craschworks

I love this photo:

It's featured in the book Growing Old Is Not For Sissies by Etta Clark. It's a collection of photographs of older athletes.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051018/news_lz1c18savvy.html

Krav Maga and CrossFit have given Bobbi Salvini good health and self-confidence

October 18, 2005

Her son's words caught Bobbi Salvini with her guard down.

“Mom, let's do sparring,” 14-year-old Kevin said.

JOHN GASTALDO / Union-Tribune
Bobbi Salvini has lost 40 pounds with a regimen of Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense discipline, and CrossFit, a conditioning program with drills.
Her reaction, once the initial blow had worn off: “Well, uh, maybe there's a gym somewhere in the phone book.”

Salvini's idea of exercise at the time began and ended with a tap dance class at Balboa Park. But she wasn't averse to trying something else that would keep her on her toes, sort of. Moreover, she wasn't about to disappoint her son.

“When your children grow up, if you don't show an interest in what they want to do, you grow apart,” she said. “There's no basis for a relationship.”

Next thing she knew, Salvini, 48, was practicing full-body contact sparring and grappling and learning the fundamentals of Krav Maga, an Israel military defense discipline. All this at her local neighborhood gym in Ramona, Brand X martial arts school. For good measure, she added CrossFit, a closely supervised conditioning program that features drills with names like pain storm.

“You can be in the gym an hour and a half, all the time working your fanny off,” Salvini said. Rope climbs, sprints and firefighter's carries (hoisting people on your back) are interspersed with Olympic lifts, push-ups and sit-ups.

Salvini, a senior civil engineer with the city of San Diego's Metropolitan Wastewater Department, is 10 months into her martial arts/CrossFit regimen.

“When I started CrossFit, I could do 20 crunches, two push-ups on my knees, and I thought I was a star being able to do 30 squats,” she said. A recent workout: 300 lunges, six 80-meter sprints, 63 box jumps (jumping on and off a box), 20 full push-ups balancing on her toes and 90 more on her knees, and 20 ring push-ups (using suspended, oversized rings for resistance).

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“I feel like a 350-pound person struggling to stay in a smaller body,” she said. “When I first looked at the weight chart for my height (5-foot-10), I thought I should be at 153. But I've gained so much muscle on this program (about 15 pounds, she estimates) that may not be right.”

For now, that's 185, with a goal of 20 percent body fat.

In dropping four dress sizes, from 22 to 16, Salvini has sort of rearranged everything. “Now I have shoulders,” she said.

PROTEIN POWER: “I used to be hungry most of the time, and if I tried to deny myself food, it was total torture,” she said. Not so with Barry Sears' Zone Diet, which disdains simple carbohydrates and is designed to avoid soaring insulin levels. “Spikes in insulin were making me hungry,” she said.

She starts the day at 6 a.m. with a hearty breakfast, often microwaving a pre-cooked steak, complemented by nuts and fruit. At 11:30, she snacks on cottage cheese, fruit and nuts (almonds, walnuts, pepitas with chili powder or cashews).

For dinner, she might barbecue steak, fish or chicken over hickory chips, aiming for 3 ounces of “quality protein.” She'll have a protein snack before bed. By the end of the day, she will have consumed a gallon of water.

“After a really hard workout, I allow myself a pint of chocolate milk, which compares to whey powder in promoting muscle recovery,” she said.

RIGOROUS ROUTINE: After taking Sunday and Monday off, Salvini walks and jogs around Balboa Park at noon Tuesday. In the evening, she hits Brand X for a full-body sparring and grappling class. On Wednesday, she takes a rhythmic tap dance class. She'll shadow box at noon Thursday, then work out in the gym in the evening – at least a half hour of CrossFit, followed by kickboxing and Krav Maga. On Friday, she'll work out on her lunch hour. Saturday finds her at Brand X for an hour of Krav Maga and at least a half hour of CrossFit.

CONFIDENCE BUILDER: Assaulted at 14, Salvini has felt vulnerable and insecure for years. “My self-defense was to stay overweight,” she said. Her training, which she describes as a “street savvy, down and dirty, no rules self-defense program,” has imbued her with a sense of pride and power. “I have built my confidence, and I no longer worry about being attacked in ordinary places,” she said.

