The rise and fall of CrossFits cult-like founder: Cocaine, $200k phone bills and private jet fast food detours

In the late 2010s, Greg Glassman’s private plane was less than an hour from Denver when he decided he couldn’t wait that long for Chick-fil-A.The CrossFit founder instructed his pilot to land in Grand Junction and arranged for two chauffeured Chevy Suburbans to meet him and his entourage at the airport.According to Jeffrey Cain, then the company’s CEO, they drove to the fast-food restaurant, picked up their order and returned to the plane to finish the flight.

Cain put the cost of the detour at more than $5,000.“That anecdote is entirely typical of Glassman and his spending habits,” said Calum Marsh, whose new book, “The Glass Box: The Shocking True Story of How CrossFit Broke the Rules, Made Millions, and Changed Fitness Forever” (HarperOne, out Oct.27), recounts the excursion.

“If he got a sudden hankering for fast food mid-trip, they’d land the plane and get some.”Marsh tracks Glassman’s journey from a broke California trainer to the owner of a fitness company that generated an estimated $100 million in annual revenue by 2015.But the edgy charisma that helped Glassman, now 70, build a well-muscled empire was ultimately his downfall.

When Glassman arrived in Santa Cruz in 1995, he was a college gymnast-turned-college dropout who didn’t own a car or a house.He shared a room with his young son in a friend’s house and started training local police officers.

His workouts could seem alarming to anyone accustomed to doing just a few curls and heading for the showers.Glassman mixed demanding weightlifting with gymnastics, sending clients outside to do lunges across the parking lot and sometimes leaving them vomiting into a trash can.

He also timed them, turning exercise into a competition.Clients could watch their scores improve, or discover that someone they thought they could easily beat was considerably fitter.“It is our observation that men will die for points,” Glassman later wrote.

Keeping score, he explained, could “motivate u...