In the summer of 2021, Josh Hunnicutt, a longtime personal trainer and the owner of the New Species CrossFit gym in Royal Oak, Mich., had a surprising opportunity: Greg Glassman, CrossFit’s contentious but charismatic co-founder, offered — more or less out of the blue — to pick him up in his private jet and fly him to a party in Ohio. The pitch was for the two of them to drink vodka sodas and rub elbows with other luminaries of the health and fitness industry.
Mr. Hunnicutt couldn’t say exactly why Mr. Glassman had singled him out with this invitation — “I randomly caught his attention, I think because I mentioned all my daddy issues,” he speculated in a recent video interview. But after spending time with Mr. Glassman, he was duly impressed. “It was the most surreal experience,” he said. “People say, ‘Don’t meet your heroes, because you’ll be disappointed.’ But Greg is Greg.”
Mr. Hunnicutt described himself as “the most basic version of a CrossFit box owner there is,” with “the pit bull, the tattoos and the wife who also does CrossFit.” His gym was founded in 2008 in the basement of a Y.M.C.A., and for 16 years it has scrupulously followed the philosophy of fitness that Mr. Glassman, a former gymnast, expounded on the CrossFit website in the early 2000s — a simple but revolutionary methodology based on “constantly varied, high-intensity functional movements,” which spawned a brand worth billions that has been adopted in more than 12,000 gyms across 140 countries.
But while his facility will continue to offer CrossFit training, Mr. Hunnicutt will be among the first gym owners to promote Mr. Glassman’s new fitness offering: MetFix, an “invite-only community” of gyms and trainers that bills itself as an “evolution of Greg Glassman’s methodology.”
Part functional fitness program with movements in the vein of CrossFit, part nutrition program that advises against sugar and carbs, it’s designed to “cut through the epidemic of chronic disease that’s killing millions and bankrupting nations.” Or, as Mr. Hunnicutt described it, “it’s a grown and sexy version of CrossFit, with a little bit more on the critical thinking.”
A Charismatic Leader’s Downfall
In addition to its stated goals, MetFix is also an attempt at a comeback for Mr. Glassman, a divisive figure whose reputation was seriously tarnished, leading to his exit from CrossFit.
After his meteoric rise, Mr. Glassman sold the company in the summer of 2020, in the wake of multiple controversies. First, he wrote a post on social media about George Floyd and the coronavirus that provoked public outrage, and for which he apologized; days later, he resigned as CrossFit’s chief executive after a fractious company Zoom call involving “expletive-filled rants” was leaked to the press.
By the time an exhaustive report of “routine and rampant sexual harassment” at the company was published by The New York Times the following week, hundreds of CrossFit gyms had canceled their affiliation, and CrossFit’s public image was in free fall.
A series of interviews with former employees for the Times report had revealed a management culture in which there was frequent vulgar discussion of women’s bodies. There were other accusations about inappropriate behavior by Mr. Glassman, including over his attempts to look down the shirts of female employees and pressure them to share a hotel with him on the road — all claims he has denied.
In the four years since the sale, CrossFit Inc. has tried to move on, cultivating an image as an accessible, welcoming exercise program with ambitious plans for growth. (It has also faced its share of controversies, including the death of an athlete at this year’s CrossFit Games.) Mr. Glassman, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has largely stayed out of the spotlight, spending time at home with his family and occasionally stopping by CrossFit gyms to speak to receptive crowds.
Talking at a gym in Colorado in 2022, he said that he “has never been happier” and that his abrupt exit from CrossFit was “the best thing that ever happened to me.” His license plate currently reads “CANCELED.”
Some of that self-effacement was mandatory: One of the terms of the CrossFit sale was a four-year noncompete clause, which ended this summer.
Free from those restraints, MetFix represents Mr. Glassman’s splashy, high-profile return to the health and fitness space after his ouster, and, despite the controversies, many in the CrossFit community are treating it like the Second Coming.
“Can’t wait for what’s coming and for Greg to be back,” reads a typical comment on the MetFix Instagram page. “His mind is what created all this. It’s not the name of the brand, it’s him and his methodology.”
A representative for CrossFit declined to comment on Mr. Glassman or his new venture.
Finding an Ally
The buzz around MetFix has focused on the return of Mr. Glassman, but he has a somewhat surprising partner in the venture.
He founded the new company with Emily Kaplan, a former investigative journalist who met Mr. Glassman when she was reporting on women’s health in the late 2010s. She learned about Mr. Glassman’s efforts to expose corruption in the scientific and medical professions — a lifelong passion project that had placed CrossFit in protracted legal battles with soda companies — and the two bonded over their shared interest in misconduct.
“We toured a bunch of hospitals together,” she said in a recent interview. “It was sort of like a meeting of the minds.”
In the summer of 2020, Ms. Kaplan was in the process of reporting a magazine story about CrossFit’s lawsuit against the National Strength and Conditioning Association when the accusations against Mr. Glassman started coming down. Mr. Glassman turned to Ms. Kaplan for advice.
“He was calling me begging me to help him,” she said. “I wanted to help him, but I kind of knew that this would be the end of my journalism career.”
She felt strongly that “we’ve mislabeled somebody who’s done a lot of work for the African American community as a racist,” but it was the sexual harassment accusations that compelled her to act. “I can say in my heart that I do not believe that those things happened,” she said.