Leo's Sport Club (mpg format, NSFW)

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20051017-000003.xml

The Winning Edge

By: Peter Doskoch
Summary: We're primed to think that talent is the key to success. But what counts even more is a fusion of passion and perseverance. In a world of instant gratification, grit may yield the biggest payoff of all.

In the summer of 1994, in the tallest o Princeton University's ivory towers, Andre Wiles was completing one of the mos extraordinary odysseys in the history o math. For more than three decades, Wile had been obsessed with Fermat's Las Theorem, a seemingly simple problem tha had stumped mathematicians for 35 years. French mathematician Pierre d Fermat had noted that although there ar plenty of solutions to the equation 2 + Y2 = Z2 (for example, 32 + 42 = 52), there is no corresponding solution if the numbers are cubed instead of squared. In fact, Fermat scribbled in the margin of a book that he had “truly marvelous” proof that the equation Xn + Yn = Zn has no solution if n is any number greater than 2. Unfortunately, he never put his proof on paper.

Wiles was 10 years old when he encountered the theorem. “It looked so simple, and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn't solve it. I knew from that moment that I had to.” When classmates were flocking to rock concerts, he was studying how geniuses of prior eras approached the problem. He abandoned the quest after college in order to focus on his budding academic career, but his obsession was rekindled in 1986, when a fellow mathematician showed that proving a certain mathematical hypothesis — this one unsolved for a mere 30 years — would also prove Fermat's theorem. He set aside all but the few classes he was teaching — and revealed his quest to no one but his wife. To disguise his single-mindedness, he rationed the publication of previously completed work.

Despite long hours of focus — his only source of relaxation was playing with his two young children — the next few years produced little concrete progress. “I wasn't going to give up. It was just a question of which method would work,” says Wiles. In 1993, after seven straight years of intense work — more than 15,000 hours — Wiles stepped up to the podium at a conference in England and, over the course of three lectures, presented his completed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

A media frenzy followed. The shy mathematician found himself named one of People magazine's 25 Most Intriguing People of the Year, alongside Oprah and Princess Diana. But a handful of peer reviewers poring over the 200-page proof found several small errors. Wiles set to work addressing them. After a full year of frustrating struggle, Wiles had the insight that allowed him to fix them.

Wiles' intellect is inarguably impressive; one of his colleagues told The New York Times that only 1 in 1,000 professional mathematicians were capable of understanding Wiles' work. However, the Princeton professor himself attributes his accomplishment not to his brains but to his persistence. “For me, it was the main thing,” he says.

It is likely that somewhere, at this very moment, a parent or coach is declaring to a discouraged child that “quitters never win.” But perseverance has come to seem like quaint lip service against the tide of interest in talent and aptitude, flashier gifts that nature, or genes, seem to inarguably confer.

And yet grit may turn out to be at least as good a gauge of future success as talent itself. In a series of provocative new studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers find that the gritty are more likely to achieve success in school, work and other pursuits — perhaps because their passion and commitment help them endure the inevitable setbacks that occur in any long-term undertaking. In other words, it's not just talent that matters but also character. “Unless you're a genius, I don't think that you can ever do better than your competitors without a quality like grit,” says Martin E. P. Seligman, director of the university's Positive Psychology Center.

Indeed, experts often speak of the “10-year rule” — that it takes at least a decade of hard work or practice to become highly successful in most endeavors, from managing a hardware store to writing sitcoms — and the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is almost always an essential ingredient in major achievements. The good news: Perhaps even more than talent, grit can be cultivated and strengthened.

How Much Does Talent Count?
Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” opined Thomas Edison, a man almost as famous for lauding perspiration as he is for inventing the lightbulb. If effort is the bedrock of success, what role do intelligence and other abilities play? “IQ counts for different amounts depending on the task and situation,” emphasizes intelligence expert Robert Sternberg, dean of arts and sciences at Tufts University.

Manly large-scale analyses, however, suggest that a mere 25 percent of the differences between individuals in job performance — and a third of the difference in grade point average — can be attributed to IQ (personality factors, creativity and luck are said to contribute to the other 75 percent). Angela Duckworth, a graduate student at Penn who, together with Seligman, has conducted several key studies on grit, argues that the precise number isn't as important as knowing that intelligence accounts for only a fraction of success.

