Essay

CrossFit and the Frontier Spirit

The gunslinging mojo of a fitness craze
By Katie Rose Hejtmanek
Competitors perform the Murph at the 907 CrossFit facility on Camp Carroll at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska (Photo by Defense Visual Information Distribution Service)

The fitness regimen CrossFit was created in 2001, using the internet to give out free daily workouts. From the beginning, it was built on a survivalist, militaristic approach. CrossFit claims to train participants as if they were Navy SEALs preparing for disaster, war, or the apocalypse, and it names special workouts after soldiers who have died during the war on terror (“Hero WODs,” or workouts of the day). CrossFit claims to have gyms in 162 countries around the world, including on U.S. military outposts.

Greg Glassman, the founder and one-time sole owner of CrossFit, identifies as a college-dropout personal trainer who got kicked out of regular gyms for his rogue style of training. Building on his upbringing as the son of a Department of Defense scientist, he then created CrossFit to elicit, he said, one’s evolutionary genetic potential. But CrossFit is also many things besides an exercise strategy: a business, a brand, a community, a sport that crowns the Fittest Man and Woman on Earth, a cult, the best hour of one’s day, and a way for members to find salvation. American CrossFit, infused with various meanings, has developed a fascinating culture centered on the workout’s special forces–informed difficulty, the program’s cult-like nature, its reorganization of everyday life for the people who are devoted to it, and its link to deeply rooted American values, such as an entrepreneurial and fierce frontier spirit. 


My local CrossFit gym, with its open floor plan in an industrial garage-like space, is like the ideal CrossFit gym described in the second volume of the CrossFit Journal. On the ground are horse-stall mats, recommended by Greg Glassman as the ideal flooring for a garage gym because they are cheap and can protect equipment dropped during workouts. Bolted against the cement walls are gym rigs, or racks, that attach to the wall and the ground, and enable squatting and pressing at various heights, and places to attach pull bars. These rigs run along the long sides of the gym, a dozen squat and pull-up stations in a row. On the far short side are two whiteboards, one for listing the workout of the day (WOD) and its points of performance and the other for scores from each class. Bumper plates (those designed to be dropped from overhead, instead of the iron plates such as those in most mainstream gyms) are stacked below the whiteboards. Barbells and clips are stowed in each corner. Along the near short wall sit kettlebells, medicine balls, dumbbells, jump ropes, and resistance bands. Stashed away in corner spaces are a few stationary rowing machines (ergs) and Assaultbikes (a particular brand of stationary bike). The main door to the gym is a gigantic garage door, of a size that would allow a semitruck entry into the cavernous space. Outside these outfitted areas along each wall, the dominant layout of the gym is an open floor plan. Most of the equipment is black or silver, except the resistance bands, which are color-coded. If you walk in after a CrossFit class, you are likely to see pools of sweat and chalk dust on the floor, evidence that a brutal workout took place. If the garage door is closed due to the weather, it might smell a bit musty. People come here to sweat, and it shows.

The CrossFit garage gym has a spartan feel, a wide-open “What do I do in here?” kind of feel. If you enter during a CrossFit class, you will see several people moving through exercises at breakneck speed, sweating and red-faced, chalking up and lifting heavy and crumbling onto the open floor after they finish, leaving sweat angels on the ground as they do. The open space is filled with people, not machines, during a class. If the garage door is open during the class, a passerby can look in and see the choreographed dance of a CrossFit class during the “MetCon,” or metabolic conditioning, portion of the class. It is like group fitness studios in mainstream gyms. However, there are no beautiful wooden floors or mirrors on the walls. Instead, black horse mats, black rigs, and unpainted concrete walls with a garage door to the outside let anyone peer in and witness the spectacle of CrossFit fitness.

CrossFit gyms are built on the garage myth—an open-floor-plan canvas ripe for individual creativity, an undomesticated space filled with masculine bravado, a place for revolution and ingenuity, a temple to the rugged individual who can create or build in such a defiantly barren place. Its position as an undomesticated space near the single-family home also indexes another American myth: the myth of the frontier. Like the garage, the frontier is a place. Like the garage, it is also mythologized and given cultural significance. The frontier serves, to quote scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, as “shorthand symbols of patriotism, democracy, rugged individualism, and a host of other virtues,” including masculine bravery, vigilante justice, redemptive violence, and an inner moral righteousness based on living in and civilizing the promised land.

