting. We were competitive. That’s when we decided to find other CrossFit people (we didn’t say “CrossFitters” back then) who could help us get good at this stuff. I posted a message in the CrossFit Message Board that me and my training partner were looking for other, more experienced CrossFit athletes to take us under their wings. That’s when the folks from CrossFit North reached out saying, “We’re only a mile away! Get on your bikes and ride down the Burke-Gilman Trail to join us one of these days.” That’s exactly what we did.

At the Hangar

Our first visit to CrossFit North was in January of 2004. We met Dave Werner and his wife Nancy. By that point Robb Wolf had moved to California, where he founded the 4th CrossFit affiliate, the original CrossFit NorCal. We met Nick Nibbler soon after we joined the Hangar O-Lifting Club. They were immediately impressed by Gary and I because—well, Gary was a ripped Adonis, who characterized himself as a Filipino version of “The Rock” and was already an accomplished martial artist—and I was the guy who could execute a muscle-up on his first attempt, did behind-the-back clapping push-ups, and would Clean & Jerk weights that made the seasoned Olympic lifters jealous.

This is something you have to understand about us early CrossFit folks: we were already all very fit from the years of base-building we’d done through practicing a wide variety of fitness activities (cross-training), always with the aim of being able to do stuff for sports, war, work, or survival (functional fitness). What we found in CrossFit was a way to sharpen those skills and channel them in a new direction with all the challenging and inventive WODs the old guys were giving us. The slogan of CrossFit at the time was “Strength for the Masses”, and we were determined to bring any new people along at a snail’s pace of basic skill development, through things like running and bodyweight workouts, before we ever threw them into a challenging “WOD” with true intensity.

CrossFit was expensive, and we were both broke college students, but we started going to the hangar on the first Saturday of every month for an event Dave named “Suffer on Saturday”. This was the first CrossFit competition in the world. These monthly events gathered CrossFit athletes, their families, and friends from around the state of Washington (and sometimes Oregon) to compete in a friendly workout event as either an introduction to CrossFit, or a way to test our mettle against other seasoned practitioners. Sometimes the Suffer on Saturday workout would be one of the named “Girl WODs”, staples of CrossFit. Sometimes it would be something else entirely, something straight out of Dave’s creative mind, or something inspired by Greg Glassman’s injunction in his World Class Fitness in 100 Words to, “Regularly learn and play new sports”, like the Dragon Boat races we held on Lake Washington against the local Hawaiian Dragon Boat team, the obstacle course runs around Magnuson Park (years before Spartan races or Tough Mudders appeared on the scene), or the Hoover Ball tournament we held in the International District with Seattle’s Hoover Ball club. I won a t-shirt at one of these Suffer on Saturday events when I completed “Helen” (3 rounds for time of a 400m run, 21 kettlebell swings with a 53lb bell, and 12 pull-ups) in 6 minutes and 36 seconds, setting a world record that no one online remembers, and puking my guts out. But I remember, and so do all the people who were there.

Soon, the CrossFit North team was innovating another program that went on to become one of the pillars of CrossFit’s multi-billion dollar business model of today: the Specialty Seminar. This happened for the first time in the history of CrossFit when our group invited Coach Mike Burgener up to teach an Olympic Weightlifting seminar in Seattle. I was there for that, and if I recall correctly, it cost $120 for a 2-day session on both Saturday and Sunday. Far cheaper than what it might cost today, but incredibly valuable stuff. Coach Burgener’s cues still echo in my head, and his methods have helped me teach 100s of people how to do the Olympic lifts.

The first CrossFit Affiliate, the first Trainer’s Seminar, the first CrossFit competition, and the first Specialty Seminar, but CrossFit North also innovated another first in 2004: the CrossFit Championships. This was Dave Werner’s brainchild, a multi-sport, multiple test event held over a single day, where the athlete’s placings in each event were averaged together and scored like golf: lowest score wins. In other words, if you got 1st place in one event, then 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, etc., you’d add up all those numbers and average them together to find your overall placing. It was simple, and it was basically the blueprint of how CrossFit and Functional Fitness competitions all around the world are organized and scored today.

Bragging Rights

I wasn’t there for the 2004 Championship, but I did compete in 2005, and possibly 2006 (I’d have to check with Nancy for the records). I remember lifting weights and throwing spears and doing some brutal MetCons. I also remember hearing the stories from the 2004 Championship, when Greg Glassman and Dave Castro had come up from California to visit and take notes. Later, they duplicated a version of Dave’s event in 2007 when they held the first “CrossFit Games” in California. Of course, that became the more popular and well-known event, while our event went on hiatus for a few years, returned as a low-key local competition in the 2010s, then faded out when Dave’s gym went out of business in 2017, and was later resurrected in a different format by CrossFit HQ in the 2020s.