If 25 percent seems surprisingly low, that's partly because the hard work and determination that go into accomplishing Something Important are overshadowed by those rare but delightful lightning strikes of inspiration, mythologized as the visit of the Muse. “Unfortunately, no one comes in my window and whispers poems to me,” laments David Baker, director of creative writing at Denison University and author of seven books of poetry, including Midwest Eclogue. “Poets work hard. I may work on a single poem for weeks or months and write 60 or 70 drafts — only to decide that draft 22 was the good one.”

Such persistence is vital even for an indisputable genius. Mozart's diaries, for example, contain an oft-cited passage in which the composer reports that an entire symphony appeared, supposedly intact, in his head. “But no one ever quotes the next paragraph, where he talks about how he refined the work for months,” notes Jonathan Plucker, an educational psychologist at Indiana University.

Angela Duckworth had studied neurobiology in college and eventually went on to teach, including a stint at a school for low-income children. “It became pretty obvious to me that IQ didn't explain why so many of the kids had reading skills that were four grade levels below their average,” she says. “The failure of kids to reach their potential was almost hitting me over the head.” Already in her 30s and with a young child, Duckworth was intrigued enough to return to school for a Ph.D.

She approached Seligman, best known for his groundbreaking work on optimism, and together, they began identifying high achievers in various fields, interviewing them and describing the characteristics that distinguished them.

“There were certainly a fair number of people who were brilliant, ambitious and persevering,” Duckworth reports. “But there were also a lot who were not a genius in any way but were really tenacious.” They began referring to this tenacity as grit — the determination to accomplish an ambitious, long-term goal despite the inevitable obstacles. Grit clearly resides in the same psychological neighborhood as motivation and self-discipline, but it's on a distinct property — and no one had ever knocked on its front door before.

Altogether Different
Not that researchers have ignored it altogether. Louis Terman, the legendary psychologist who followed a group of gifted boys from childhood to middle age, reported that “persistence in the accomplishment of ends” was one of the factors that distinguished the most successful men from the least successful. And in the most-cited paper in the giftedness literature, University of Connecticut psychologist Joseph Renzulli, director of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented, argued that “task commitment” — perseverance, endurance and hard work — is one of the three essential components of giftedness (along with ability and creativity). Indeed, Renzulli says, the evidence that these nonintellectual factors are critical to giftedness is “nothing short of overwhelming.”

For the 95 percent of humanity that isn't recognized as gifted, Duckworth and Seligman have an egalitarian finding: Grit has value for people at all levels of ability.

In fact, their initial studies show that grit and intelligence are completely independent traits. Both enhance the likelihood of success, but the brightest among us are no more likely than the dimmest to be gritty. “I would be surprised if grit only matters for the upper echelons,” Duckworth says. “One could argue that if you don't have a lot of raw ability, it's doubly important to be focused, hardworking and able to bounce back from setbacks.”

The Penn researchers have already found that grit is valuable in a variety of real-world academic settings — such as middle school spelling bees. And they're looking at its real-world value among real estate agents and Wharton Business School grads.

They've proved that grit is the premier attribute for surviving the grueling first summer of training at West Point (“Beast Barracks”), when as many as 5 percent of new cadets typically drop out. “West Point costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per student, so the military has a keen interest in predicting attrition,” Duckworth explains. A grit questionnaire administered to all 1,223 cadets entering the class of 2008 showed that grit is the single best yardstick for predicting who will survive the academy's punishing first weeks. It bested such highly touted measures as high school class rank, SAT scores, athletic experience and faculty appraisal scores. “Sticking with West Point doesn't have as much to do with how smart you are as your character does,” Duckworth concludes.

The Power of Passion
Certainly character was a tremendous asset to Andrew Wiles, who says he has a “single-mindedness that I don't see in most other people.” But he also had “a special passion” for Fermat's Last Theorem. It is this sort of fervor and fascination that might just be the cornerstone of grit.