CrossFit is in many ways akin to the Wild West or the frontier. Glassman is a “rabid” libertarian, a political position fiercely loyal to frontier ideology: minimal state intervention, an abundance of freedoms, and a sink-or-swim attitude. The affiliate organization of CrossFit is also rather frontier-like; one does not need a lot of capital, just a willing spirit and some moxie. The actual gym space is also akin to the frontier: spartan, minimalist, focusing on “functional” movements and body weight. The ideal body is forged doing pull-ups and squats, not knee extensions on a fancy machine. The ideal community is a bunch of people believing in this ideology. CrossFit is also tightly linked to the U.S. military, which was forged during settler Christian colonialization of the natural environment and Indigenous people. More so, CrossFit is linked to the special forces of the U.S. military, those individuals (almost exclusively men) sent out to get the job done, the tip of the spear with lots of latitude. While no one really talks about the “Wild West” or “the frontier” in the CrossFit gym, it oozes with frontier ideology and a Wild West attitude. It is thus useful to examine the framework of CrossFit as a spartan place for real, “functional,” and special-forces fitness and the role of the American frontier ethos, spirit, and myth in the production and success of this framework.


The mythology of the United States hinges on the idea of the frontier and Manifest Destiny. From 1839 to 1845, the author and editor John O’Sullivan wrote about the United States’s divine destiny and coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” Manifest Destiny was the call to white men to explore, settle, and take the West, to realize the greatness of the U.S. in the name of Christianity.

Natural resources were abundant in the West, but there were significant impediments to westward expansion despite divine destiny, most notably Indigenous people and the lack of infrastructure. Therefore, those who were willing to “go West” required more than divine inspiration; they required bravery, ingenuity, and the will to enact ruthless violence. 

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner published a now famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and he would go on to change the way historians, presidents, and everyday Americans think about the role of the frontier in American life. In that essay, he argued that formally, per official census practices, the frontier is a “line” based on population. On one side of this line are people and civilization, and on the other is wilderness. “America”—its institutions and people—was forged on that line, delicately balanced between civilization and wilderness. The frontier line encapsulated all the United States and created an American spirit of pushing just a bit farther into the unknown, of braving the wilderness.

According to Turner, the pioneers or settlers, those who lived right at the line but on the side of civilization, best represented the American “national character.” Through perseverance and adaptability, the pioneers would overcome and establish themselves, thereby illustrating to others that it was safe and that settler Christian colonial civilization could flourish there. It was through this process that a variety of people from different nations could somehow emerge as “American.” It is not a coincidence that the idea of “whiteness” emerged at this time, in opposition to Indigenous people already inhabiting the area; the shared identity of many European settlers pushing forth became one “American settler.” The myth continues in framing these Americans who kept pushing the line west as individually driven, courageous, individualistic, and prone to egalitarianism, as the frontier required ingenuity, skills, and bravery, not titles or courtesies. The frontier shaped what it meant to be American: rebirth, new opportunities, dedication to freedom and individualism, the valorization of inquisitiveness and bravery.

There have been revisions to Turner’s theory over the decades. One of the most prolific historians of the frontier, Ray Billington, argued that fur trappers, speculators, cattlemen, and what Turner and Billington called “Indian fighters” were as present along the frontier line as settlers were. Also while being ruggedly individualistic, frontier folk had community-oriented views as well. Together, and only together, could they harvest all their crops and build cabins, roads, and schools. These frontier outposts operated as a cooperative of rugged individuals.

This is a very idyllic and whitewashed notion of the process of settlement and civilization. The settler life and frontier outposts were also very dangerous and violent. The settler Christian colonial agenda was met with fierce opposition by Indigenous people throughout the country and particularly around westward expansion. Violence and vigilante justice were also part of the frontier. In fact, for many people, it was as significant as the frontier line.


Theodore Roosevelt, an avid frontiersman himself, who used his experience in North Dakota to transform himself from a sick boy to a stout man (not unlike Glassman), built on Turner’s understanding of the frontier. While not a historian, Roosevelt was a prolific writer at the turn of the twentieth century and focused significantly on the meaning of the frontier as a myth-ideological system to understand the cultural, political, economic, and social systems in the United States. Roosevelt disagreed with Turner on where the frontier began. Whereas Turner thought it was just on this side of the line of civilization, Roosevelt thought it was on the side of the wilderness. Furthermore, in his multivolume treatise The Winning of the West, Roosevelt proposed that American identity and character were indeed forged in the wilderness or the frontier, but they were embodied in the “hunter/fighter,” not the settler. This hunter/fighter was the hero winning the West from animals, Indigenous peoples, and natural forces. These hunters were the first heroes in American society, who learned the ways of the wilderness (or Indigenous ways of living on and with the land) but also used these violent ways to make way for white, settler, Christian, colonial expansion.

