Great article on the CrossFit Games

The whole thing is good.

Some of my favourite lines:

Crossfit is a cult, or a fitness movement, and possibly a sport. It could be all three, or if you throw in a lifestyle, all four.
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It is all done very quickly, and with great intensity, and if you are not prepared, it will kindly help you remember what you had for lunch by forcibly reintroducing it to you. If that doesn't happen, then you will likely end up on the floor praying for oxygen.
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It looks like the setting for Of Mice and Men, but with an encampment of tents and RVs surrounding it. It's beautiful, really, as long as you're not running 7.1 km across its most hill-acious parts. Hey, wouldn't that be fun to make people do? Crossfit's mysterious HQ thought so.
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...then a good bleeding, a dose of water torture, some strappado, and whatever other torture you'd like to throw into the sequence. The competitors would have eaten it up happily, and the 3,000 plus who showed up to drink the $3 beer and enjoy what has become, in only its third year, the surprisingly entertaining mutant hybrid of the World's Strongest Man and the old Survival of the Fittest.
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Andy Petranek, the oldest male competitor at 42, a former Marine, and owner of a Crossfit Affiliate in Los Angeles. He's in unreal shape, can run for days, and he didn't make the cut for the final event of day one, the horrible turning point in the day when the spectacle of struggle turned into outright sado-masochism.
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I asked him if he was happy with the results as the last round of the day began and the remaining competitors balled through the fifth and final round of punishment. He laughed, and said "Yeah, I am. Being cut means I don't have to go through the rest of it."