The idea that passion fuels perseverance has crucial implications: If grit — and hence high achievement — hinges on passion, then it's especially important for parents to expose their children to the broadest possible range of academic, artistic and athletic activities, to maximize the chances that something will capture the child's imagination. Helping children find their passion may turn out to be more important than addressing their academic weaknesses.

Renzulli points to his own son as Exhibit A. From early childhood, the boy was, in his father's words, “an electrical, mechanical and scientific genius.” He routinely received As in science and math — but Cs in English and history. “He would bring home his report card and his mother would go ballistic,” Renzulli recalls. But convinced that his son's love of science was the key to his future success, Renzulli wasn't concerned. “I'd take him for a car ride, get some ice cream and say, 'I'm as happy as a lark that you are doing what you're doing. And I don't care about those Cs.'” The younger Renzulli, now in his 30s, has become a highly successful researcher.

Although extremely persistent people are usually passionate about their work, that doesn't mean that the passion always comes first. Perseverance, notes Duckworth, can itself foster passion. Often the most fascinating aspects of a topic (particularly a highly complex one) become apparent only after deep immersion, to a level “where you understand it and are enlivened by it.”

Such is the case with Duckworth herself, who says that she decided on graduate school after a string of job stints in neuroscience research, management consulting and teaching spawned a desire to stick with one thing long enough to become an expert in it. “I decided to be persevering,” she says. Although she had always been interested in education and achievement, her passion for exploring grit fully emerged only after she had been pursuing it for a while.

For others, persistence may grow from a desire to test one's limits, to see how far one can go — sometimes literally. Think of endurance athletes, for whom challenge isn't merely an obstacle to accomplishing something but often the spur to action in the first place. Duckworth points to athletes who spend months or years training for a marathon not because they love the act of running long distances but because they want the personal satisfaction or public glory of having run a marathon.

Lance Armstrong entered his first distance running race at the age of 10, because he was determined to find something at which he could succeed. He won, and within three years he was winning swim meets and triathlons too — anything that tested his mettle. “If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it,” he wrote in his autobiography It's Not About the Bike.

No less remarkable in his perseverance is Chinh Chu, who has engineered some of the largest private equity deals in history. During the 1980s, Chu worked his way through college by selling books door to door, becoming his company's top salesman in a job where 60 percent of sales come after the customer has said “no” and a third come after three “no's.”

In his final year of college, Chu used his persistence to land a job on Wall Street, getting his foot in the door by driving eight hours through a snowstorm in order to crash a cocktail reception hosted by Salomon Brothers. As Chu and his friend were about to be kicked out, a recruiter, impressed by their verve, offered Chu an interview. More recently, as senior managing director of the Blackstone Group, Chu has led the grueling negotiations for complex multibillion-dollar deals that literally took years to structure and complete.

Perseverance, he insists, “is purely a state of mind” that depends on one's happiness and level of discomfort. But because people are influenced by their environment, a person's grit may vary as circumstances change. Enduring the rigors of selling books door to door is a lot easier for someone hungry to prove themselves. “I don't think I'd make it if you sent me out today to sell books door to door,” he offers. Diligence has not deserted him; it's just moved to a fancier address.

Also in the Mix
Passion may be the linchpin of grit, but it's not the only element. Ambition is right on its heels. For some of us, vowing to organize our closet next weekend may represent the height of our ambition. Truly gritty people, however, tend to set especially challenging long-term goals; one of Duckworth's recent students confidently stated that he planned to become a U.S. Senator.

Self-discipline is probably also an important part of grit, and studies have shown that gritty people tend to be highly self- disciplined. But whereas perseverance implies the ability to keep doing something, self-discipline primarily implies the ability to refrain from doing something — to stop drinking, goofing off or straying from one's diet. It doesn't embrace the ambition and zest needed to tackle a challenging goal. “Self-discipline is probably necessary for grit,” Duckworth says, “but it's not sufficient.”

Then there's optimism, a trait that Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis finds is extremely common among high achievers. “It helps them hang in there in times when they have to overcome all of these obstacles,” he observes. “They just really believe in the end that they're going to win, and until they do, they're just going to keep on pushing, keep on making the phone calls, writing the letters, whatever they have to do.”