The cultural historian Richard Slotkin has written three volumes detailing the way the myth of the frontier has shaped American culture and society. The myth of the frontier, he argues, has transformed throughout U.S. history but has maintained a stronghold on national ideology and narrative about what it means to be an American and, more important, an American hero, as embodied by the white, Anglo-Saxon, masculine, Protestant hero mobilizing violence to redeem the dream of America. He agreed with Roosevelt, not Turner, in that the “West was won” by hunter-heroes, through violence and the narrative of “redemptive sacrifice.”

Despite their differences, Turner, Roosevelt, and Slotkin understood the “frontier” as the most significant force shaping “national character.” Long before the comic book superheroes, the men and legends of the Wild West, including Roosevelt, were the American heroes to idolize.

Roosevelt not only wrote prolifically, but he was also an American frontier hero as the leader of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, made up of cowboys, Native Americans, small-town sheriffs, and other frontiersmen, as well as city police officers, elite college athletes, and even some men from high society. He was named lieutenant colonel of this unit, which became known as “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” and were outfitted with special cowboy-like uniforms and Colt revolvers, the Wild West weapon of choice.

Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were known for their battle in Cuba against the Spanish army. Seriously outnumbered but rigorously trained and highly resolved, they took, according to legend, San Juan Hill in Santiago de Cuba and planted their cavalry flag (some historians believe it was African American Buffalo Soldiers who did). Roosevelt borrowed the term “Rough Riders” from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, popular entertainment at the time. The Rough Riders are one of the most famous examples of U.S. military glory and bravery under fire. They also serve as a precursor of contemporary Navy special forces units, the SEALs, which also embody the tenacious hunter-hero of the American frontier and are connected to CrossFit.

Superman, Captain America, and other comic book heroes emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s, as did the special forces units of the military, which took shape during World War II. These heroes resemble the frontier heroes; they were marked by rugged individualism, enacting vigilante justice outside of social institutions. They were individuals willing to commit ruthless violence to ensure the safety of humanity or Americans. The American military hero is molded on the hunter-hero as epitomizing the frontier characteristics of American culture. The enemy has changed, but the hunter-hero, with his use of vigilante justice or violence, has remained. CrossFit taps into the meanings of the frontier—not because the frontier thesis is correct but because it is the story we tell about ourselves and of our heroes.


In a short video on ReasonTV, a libertarian YouTube channel, featuring Glassman and deputy sheriff Greg Amundson of Santa Cruz, Cal., talking about CrossFit, we see the frontier myth, CrossFit edition. A man out west broke free of conventional fitness, economic, and physiologic institutions and forged his own way. He put up an outpost, and local sheriffs and special forces members, “a different kind of people,” found their way to him. They soon realized that this was the way, and it was predicated on being rough-edged, authentic, and willing to make violent sacrifices to prove their character and win “against the man.” While the frontier looks a bit different, the afterlife of the myth remains; the frontier is fitness, and CrossFit, as Roosevelt claimed of the Rough Riders, will take the mountain. 

This ethos is part libertarian and part hard-core Navy SEAL. These men are modern-day frontiersmen, pushing boundaries of fitness and economic strategy, living lives that are part legend, part real-life hero, and cussing at, spitting on, laughing at, and getting in anyone’s face if they disagree. One could not make up caricatures of living hunter-heroes that so match the frontier spirit understood by Roosevelt and Slotkin if one tried. But the frontier is not just forged by hunter-heroes; yes, they are the tip of the spear, but they are not the pioneers or settlers who form the frontier outpost communities. If Glassman is the hunter-hero, then local CrossFit gyms are the settler outposts.


As noted, CrossFit gyms are spartan, with horse-stall mats (to be able to drop the barbells), squat racks, and pull-up bars (simply referred to as “rigs” in CrossFit gyms). They do not have televisions or air-conditioning. As we have seen, they are in garages, and used tires are flipped for exercise. In her book on the history of fitness, Natalia Petrzela calls the CrossFit gym the “anti-gym,” because it focuses so much on not being a typical gym with lots of machines, fancy accessories like saunas, or members who get on cardio machines for hours. There are thousands of CrossFit gyms in the United States and worldwide. As noted earlier, they have often followed the U.S. military to outposts in Baghdad, Qatar, and Afghanistan. But even the local ones, including the ones in New York City, perhaps as far from the frontier as one can imagine, come off as frontier-like. Take one in Brooklyn. According to its website, this is its origin story:

[We] started in November of 2007 in a small park below a subway line. After three months, we developed a small crew of five to eight people who trained together on the weekends. A fast-approaching winter forced us to find a space we could rent by the hour so we could continue teaching classes and growing the business. We ended up at The Brooklyn Lyceum, an old bathhouse, where we slowly went from two classes per week and about 10 members to classes five days per week and about 50+ consistent members. Many from that crew are still with us. We learned plenty of lessons through a trial-and-error approach as we found our voice as a gym and community. A little over a year later, we moved into our current facility just a few blocks down the street [in an industrial part of Brooklyn]. We [as a community workout] schlepped our equipment over and have been steadily building our program ever since. In 2014, we leased a 1,200 square foot annex space above us for additional offerings and in 2015 we expanded into a second location across the street, which gave us an additional 5,000 square feet … 

This CrossFit gym reveals its CrossFit and frontier bona fides. It started in a wilderness—outside, in a park, under a subway line—before it had any official space to call home. It then moved to an empty bathhouse/abandoned building, an outpost but at least a settlement. Then, with community cooperation akin to a cabin or school building in the original frontier settlements, the gym moved into an industrial space with a roll-up garage door, tall ceilings for ropes, and an open floor plan. As in the frontier model, more people settled at the initial outpost (former bathhouse), and, after trial and error, it soon found itself “civilizing” into a formal gym space, not an abandoned building. After several years of developing itself, the itch to move, expand, “go west,” or colonize more land took over. In classic frontier style, it moved farther into the frontier and settled more industrial space.

However, most CrossFit gyms, even if they do not expand, never quite become “civilized” in the classic gym sense. There will never be mirrors, fancy locker rooms, saunas and steam rooms, televisions, air-conditioning, or most of the other accoutrements of mainstream gyms. That is just not who they are. They are the rogue, the outsider, the outpost. They are the open floor plan, the garage, the horse-stall mats, and defiantly barren interiors. They demand blood, sweat, and tears from their athletes as much as they provide community and support in the process, building their frontier settlements on the ideals of Green Beret camaraderie, agony, and laughter. 


Next time you enter any gym outside of CrossFit, see if they have an American flag hanging. Some CrossFit gyms, especially those that are veteran-owned, hang flags representing the various branches of the armed services. Much like Roosevelt and his Rough Riders planting the cavalry flag on San Juan Hill, CrossFit plants the American flag in each gym to represent the claim that the U.S. armed forces, service members, and the nation-state have on that land.

One of the most notable elements of CrossFit is its Hero WODs. “Since 2005,” the CrossFit Hero and Tribute workout page states, “CrossFit has posted workouts meant to honor the memories of CrossFit service members who made the ultimate sacrifice and exemplary members of the CrossFit community who are no longer with us.” Hero WODs are officially named CrossFit workouts; the institution began in 2005 and was established as “tradition” by 2008. They are almost always named after a white male U.S. soldier. There are almost two hundred Hero WODs. On the CrossFit Hero WOD website, each workout is accompanied by a photo, typically depicting the person in military gear, field camouflage, or dress uniform.

The Murph Hero WOD was created in 2005 following the death of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy of Long Island. He lost his life during a SEAL mission to capture a Taliban leader in Afghanistan. He and the team had been trapped in a firefight behind enemy lines, needing to call Bagram Air Base for backup. Murphy abandoned cover to make the call and was shot. Murphy was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2007 for his bravery and sacrifice. A Hollywood movie was made about the lone survivor of the mission. According to the CrossFit website, “This workout was one of Mike’s favorites, and he named it ‘Body Armor.’ From here on it will be referred to as ‘Murph’ in honor of the focused warrior and great American who wanted nothing more in life than to serve this great country and the beautiful people who make it what it is.” The “Body Armor” workout—a one-mile run, one hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred squats, one-mile run, with a weighted vest—is now “Murph.” All hero WODs are like this, named after the fallen soldier and based on a favorite workout of theirs.

What does it mean to do a workout named after someone who is dead? What does it mean that it is called a “hero” workout? How is this different from a 5K run? Is it important that the “body armor” did not save his life? The meaning that inheres in CrossFitters performing Hero WODs is that they are not doing just a Memorial Day run. Doing Murph is an American-made, frontier-forged, military-tested, and “Built Ford Tough” fitness endeavor. CrossFit and Hero WODs are the embodiment of America at its finest, fittest, and toughest; dead war fighters/warriors provide the branding.

This piece is excerpted from The Cult of CrossFit: Christianity and the American Fitness Phenomenon (NYU Press, 2025). Katie Rose Hejtmanek teaches anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

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