One of the other competitions I remember from those days was the online “CrossFit Challenge”. These were 6-month competitive challenges organized through the CrossFit.com message board. They started every January and July and had to be completed by either June or December, respectively. Each one began with a group of people in the message board saying, “Hey, it’s about time to start another CrossFit Challenge, what do you think it should be?” Then we’d post our ideas and proposals for the content of the challenge, vote on it, and start a list of names of people who would commit themselves to participate. The Challenge was always something distinct that you had to be able to accomplish, like, “do 15 unbroken reps of Overhead Squats with weight on the bar equal to your bodyweight”, and you had to do it—with witnesses who’d vouch for you—before the deadline at the end of the 6 months.

I won that one actually—the 15 overhead squats one—when I was the only one out of 99 participants to complete the challenge by the 6-month deadline. We’d posted daily in the message board regarding our training for this, but when it came down to it, no one was able to complete the challenge. I went to CrossFit North on a Saturday to find my witnesses. There, in my bare feet, I made 3 attempts, cleaning & jerking the bar off the ground each time, then pumping out rhythmic overhead squats, trying to get to 15. On the first attempt, around rep 13 or 14, I dropped it. That happened again on the second attempt. Then, after sitting and staring at that bar for several minutes, I got up and tried it again, nailing all 15. It was epic and the whole gym flipped out. Dave Werner or Nick Nibbler could probably tell you about that one, or Mike Ng (a longtime Olympic Weightlifter and early CrossFit trainer), who always reminds me of my old-school fitness achievements. As my prize, Lauren Glassman sent me a long-sleeve t-shirt. It was bright red, with a bulldog on the front, and it said, “CrossFit. Mess you up!”

I won another CrossFit Challenge when Eugene Allen (another early CrossFit athlete, affiliate owner, educator, and Pierce County Sheriff’s Deputy) wanted to celebrate his 50th birthday by challenging everyone to do a set of 50 kipping pull-ups. His birthday coincided with the end of the 6-month challenge period, so it was a perfect test for the group. Again, I trained all 6 months for this, doing stupid amounts of kipping pull-ups at every opportunity. I often did them in sets of 40. Then, on Eugene’s birthday, at about 5am (before he started his shift as a Sheriff), I met him at his place—CrossFit Pierce County—along with another Deputy who’d been participating in the message board challenge. Eugene, at 50 years old, blew us away by doing all 50 kipping pull-ups in an unbroken set. The other Deputy did 52, and I smashed it out of the park with 56 unbroken kipping pull-ups. There were other people online who completed the feat that day, but I had the best total score and I won the Challenge.

In 2006, I took the show on the road, traveling throughout Southeast Asia, then India, Kenya, and Greece in 2007. I continued training and evangelizing CrossFit everywhere I traveled, and I wrote about it on my travel blog. In the summer of 2007, I was training in a backyard gym with some Rasta acrobats near Mombasa, using their homemade poured-concrete weights and hanging rings from the trees, while chickens ran around between our feet. I taught CrossFit to the acrobats and their friends, some of them bodybuilders. One of the bodybuilders was also a Physical Education teacher at the local school and he invited me to teach a group of students. There were easily 100 children out in that field as I taught them a modified version of the “Official CrossFit Warmup” with air squats, Samson stretches, push-ups, and such. I sent the CrossFit folks some of my photos from Kenya, then Greg & Lauren Glassman posted a few of my pictures on CrossFit.com, giving me the title “CrossFit Kenya”. They even included the chickens.

Time Changes Tingz

My first stint with CrossFit lasted from 2003-2007. Then I got married in January, 2008, and stopped participating in CrossFit as much. Life just took on other priorities, like my new wife and my new career as a video Producer. Other than one or two visits to the latest CrossFit North location in Ballard (now renamed “CrossFit Seattle”), I didn’t really engage with CrossFit much again until 2010 or 2011. In the interim, a lot had changed. I saw CrossFit on the TV (Reebok had decided to sponsor them) and heard people talking about it at common places like the grocery store. One time, I stumbled upon a big CrossFit event happening at Magnuson Park, but there was no one I knew or even recognized there. I remember talking to one of the organizers and they hadn’t even heard of CrossFit North or any of the people I’d known there, just a couple hundred feet away in the old hangar. Robb Wolf became famous for his Paleo books and podcasts, Dave and Nancy went to Ballard, and Nick Nibbler left to start CrossFit Agoge in Woodinville, while coaches Michael Street and Carrie Klumpar went to start CrossFit Eastside (now Eastside Strength & Conditioning) in Bellevue. The old hangar gym was taken over by the Olympic Weightlifting club who used to train there on Saturdays.