It's this optimism, most likely, that helped Chester Carlson convince someone that the technology he had invented was worthwhile, even after more than 20 companies and the National Inventors Council rejected his work. Carlson called his new process electrophotography; today it's known as photocopying.

Grit at Home
Grit gets right into bed with you, and that may be one of the secrets of successful marriages. During the 1950s, demographer Paul Glick found that high school dropouts were more likely than graduates to be divorced, leading to speculation that people who give up on some hard things, like finishing school, are also unlikely to persevere in other matters, such as marriage.

Although plausible explanations have been proposed for the Glick Effect, the issue remains unresolved. The Penn researchers have not yet examined whether marital status or marital duration is associated with grit, although Duckworth confides they've got something in the works. It seems reasonable that people who are highly persistent in their work would also be adept at overcoming obstacles in their marriage, but it's possible that some highly driven, gritty individuals might be so focused on their career that personal relationships actually suffer.

Grit, most likely, can be taught, or at least encouraged. But one impediment to growing grit may be — surprisingly — the seemingly innocent act of parents praising a child's intelligence. In one fascinating series of studies, Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues showed that children who were praised for their intelligence cared more about their grades than about learning during subsequent tasks. And after experiencing a failure, these children were less persistent than their peers who had been praised for their effort. “When you praise kids' intelligence and then they fail, they think they're not smart anymore, and they lose interest in their work,” Dweck explains. “In contrast, kids praised for effort show no impairment and often are energized in the face of difficulty.”

In another study, seventh graders were categorized according to whether they felt that intelligence is fixed or malleable. Students who viewed intelligence as something that can be cultivated earned progressively higher grades during the next two years, whereas those who had a fixed view of intelligence did not improve. “When you have a malleable view of intelligence, you believe in learning and you believe in effort,” Dweck says. “When you have the fixed view, you don't.”

Based on these findings, Dweck and colleagues designed a program (the Brainology Workshop) that explains to kids that learning creates new neuronal connections in the brain and that they themselves can foster this process. When seventh graders whose grades had been declining took the workshop, their marks shot right back up. Among a control group that received only the study skills, grades continued to fall. The program is currently being tested in New York City schools.

The data demonstrate the need for parents and teachers to praise effort rather than ability. But it also explains why so many prodigies fail to flourish as adults: The adoration showered upon them in childhood rests on their remarkable abilities rather than on their hard work.

The need for grit is generally hidden from the young until they head off to college or enter the workforce. That's when it first becomes necessary to chart one's own course and set one's own goals. Before then, achievement hinges largely on doing your homework — and that's chosen by others and assigned to you. Nonetheless, says Duckworth, perseverance clearly matters for kids. Gritty youngsters get better grades than their peers. And, as a study of participants in this year's National Spelling Bee revealed, kids who ranked high in grit were more likely to reach the final round of the competition, for the simple reason that they had worked harder than their rivals to prepare for the event.

Global Grit
Some argue that grit is engrained in the American psyche. In his recent book The Hypomanic Edge, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist John Gartner observes that the U.S. and other countries founded by immigrants tend to have high rates of people with mild mania. These folks tend to be energetic risk takers — precisely the type of person likely to undertake a bold endeavor like immigration. Moreover, such people “are able to persist when others might get depressed,” notes U.C. Davis psychologist Dean Keith Simonton.

Today the Pacific Rim countries may best exemplify grit. Think of Japan's astounding rebirth following its defeat in World War II, transforming itself from a near-feudal empire to a modernized republic and economic powerhouse. Or the long hours and Spartan conditions that welcome laborers in China's many factories. The writings of Confucius teach that people can reach perfection through practice and effort. Many Chinese folktales focus on feats of persistence — for example, a boy who grew up in such poverty that he couldn't afford oil for his lamp but who nonetheless worked very hard and succeeded in becoming a government official.

Parental expectations are uniformly high in Asian cultures: Even though children in Japan outperform American children on most educational measures, their parents tend to say, “My kids can do better.” By contrast, a large proportion of American parents report that they are satisfied with their kids' academic performance, lackluster though it may be by international standards.

Of course, hard work isn't the same as grit, and perseverance in response to parental obligations or social norms doesn't come close to suggesting the lit-from-within passion that drives most innovators. But external motivators like family expectations and internal motivators like passion often work together, in symbiosis. “It's possible,” says Duckworth, “to do something because your parents say you should do it but then gradually learn to love it.”

