Best Defense

Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

CrossFit: An update

Guest columnist Jim Gourley responds to a letter alleging an inaccuracy in his post on CrossFit and the U.S. military.

crossfit
crossfit

Tom: A guy apparently with CrossFit wrote in complaining about this item, alleging an inaccuracy. So I asked the author of the item, Jim Gourley, about it. He responds:

Tom: A guy apparently with CrossFit wrote in complaining about this item, alleging an inaccuracy. So I asked the author of the item, Jim Gourley, about it. He responds:

“Personnel from CrossFit headquarters contacted Foreign Policy to challenge the statement that the USUHS paper reflected a negative outlook on CrossFit from the Army. A background review of the paper’s authors found that there was one civilian employee from the Air Force and Navy, respectively, one civilian USUHS instructor, an Army Colonel teaching at USUHS, and two other Army civilian employees. The Marines did not send a representative. It is therefore more accurate to say that all other services have given extreme conditioning programs a cooler reception than the Marines. Because the Army contributed the majority of the paper’s authors and published papers of similar negative outlook in the Army Medical Department Journal, it is my assessment that it is the organization that has taken the most pessimistic outlook on “extreme conditioning programs,” which include, but are not limited to, CrossFit.”

via CrossfitPaleoDietFitnessClasses/flickr

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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