Right after the BarBend. [laughs] Myself and Chase Ingraham…It was Chase’s brainchild first. He hit me up on New Year’s Eve this last year, and he’s like, “Dude, I want to start a podcast. I’m scared shitless, but it would be really fun to do. My idea’s talking about CrossFit programming.”
I’m like, “Dude, that’s awesome.” He’s like, “Hey, would you come on the show with me? The first one? We’ll talk about the Masters programming.” I’m like, “Yeah, all right. That sounds good.” Me and Chase have had a long history anyway with our commentary stuff that we do.
We’ve done a lot of the off-season, big events. We’ve done Dubai. We’ve done Wodapalooza. We’ve done Granite Games. We’ve done all the big ones, East Coast Championship, all that kind of stuff. We have a natural banter with ourselves.
We have a good flow, a real conversational…My work with him, it’s different than when I work with Sean Woodland. The tempos are different, but when I’m with Chase, we definitely have a good time. It ends up being a here’s two dudes hanging out with a beer just talking about whatever we’re talking about, whether we’re at a competition or we’re doing this.
We had a really good time the first time and then COVID hit. Was it COVID first? It was COVID first. We were talking about, like what should people be doing when they’re at home? What workout should they be doing? How should they be training? What should they be doing? What are gyms doing?
He’s like, “Hey, would you be on the show with me again?” I’m like, “Yeah, totally. Anytime, just let me know.” After that one, he was like, “Hey, how about just being my normal co-host, and we’ll just do it whenever we do it, but it’ll be me and you.” I’m like, “Yeah, man. Are you kidding me?”
It’s weird because I would consider him one of my best friends, even though we are literally states apart from each other. I talk to him probably more than most people that I talk to because we’re doing the podcast so much, always talking about different ideas and what we want to do. We have a really cool connection.
Basically, what the gist of the podcast is — it’s called Get With The Programming — we analyze programming from all types of different events. The idea to start off with was we wanted to look at the Games. Our first big episode were we went back to every single CrossFit Games, looked at every single event, piece by piece.
How they turned out, how the results were finishing and then, at the end of that, would we have made any changes? What did we like about it? What did we not like about? We’re programming geeks. We get into the numbers, and how it looks. What’s the intent supposed to be? Did it happen right? How many pushes and pulls did you have and all these other kind of stuff.
At the end of that, we pull up the CrossFit level two checklist of programming. You can chart every single pro, every single event, every single workout, and see — did you have a well rounded event? We use that as well as the general definitions of CrossFit to find are we truly finding the fittest by our definition? It’s been really fun to do that.
We just started a new one. One of the coolest ones we did is we had Dave Castro on for 2020. We didn’t do the analyzing while we had him on the show, necessarily, but we had him talk about how he came up with them. That’s something that a lot of people…It’s good for them to hear, because for the most part, when people do workouts, it’s just throwing shit together.
It’s like, “Oh, this is hard.” Obviously it’s a good workout. “Well, not that.” Making something that hard is not difficult. Anybody can do that. What’s the intent behind it? What are you trying to achieve with it? The first person that I ever heard say this was Dave. He feels it says, “Creative outlet.” He sees it as a painter or a sculpture and a sculptor.
That’s the same thing to me and Chase too. We come up with an idea. We have, whatever our workout, we know what that ball of clay is supposed to look like. You sit there and massage it. You build it into this little thing. When you’re done, you feel like here it is. I’m presenting this whatever.
Sometimes in your mind it works out well. It was cool to hear Dave talk about which ones worked out the way he wanted, which ones didn’t work out the way he wanted. After seeing it being put to the test, would he have changed anything? How did he get to the numbers that he got to? How he went through all the tests [indecipherable 7:38] , that was really, really cool.
We went back. We analyzed all the Games. We just started. The Open is going to be coming up to the normal time. We’re analyzing the open competitions now as well and looking at the events.
What are they doing? Is it a good test? Is it doing what it’s supposed to be doing? If it’s a qualifier, trying to find the fittest or whatever that might be. It’s been super fun. We throw a lot of our goofiness in there as well.
We do these things called rush moments. We’ll take each year. What are our four memories or four big things that we remember from that time? Whether it was at Games or in the Open, and sometimes a personal story; sometimes there are event competition type stories. Sometimes there are certain things we did in our gym. Whichever.
It’s been fun, and we’re getting a good group of people that are starting to listen to it. It’s a place in the CrossFit space that it hasn’t been looked at. We aren’t a news source but we want to find our spot.
We’re playing with the numbers man, nerd now. Drink some coffee or drinking some beer. Whatever it is, whatever time of the day is it we’re doing it, and having a good time with it.