When giftedness expert Ellen Winner of Boston College visited China in the late 1980s, she was “absolutely astonished” by an after-school program in which first graders were required to choose an art form such as calligraphy or traditional ink and brush drawing — and they were to continue practicing it for six years. “I asked a teacher, 'What happens if a child changes his mind or says that he didn't choose the right thing?' She looked at me like I was crazy and said, 'That never happens.'”

At first Winner was horrified that children were expected to stick with something that had been thrust upon them at such an early age: “It was like an arranged marriage. But then I thought, 'There's something really great about this, because these kids are really gaining mastery. And when they see that they're becoming good, they develop motivation.'”

In a global marketplace where innovation is more critical to viability than ever before, there's an urgency to identifying and, eventually, cultivating, the elements of success. Duckworth, Dweck and a host of others are demonstrating that grit is an important contributor.

Another thing they know: This isn't your grandmother's view of grit. The quality Duckworth finds so intriguing has little to do with clenched teeth. Rather, it's a force of motivation so luminous that, as mathematician Andrew Wiles found, it constantly renews itself.

Despite instant messaging, speed dating and immediate gratification, the idea that perseverance pays off big-time is slowly gathering steam. It augurs a far more democratic vision than a culture of achievement that recognizes only talent. No wonder grit is on its way to becoming The Next Big Thing.

Peter Doskoch is a science writer based in New Jersey, and he is the former executive editor of Psychology Today.

[This article has a number of inaccuracies and exaggerations. For example, the article suggests that workouts are too strenuous and that crossfit enthusiasts are encouraged to value speed and weight over correct form. However, if you read the crossfit.com site, you will find that newbies are encouraged to adjust the workout-of-the-day (aka "WOD") to suit their level of fitness, and to always perform the exercises with correct form. Plus the website publishes an extensive video archive demonstrating how to do each exercise with proper form:

http://www.crossfit.com/cf-info/excercise.html

If you adjust the workout to your fitness level, the risk of rhabdomyolysis is quite low. I like the crossfit philosophy, and I recommend that anyone interested in functional fitness check them out.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/fashion/thursdaystyles/22Fitness.html?pagewanted=print

December 22, 2005
Physical Culture
Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You

By STEPHANIE COOPERMAN
WHILE many gymgoers complain that they might not survive a tough workout, Brian Anderson can speak from experience. For his first CrossFit session, he swung a 44-pound steel ball with a handle over his head and between his legs. The aim was to do 50 quick repetitions, rest and repeat. After 30 minutes, Mr. Anderson, a 38-year-old member of the special weapons and tactics team in the sheriff's office in Tacoma, Wash., left the gym with his muscles sapped and back pain so excruciating that he had to lie in the driveway to collect himself.

That night he went to the emergency room, where doctors told him he had rhabdomyolysis, which is caused when muscle fiber breaks down and is released into the bloodstream, poisoning the kidneys. He spent six days in intensive care.

Yet six months later Mr. Anderson, a former Army Ranger, was back in the gym, performing the very exercises that nearly killed him. “I see pushing my body to the point where the muscles destroy themselves as a huge benefit of CrossFit,” he said.

In the last year this controversial exercise program has attracted a growing following of thousands nationwide, who log on to CrossFit.com for a daily workout, said its founder, Greg Glassman. Participants skip StairMasters and weight machines. Instead they do high-intensity workouts that mix gymnastics, track and field skills and bodybuilding, resting very little between movements.

The emphasis is on speed and weight hoisted, not technique. And the importance placed on quantifiable results has attracted hard-charging people like hedge fund managers, former Olympians and scientists. But some exercise experts are troubled by the lack of guidance for beginners, who may dive into stressful workouts as Mr. Anderson did. (He had not worked out regularly for two years.) “There's no way inexperienced people doing this are not going to hurt themselves,” said Wayne Winnick, a sports medicine specialist in private practice in Manhattan, who also works for the New York City Marathon.

