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THE
JOURNAL
Fitness Is … Potential
By Blair Morrison CrossFit Anywhere November 2010
Greg Glassman asked the question, “What is fitness?” Blair Morrison offers some of his own
thoughts to help you discover what fitness means to you.
What is fitness?
The question is one of the foundations of the CrossFit program, and asking it will make you reconsider just about everything
you know about training. In answering it, Greg Glassman created a new way of training and a new way of thinking
about health and human performance. He also got people thinking and answering the question for themselves.
In the first installment of this multi-part series, two-time CrossFit Games competitor Blair Morrison talks about what
fitness is to him.
Courtesy of Blair Morrison
Fitness is ... (continued)
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You Can Be More Than You Are
Potential.
Everybody has it. Few reach it.
It’s easy to assume people despise mediocrity because
the world is littered with evidence of humanity’s desire
to excel—our obsession with talent, our reverence for
heroes, even our love of money. It’s easy to assume
everyone wants to be his or her physical best because
everywhere there are those wishing for a better body or
a better lifestyle. They fill our virgin ears with a symphony
of sincerity and aspiration—but listen closer. They clamor
with empty voices.
The truth is that 90 percent of people just want to get by.
We pretend our ultimate goal is to be the best version of
ourselves, reading the right literature, quoting the right
sources, joining the right gyms. But the reality is far less
compelling. If we are truly honest, we will admit that the
level to which we might possibly rise is rarely our chief
concern. More important is reaching the level of mere
survival or, at the very least, mock survival. Getting there is
much easier. Getting there requires less time, less pain and
less effort. Getting there is too often there enough.
I was speaking with my father the other day about a friend
of ours whose son wanted to be a college football player.
He had good size and natural talent, but he was a little
slow and lacked the explosive quality most big programs
look for in an athlete. One evening while having dinner
with this family, my dad suggested the kid hang a bell at
the top of the hill abutting their property and ring it every
morning before going to school. Not only would sprinting
up the hill begin to build the explosive power needed for
speed and acceleration, but the sound of the bell would
also become a symbol of his dedication to the goal.
I wish I could say the kid went out and rang that bell every
day or committed himself to some other program in its
place, but this isn’t that kind of story. He, like many others,
chose instead to remain a card-carrying member of that
mediocre 90 percent.
Why? Because greatness is hard. Our bodies don’t care
about potential. They were built to survive, not to excel,
and survival has gotten pretty easy as of late. Our bodies
don’t know that by being stronger and faster and leaner the
likelihood of illness, disease and injury drop dramatically.
Do you have the will to rise above everything around you?
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Our bodies only know that it hurts like hell getting there.
It takes supreme physical and mental fortitude and an
unflinching, genuine ambition to overcome these hurdles.
Most of us lack these qualities—and it shows.
Now, maybe this kid never would have been great like
Peyton Manning or Jerry Rice or Ray Lewis, just like some
of us will always be at a higher risk for diabetes or arthritis
than others, but that really isn’t the point. In this story, his
ability was being measured only against his own potential
as an individual. He claimed he wanted to be the best he
could be, to give himself the best chance to be a college
football player. But when faced with the reality of what
it would take to reach that goal, he balked, exposing his
ambitions as half-hearted and insincere and his athletic
future to be one ridden along the tired road to the middle.
This is an all-too-common tragedy.
After hearing this story, I sat for a minute and observed my
father. He was visibly disappointed by the kid’s inability to
commit himself to his goal. Yet I knew for a fact that my
dad had wanted to lose weight for years and had failed to
commit himself to doing so in much the same way. This
struck me as a prevailing irony, not just in this conversation
but in our culture in general, so I decided to ask him when
was the last time he “rang the bell.”
He was lost for a second, then smiled wryly as he got my
meaning.
“Too long,” he replied.
Sadly, it seems that our praise of greatness and our distaste
for mediocrity is an appreciation and expectation reserved
for others. We expect Jordan or Tiger or Ronaldo to reach
his potential every time he competes, and we shake
our heads when he falls short. But we shrug off our love
handles and that occasional chocolate cake as acceptable
losses. We cry for the children growing up without physical
opportunities yet lie on the couch and amicably waste
ours away. We claim we’re too old, too fat, too injured or
too tired. The truth is we’re too obsessed with getting by.
The good news is that physical potential does not expire.
It has no shelf life. Whatever state you’re in at whatever
moment, you can always be better.
So be better.
Fitness is usually associated with the body, but it’s the mind that makes the commitment to improvement.
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Blair Morrison believes athletes need to set lofty goals. In chasing them,
they’ll find they can do more than they thought they could.
Too often, people try to do this by setting a number to hit,
a person to beat or a mirror to impress, implicitly attaching
a finite quality to the process. This focus is flawed. As you
change and improve, so too should your potential grow
and your ambition swell. Remember that fitness is a goal
inadvertently attained through the systematic overestimation
of yourself in all fields. It’s a byproduct of setting
the bar too high, of striving for perfection and falling just
short. It’s knowing that you’ll never get there but trying
your damndest nonetheless. It’s constantly pushing your
limits in every direction regardless of your skill. It’s finding a
way to keep ringing the bell.
Do this and we inevitably yield the best version of ourselves.
WOW! this really says it all.
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