So Ms. Kaplan formed her own crisis public relations firm, the Kleio Group, and began working to salvage Mr. Glassman’s name. She maintained that the accusations were untrue, and said that when Mr. Glassman sold CrossFit “they kept $20 million in escrow because they were sure somebody was going to come forward with a claim of sexual harassment, and the agreement was to just pay them.” “But no one came forward,” she added.
Building It Back Up
Mr. Glassman’s fall from grace resulted in swift backlash from many of CrossFit’s longtime corporate sponsors, including Reebok, which said in a statement in 2020 that the company had decided to end its partnership with the brand “in light of recent events.” Rogue Fitness, an equipment manufacturer with deep ties to CrossFit, denounced Mr. Glassman on social media.
Despite this fallout, Ms. Kaplan seemed confident that many major athletic brands, including one of CrossFit’s regular sponsors, Goruck, were eager to work with Mr. Glassman again in his new role at MetFix.
Jason McCarthy, Goruck’s chief executive, confirmed his company’s involvement, but when asked if he had any concerns about associating with Mr. Glassman in light of the controversies, he hesitated and seemed reluctant to commit.
“I mean, the truth is, I don’t actually know Greg,” he said. “Am I worried? We’ll kind of see where it goes. I haven’t heard too much.”
Last summer, Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Glassman paid a surprise visit to the CrossFit Games, the annual competition to crown the “Fittest on Earth,” where, Ms. Kaplan said, fans waited for more than three hours to meet Mr. Glassman and thank him for changing their lives.
“People were taking pictures, crying, talking about how sad they were that he’s not there anymore,” she said. After the event, she added, Mr. Glassman told her, “they think that they owe me, but I owe them everything that I have.”
With MetFix, Ms. Kaplan and Mr. Glassman are banking on the hope that there are many people in the CrossFit community who still feel as those fans did. Ms. Kaplan said that when they put out an open call for registration, they received applications from more than 3,000 former and current CrossFit affiliates — many of whom had appended “sweet, heartfelt essays about how they miss his leadership.”
A Lack of Leadership
As CrossFit’s outspoken founder, Mr. Glassman has always had the aura of a guru, and there’s a popular sentiment among many CrossFit athletes and gym owners that his distinctive style of leadership is yearned for — even if some controversies seem to go with it.
“There’s been no leadership in CrossFit since Greg’s departure,” said Andrew Hiller, a YouTube personality known for his videos about CrossFit. “When Greg would say something, it would kind of be written into a theoretical tablet — like, Moses comes down from the mountain, and here are your Ten Commandments.”
Mr. Hiller referred to several documents that Mr. Glassman wrote in the early days of the company, including the essay “What Is Fitness?” and his “Fitness in 100 Words” statement, which for many in the CrossFit world are akin to religious texts.
“These are just things that can’t be replicated,” Mr. Hiller said.
MetFix intends to lean into that. Ms. Kaplan said that she fought for Mr. Glassman to retain ownership of his writing when he sold CrossFit, and that this material, revised and expanded with a new focus on nutrition, would form the foundation of MetFix’s own training certification programs. (Gym owners and trainers wishing to become MetFix certified, Ms. Kaplan explained, will be required to study this material and write an essay that Mr. Glassman will grade.)
It’s this emphasis on education that she insists will set MetFix apart, even from CrossFit. “Frankly, there is no one at CrossFit anymore who has any real depth of knowledge about chronic disease or metabolic health,” she said. “They’ve replaced most of those people with M.B.A.s.”
The Science of MetFix
The solution that MetFix proposes to fix chronic disease — “off the carbs, off the couch,” as one MetFix affiliate put it — has had a mixed reception among dietitians and nutritionists, even though many of the more granular details have yet to be fully revealed.
Jennifer Broxterman, a registered dietitian and the founder of CrossFit’s NutritionRX program, took issue with some of MetFix’s framing of complex issues as “black-and-white absolutes.” She added, “When you set up a language of absolutes — this is good, this is bad; if you have this you’re going to get cancer or Alzheimer’s — now you’re fearmongering.”
Ms. Kaplan said that MetFix would begin offering two-day seminars, taught by Mr. Glassman, sometime in the new year. She promised “a big, broad education piece,” tailored initially for coaches and gym owners, but which “eventually I think could be a home-school curriculum.”
Of course, CrossFit itself became popular primarily as a fast-paced, dynamic exercise regimen — a way to burn calories, and perhaps build an impressive physique, in a fun environment and an upbeat social setting. Its novelty mainly lay in combining Olympic weight lifting, gymnastics and functional exercises, and many of the amateur athletes who show up for their CrossFit workout probably haven’t read Mr. Glassman’s essays on metabolic conditioning or the glycemic index. Will MetFix be able to draw away from CrossFit people who just want to get in shape?
Dale King, a CrossFit box owner in Portsmouth, Ohio, who is leading MetFix’s affiliate program, suggested that MetFix might appeal to another group of gym owners: those who have already abandoned CrossFit and want something new.
“There’s been a lot of people who have dropped their affiliate for one reason or another and who feel like they’re doing better business because they don’t have all the negative connotations of CrossFit attached to it,” he said. “I think there’s an opportunity there.”
But ultimately MetFix isn’t intended to replace CrossFit outright.
“A lot of people have asked me if they can do both,” Ms. Kaplan said. “The end goal is to save lives, not to become competitive and petty.”
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