Other critics say that even fit people risk injury if they exercise strenuously and too quickly to give form its due, as CrossFit participants often do. For people who like to push the limits of fitness and strength – there are many police officers, firefighters and military personnel in the ranks of CrossFit athletes – the risks are worth it, because they consider it the most challenging workout around.

The short grueling sessions aren't for the weekend gym warrior. The three-days-on, one-day-rest schedule includes workouts like “Cindy”: 20 minutes of as many repetitions as you can of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats. “Fight Gone Bad” entails rotating through five exercises, including throwing a 20-pound ball at a target 10 feet away. And only veteran CrossFit devotees even attempt, and few complete, “Murph,” a timed mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and then a second mile run. (A weighted vest is optional.)

Mr. Glassman, CrossFit's founder, does not discount his regimen's risks, even to those who are in shape and take the time to warm up their bodies before a session.

“It can kill you,” he said. “I've always been completely honest about that.”

But CrossFitters revel in the challenge. A common axiom among practitioners is “I met Pukey,” meaning they worked out so hard they vomited. Some even own T-shirts emblazoned with a clown, Pukey. CrossFit's other mascot is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, whose kidneys have spilled onto the floor presumably due to rhabdomyolysis.

Mr. Glassman, 49, a former gymnast from Santa Cruz, Calif., walks with a slight limp because of a knee injury, and at 5-foot-7 and 185 pounds admits he should lose weight. He began developing CrossFit more than two decades ago, but he says that he spends so much time running the business now that he no longer regularly does the routines. At first his program was a hard sell to clients who weren't keen to climb ropes or grapple with gymnastic rings.

Then in 2001 he launched CrossFit.com and began publishing a monthly journal and holding seminars at his California gym. People from around the world have come to learn Mr. Glassman's techniques. Today CrossFit has more than 50 affiliates in 21 states and 5 countries, Mr. Glassman said. And CrossFit.com has 25,000 unique visitors a week, according to WebSideStory, a Web analytics company in Seattle.

Mr. Glassman's followers call him Coach and share a cultlike devotion to his theories.

“We are all drinking the Kool-Aid,” said Eugene Allen, another Tacoma SWAT team member who introduced Mr. Anderson to CrossFit last summer. “It's hard not to catch Coach's enthusiasm.”

Devotees say CrossFit has enabled them to challenge their bodies in ways they never thought possible. Eva Twardokens, 40, an Olympic alpine skier in the 1992 and 1994 Games, said years of CrossFit training have enabled her to bench-press 155 pounds, 20 more than she could when she was training for the Olympics.

Tariq Kassum, 31, a research analyst in New York, found both the workout community and the variety of difficult exercises he was looking for. Online, where some participants record their workout progress, people cheered him on as his upper-body strength increased. When he started CrossFit, Mr. Kassum was unable to do a handstand, but after a year with the program he can do push-ups from that position. CrossFit exercises can be made more or less intense based on a person's abilities, but the workouts are the same for everyone, from marines to senior citizens. And some critics say that is a big part of what's wrong.

“My concern is that one cookie-cutter program doesn't apply to everyone,” said Fabio Comana, an exercise physiologist at the American Council on Exercise. He said people in their 60's who have osteoporosis, for example, may not be able to do an overhead press, pushing a barbell over one's head.

CrossFit enthusiasts are also criticized for being cavalier about the injuries they sustain, including chronic soreness, pulled muscles and even some separated shoulders. Norma Loehr, 37, a vice president for a financial services company in New York, was sidelined for a week after she strained her back doing “Three Bars of Death,” 10 sets of 3 lifts using barbells that weigh up to one and a half times as much as the person using them. She realized the barbells were too heavy, but she didn't want to waste the seconds it would have taken to change plates.

Mr. Glassman said that he has never been sued by an injured client and that paramedics have never had to treat one of his clients in his gym. But he acknowledged that as many as six CrossFit participants have suffered rhabdomyolysis, which often sets in more than a day after excessive exercise.

After they complete the workout of the day, hundreds of people post their times and the amount they have lifted on the Web site, making CrossFit a competitive online sport.

“When I first started the program, I could barely do a pull-up, so I was embarrassed to post,” Mr. Kassum said. “Now that I can do 20 or 30, I'm on there every day. People on there are animals.”

