What is WODDITY? Live Streaming 28 Sanctionals.

WODDITY wasn't designed to replace Morning Chalk Up, BoxRox, The Barbell Spin, Talking Elite Fitness, or the Buttery Bros. But we are live streaming it ALL.

Wednesday, November 27th, 2019

The theme of today’s episode is pivoting. You may have noticed there was no podcast episode on Tuesday. That’s because I’m a believer in pivoting. Let me catch you up on what has been happening with WODDITY, and myself, over the past four months.

What is WODDITY?

It all starts with CrossFit’s unfortunate purging of their media staff. The organization, some could say sport and athletic phenomenon, had worked so tirelessly throughout its history to carefully curate its own narrative, telling and promoting the stories it wanted to share while casting shadows on those it didn’t. In many ways, CrossFit had built a reputation as a somewhat litigious company which would protect its reputation at all costs. This built a tight-lipped culture which largely limited outside companies from providing significant contributions of media and news without also being forced to tiptoe in a delicate balance of independent reporting and adherence to CrossFit’s carefully painted image. The changes to their media staff, while devastating to a tremendous number of jobs and people we’ve all grown to love watching and listening to, meant the organization responsible for the fitness values and the sport we have all fallen in love with, was potentially opening up to allow more people, outside people, and people with a greater expertise to begin to tell CrossFit’s story. And I wanted to be a part of that.

So, I started WODDITY. The idea wasn’t ever to come in and try to compete with a newsletter like Morning Chalk Up. I never wanted to replace news sites like The Barbell Spin or BoxRox. I didn’t ever think I could capture the star power guests of Marston Sawyer and Heber Cannon as the Buttery Bros or the Talking Elite Fitness friends of Sean Woodland and Tommy Marquez. I just wanted to built tools and resources for everyone in this community and fill whatever gaps would, should, or could remain.

The first step was this podcast. It’s a quick, digestible flyby of CrossFit headlines and every once in a while you have to deal with one of my deep dives, like this one, and my foray into This is Us’s CrossFit Toby with Jessica Danger at Morning Chalk Up. The second step was live streams and video analysis of the CrossFit Open, which we delivered with mixed results. So I doubled down on it and was able to build a much better quality for a test run doing a live stream broadcast of a Sanctional last weekend, with the Filthy150.

The third step was supposed to be an important one: going to and reporting live from every north American Sanctional of the 2020 season. And that’s where we are pivoting right now. If my goal for the company is to fill the most valid and needed voids in your life as a fan of and participant in CrossFit, you don’t need another social media warrior and sideline reporter. You need good, timely, and valuable analysis and event live streams. So, that’s what we’re doing. Of the 28 Sanctionals scheduled for the 2020 CrossFit Games season (27 unless Cape Town can find a viable venue), only eight of them are in North America. 100% of them, except possibly those run by Loud and Live Sports, will have their own live streams, if they have live streams, in languages like Mandarin, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German...all possibly on different platforms and with different levels of quality from announcers.

WODDITY’s CrossFit Live Streams

WODDITY will be closing that hole. I will be running live streams of every 2020 Sanctional event with a standing stream with live analysis and commentary, in english, on one single YouTube channel you can subscribe to for those streams.

You can go to my show notes at WODDITY.com for a link to our YouTube channel and subscribe for alerts. Next up will be a doozy, with the Pandaland CrossFit Challenge on December 7th and 8th, in a difficult time zone, and overdubbing the broadcast in english.

The future of WODDITY is very bright, with some incredible new and absolutely disruptive tools and resources, videos, series, books, games, and more on their way.

And that’s it for news about...well, not CrossFit, but about WODDITY, on Wednesday, November 27th. My name is Ben Garves. Thanks for listening and we will chat tomorrow, getting back to our good old CrossFit headlines.