REINVENTING THE BOX
On June 27, 2020, Eric Roza masked up and flew from Boulder, Colorado, to San Jose, California, where he rented a car and began driving south. A tech entrepreneur who made his name and fortune with a data company he sold to Oracle for $1.5 billion in 2014, Roza, 53, had just spent, according to one source, $250 million buying CrossFit Inc., the largest fitness chain in the world, somewhat bigger than Dunkin’ and somewhat smaller than Domino’s. At its peak, you could have found one of the more than 15,000 CrossFit affiliates at most latitudes and longitudes around the world – in Nuuk, Greenland; in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; in Païta, New Caledonia; in Gillette, Wyoming. Roza had big ideas that he believed could radically change the brand. And despite the Starbucks-level ubiquity of CrossFit boxes and the titanic role the company has played in the functional-fitness boom of the 21st century, CrossFit needed to change – desperately.
After 80 km, Roza turned off Highway 101 and onto a dirt road leading to a hilly 26-hectare ranch anchored by a warehouse filled with squat rigs, barbells, med balls, rowers and more. This was the CrossFit Ranch in Aromas, California, made famous as the site of the first CrossFit Games, which have tested the bodies and minds of the world’s fittest masochists since 2007. Ruling over this sprawl was Dave Castro, 43, the director of the Games, who is widely considered the architect of the CrossFit ethos. He had built the company alongside founder Greg Glassman, creatively translating Glassman’s elegant formula for fitness – “perform constantly varied functional movements at high intensity” – into public displays in the CrossFit Games and, probably, in some CrossFit workout of the day you ripped off the Internet once.
The two had been the equivalent of Jobs and Woz. Glassman the brilliant but mercurial big-idea guy, Castro the fastidious engineer and executor. And things at CrossFit were great. Then fine. Then not very good at all, which is why, at the time of Roza’s visit to the ranch, Castro was finishing up a short stint as the company’s CEO and about to have a potentially awkward conversation with his new boss and CEO.
“I wasn’t sure how Dave would respond,” says Roza. (Picture a Colorado-y Jason Statham who includes