CrossFit itself also went through many changes during this period. While Greg Glassman in his earlier days had touted CrossFit as an “Open Source” system, inspired by the open-source software movement, once the name got big and the money began to roll in, he became highly proprietary and litigious about his brand’s intellectual property. This led to a famous beef and online flame-war between Glassman and Mark Twight over Twight’s success and rising fame as the trainer of the movie extras for the “300”, a film about a bunch of ripped Spartans. Then there was the 2008 Black Box Summit, another drama between Glassman’s CrossFit HQ team and the early CrossFit Affiliate community. Most CrossFit affiliates in those days were in fact experienced and talented strength & conditioning coaches in their own rights, who had contributed greatly to the development of CrossFit’s IP during the “open source” days, but were completely cut out of the profits as CrossFit HQ closed their gym practice and reconfigured themselves as a media company. The massive earnings from CrossFit Affiliate fees, Trainer Seminars, Specialty Seminars, and CrossFit Competitions (such as the Reebok-sponsored CrossFit Games on ESPN) did not trickle down to the community of early affiliate owners who had developed and spread the successful CrossFit formula, least of all to Dave Werner, Nick Nibbler, and Robb Wolf, who arguably originated each of these lucrative lines of business.

I encountered some health challenges in 2010 and 2011 and needed to get back into the gym again. I became a regular at Level 4 CrossFit Seattle (Dave and Nancy’s latest reincarnation of CrossFit North), which now identified themselves as an “anti-CrossFit CrossFit gym”. This was meant to indicate something like they were the real CrossFit and all others were unworthy of the name, or that the ideas and methods promoted by CrossFit HQ were actually bogus. I didn’t get it at first, but soon came to see what they were talking about.

A couple of friends and I (Zach Finer and Ramey Harris) began to do a little thing called “Box Jumpers”, where we’d visit a new CrossFit affiliate every week, somewhere in the greater Seattle area (or elsewhere if one of us was on vacation), just to see what people were doing differently at the other gyms. Most of the affiliates were awful, with the exception of those tied directly to the pedigree of CrossFit North. In other words, all the folks who’d started out with Dave, Nick, and the old hangar crew—or learned from that group—were smart, experienced, and running excellent programs at places like CrossFit Sumner, CrossFit Eastside, and Xplore CrossFit. The other affiliates, who had sprung up in the wake of the “300” fame and the Reebok sponsorship, were mostly fly-by-night operations trying to cash in, their only qualifications being a cheap weekend seminar.

I was passionate about this CrossFit thing and I wanted to see it done right. In fact, I wanted to change my career and work as a CrossFit Coach. In 2012, I went for my CrossFit Level 1certificate course. I thought I’d learn something new, but I was surprised when the training materials turned out to be simple re-prints of the same CrossFit Journal articles I’d read close to a decade earlier. So, I relearned some things I already knew, just so that I could officially work as a CrossFit Trainer. And I’m gonna accelerate the pace a bit here. I have lots of stories, but I won’t tell them all, because I don’t think you need about the details, but maybe just the common themes that appear.

I worked at some CrossFit affiliates in Seattle. I worked at a couple of bootleg “cross-training” gyms, including one at a destination martial arts and fitness center in Phuket, Thailand. I became the CrossFit affiliate owner at a health club in the States for several years. I did many more competitions, I had a lot of injuries, I sometimes followed the new trends instead of the old wisdom, I messed up my health in the name of “fitness” (CrossFit’s version of fitness), and I learned a lot of lessons in both life and business. At every step of the way, I encountered tensions between what was being depicted or promoted as “CrossFit” nowadays and what I knew to be the right way to do CrossFit from my many years of experience and the things I’d known from early days. The worst part about it was the increasing cultishness of CrossFit followers, who would doubt the experience of someone like me (one of the first 100 CrossFitters), or deny exercise science and just plain common sense, in favor of whatever nonsense was being promoted by “The Brand” (CrossFit HQ) today.

In 2018, while I was trying to become a better Coach, with the ambition of really helping people, I decided to ditch the name “CrossFit” altogether. The brand name no longer indicated the quality and insightfulness I wanted to message to potential customers, the group class business model was not successful or sustainable, and I simply couldn’t endorse CrossFit’s training methodologies any more.