Those people include Kelly Moore, a 42-year-old Wisconsin police dispatcher and former powerlifter who is 5 feet tall and 117 pounds and has eight-pack abs. Her self-reported statistics have become the stuff of legend on CrossFit.com, inspiring both praise (“Pull-ups with a broken hand? You rock!”) and amazement that she beats most men on the site. (“I'll be chasing Kelly until I die. At this rate, literally.”)

CrossFit has an especially large number of police, firefighter and military participants. Members of Navy Seals, Air Force Pararescue and Special Forces groups also do workouts. And though it is not recognized as an official military regimen, CrossFit has drawn the attention of people in charge of military preparation. Capt. Timothy Joyce teaches CrossFit to marines in the Fleet Support Division in Barstow, Calif. And Capt. J. T. Williams, the chief standards officer at the Canadian Infantry School, where officers are trained, helped run a six-week trial where half of the participants followed the school's fitness program and half did CrossFit workouts. He declared CrossFit “very effective.”

In recent months a group of New York CrossFit athletes have tried unsuccessfully to find a home gym. Joshua Newman, the group's organizer, said gym managers expressed concerns that they took up too much space, or even that their fast and furious pull-ups would break the apparatus.

“They used too many pieces of equipment at one time, and we got a lot of complaints from trainers who didn't like being on the floor with them,” said Eric Slayton, the owner of New York Underground Fitness, a Midtown gym that Crossfit New York called home for a few weeks. “They put too much emphasis on getting things done in a certain amount of time and not enough on form.”

But for Mr. Glassman, dismissals of his extreme workouts merely help him weed out people he considers weak-willed. “If you find the notion of falling off the rings and breaking your neck so foreign to you, then we don't want you in our ranks,” he said.

http://www.raysat.com/products/

ROLLING HOTSPOTS. Satellite TV's rebuttal to cable in the car is: “Why rely on external WiFi hotspots when you can be one?” Samer Salameh, president and CEO of RaySat Inc. (www.raysat.com; Vienna, VA) says his company's vehicle-mounted satellite antennas can transform cars into “rolling hotspots,” capable of receiving both real-time satellite TV broadcasts and broadband Internet access. RaySat's antennas use essentially the same phased-array technology found in the huge domes that grace the tops of many RVs, but its debut model, SpeedRay 3000, is only 5-in. thick and can be mounted to the roof rails of an SUV or minivan. This is hardly an earthshaking achievement since competitors like KVH Industries, Inc. (www.kvh.com; Middletown, RI) already sell similarly sized units. What is noteworthy is that the SpeedRay will include a transmitter for real-time satellite-linked Internet sessions (with download speeds of 2mbps and upload speeds up to 128 mbps) linked to a WiFi node that broadcasts the satellite connection throughout the car. Samer explains that RaySat achieves this first by converting one of the four moving panels sealed inside the antenna that track and receive satellite signals into a transmitter. Priced at $3,495 plus monthly satellite subscription fees, the SpeedRay will occupy a specialty niche inhabited by those who can't bear the information disconnect a long drive represents. But Samer is looking ahead to smaller and cheaper units. The company has already developed a prototype for a sleek 2-in. thick antenna dubbed StealthRay that it plans to put in production in 2006. “In 2007 I want to have a sub-1 in. antenna that can be installed by the OEM in the factory,” says Samer, who reckons that a factory-installed unit could go for $2,000 or less and sell well over a million copies a year. But technological hurdles may slow that plan, because to achieve a thinner antenna the complex belt and gear system that now positions the tracking panels must be replaced by a solid-state setup that tracks satellite signals electromagnetically. RaySat has been able to eliminate some mechanical parts in the StealthRay prototype, but Samer acknowledges, “We need to have a breakthrough to get to 1 in.” (Delphi is also working on satellite antennas for the car. See: http://www.autofieldguide.com/articles/030403.html.)

I hope you've all been good, cause Santa's not just giving out coal this year:

Hey — what do you think of the lumber link system?

Via : Russian Parkour video.

I, for one, am appalled at the price gouging engaged in by the NYC transit workers. How dare they take advantage of the shortage of transportation alternatives in NYC to jack up prices for everyone else?