Differing

CrossFit’s basic formula was, and has always been, “constantly varied functional movements performed at high intensity” with the goal of, “maximizing work capacity across broad time and modal domains”. They promote this system using group fitness classes within box gyms run by under-qualified personnel whose only training as instructors is typically a 2-day weekend seminar.

Over time, I came to differ with this philosophy and business model on each point:

Constantly Varied

I say, “Varied for what purpose?” Variation on its own carries no rationale or benefit.

Functional Movements

And I ask, “Functional for whom?” The functions of different people do, in fact, differ by nature, and not just by scale.

Performed at High Intensity

I ask, “Intensity for whom and for what purpose?” Intensity can be dangerous and inappropriate for many people.

Maximizing Work Capacity

Why is this the target? This is not every person’s goal when they come into the gym.

Across Broad Time & Modal Domains

Why is it presupposed that everyone needs this? This is an ideological goal that is not person-focused.

Group Fitness Classes

These just don’t work long-term for a business. If the times of classes are inconvenient to someone’s schedule, you lose them as a client. If they don’t have a good relationship with the instructor, or with other students in the class, they’re gone. The class can never cater perfectly to one person’s needs. So, for these and other reasons, the turnover rate of CrossFit clients is very short. You don’t keep people long-term and that means you’re constantly facing the costs of customer acquisition.

Box Gyms

While the investment and overhead in these gyms is less than a larger commercial facility or health club, you still have to keep large numbers of certain items on hand (like a dozen rowing machines) for intermittent use in group classes. Specialty gyms or personal training studios, on the other hand, may need a smaller amount of specialized items that they use more frequently, and can operate with more limited schedules or less staff on hand.

Under-Qualified Instructors

This to me is just common-sense. The early CrossFit affiliates were like bespoke, gourmet, tasting kitchens. These were knowledgeable, passionate, and highly-skilled individuals who built a strong brand name. When the standards were lowered, it became like a McDonald’s: The same everywhere and not very good. Who would want to pay good money for that?

In my Coaching business today, I use a very different philosophy, and that’s why I can no longer say that I practice “CrossFit”, even though much of what I do looks similar to CrossFit, and it is all based on the experiences I had as a CrossFit athlete and trainer.

In direct counterpoint to the CrossFit formula, today I use a system that is:

Intentionally Varied

At many levels of skill development, people actually need consistency. They need to develop mastery of skills through regular practice, and develop the long-term neurologic and tissue adaptations that come with training. Sometimes, however, variation is important and necessary. I say variation should be planned and used for a purpose.

Functional for the Person

The functions of a professional firefighter and a retired grandmother are not the same. This can also be said for all types of athletes, professions, and “general population”. The functions of our daily lives, hobbies, and careers differ, so our functional objectives in training must also differ. The “functions” prioritized in a training program should be those of the individual trainee.

Performed at Appropriate Intensity

Intensity is not something that everyone is able to execute effectively. The exact definition of intensity is not even always agreed upon or clear. If someone is ready to express the intensity of, say, a 50m sprint, or a 1-rep max Clean & Jerk, then they by all means can, but most trainees are not ready for that. The intensity used in training should be appropriate to the person, their experience, and their function.

Designed to Achieve THEIR Goals (Not Mine)

While my personal goals do include increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains, most prospective clients would never say that. Their goals usually involve improved quality of life (through establishing a healthy lifestyle), increased strength, and greater abilities in their daily functions of life, job, and recreation (along with the confidence this brings). Their training programs should be directed towards these aims.

Individualized

Rather than forcing disparate personalities at differing skill levels together into a haphazard group workout that has been designed for everyone, but for no one at the same time, I do individualized training programs. One person, one coach, one program (One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all).

Gym-Neutral

My clients don’t come do their workouts at my gym, constrained by my location, my hours, level of staffing, and equipment availability. Instead, they do their workouts wherever they want to: At the convenient gym in their neighborhood, in their home gym, on their living room floor, or outside in the park.

Highly Qualified

In addition to my decades of experience with CrossFit (and my CrossFit L1 and L2 certifications), I am also an OPEX CCP (Coaches Certificate Program) Level 1 Coach, Precision Nutrition Level 1 Trainer, a Personal Trainer certified through National Federation of Personal Trainers (NFPT), TRX certified, with Yoga Teacher Training from Iyengar Yoga of Seattle, and a National Outdoor Leadership Schools (NOLS) Outdoor Educator Mountaineering Course graduate.

Hopefully, there are one or two things here you can takeaway and incorporate into your 2025 fitness protocol(s), that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land.