The Performance Menu is Dead. Long Live the Performance Menu!
I found the CrossFit website before I ever stepped my foot into a CrossFit gym or wrote my sole article for the CrossFit Journal or attended a seminar or got yelled at by a swole athlete when I made the mistake of doing farmer’s walks in the area where you’re supposed to do farmer’s walk, which just so happened to be between where she was stationed and where she’d placed her phone to film herself doing her workout.
Back then the community seemed so much smaller, and a skeptic like me who was clearly a beginner but was still always asking questions really stood out. I wanted to dig deeper, to see the studies, to get answers when I tested things out for a while and they didn’t work as planned. Sometimes questions weren’t exactly welcome, or they were meant to be sacrificed on the altar of tradition, or respecting authority, or something—which is why you had full gyms of people following the Zone diet and not getting results, or getting unnecessary colonics because a coach said so, or being convinced that walking barefoot sucks up electrons from the earth into your body, or that rubbing castor oil on the outside of your skin somehow seeps into your internal organs and cures your liver. Or something.
I was attracted to the Performance Menu because I saw it as CrossFit-esque, but for smart people—former CrossFitters who often had moved onto Olympic weightlifting or another sport, or even current CrossFitters who wanted to exercise in a way that was customized for their experience and goals, and with smart progressions and recovery, rather than just swallowing whatever came up on a website. People who were interested in the scientific research Robb Wolf cited, and who wanted to experiment with their diets and supplements beyond following Zone ratios because somebody said so.
The Performance Menu has never been perfect. Tempers have flared in the now-defunct forum, magazine deadlines have been missed (I never cried over this, but have wanted to), and every once in a blue moon (gasp!) mistakes have even been published. (I think only once or twice!) In April 2011, we did not publish a photo in a handstand walking story by the legendary Beast Skills creator (and now Head of Fitness at Nerd Fitness) Jim Bathurst, a photo that would’ve made the sentence “How about handstand walking in your underwear on asphalt in the winter in front of a crowd of people?” make sense. And that I will forever regret.
Besides that, we’re a community filled with extremists with an unhealthy hatred of bicep curls and need to refer to exercises that get one’s heartrate up as metabolic conditioning rather than Voldemort…er, I mean cardio. Some people brag about getting piss ass drunk (which is apparently Paleo if you use clear liquor), but are far above touching a piece of fruit, because an apple is just not that healthy. And I will never see eye-to-eye with people who deny that global warming is caused by humans or think that coaches could learn anything other than what not to do from the movie Whiplash, and the abusive music teacher so many idolize for some reason. I, too, have had difficulty with healthy habits and have fallen for some fads that others would either rightfully laugh at or take with a healthy grain of salt or whatever other seasoning was available. (I speak as a recovering Weston Price true believer who was once obsessed with oil pulling, as someone who still sings the praises of ashwagandha, as someone who hasn’t quite won the temperance battle with chocolate and sugar, as someone who knows better and yet perpetually stays up past her bedtime.) And yet somehow I think if we were all in a room together, we could find common ground and all get along.
Despite all our differences (and difference of opinion), the philosophy behind this magazine has been pretty damn close to perfect, and I’m thrilled that I got to be a part of it for so long.
Some of our writers have gone on to author books (the consistently impressive and prolific Matt Foreman and, of course, Greg Everett himself, to name just a few). Former PM columnist Beth Skwarecki is a senior health editor at Lifehacker. My friends Leigh Kramarczuk—who I worked with when I helped edit Bed, Bath & Beyond’s blog through an agency— shared some legendary cooking tips, and is still writing for a living, as far as I know.
It was through the Performance Menu that I got to edit absolute legends like osteopath and mixed martial artists Rosi Sexton, with lawyer extraordinaire Amber Sheppard, with top tier coach Brian Tabor, and so many others (I can’t name them all) who I convinced to put their experience into words that people could learn from, regardless of what some awful high school English teacher may have told them about their writing. I talked Jeff Beran, the best physical therapist I’ve ever had, to pen a story. I even convinced my husband to write an article on training for a race back in 2016. And who could forget the legendary recipes from Scotty Hagnas?
(There are so many more names I could drop here. We have had 216 contributors, and unfortunately there’s no space to do them all justice.)
Editing the Performance Menu was a lot of spellcheck and using find and replace to turn double spaces to single spaces, teaching people how to use hyperlinks instead of footnotes, and getting JPG and GIF files instead of cut-and-pasted images or ones we couldn’t actually publish because someone else had the copyright. It also helped me learn how to work with non-writers who are amazing and intelligent and have a lot to say, guiding people to form thoughts into cohesive sentences and paragraphs and sections, and developing my own patience when doing so didn’t come naturally to them—the way that exercises don’t always come naturally to me, and to so many of us. And it felt good to not only pay people for their work, but to promote athletes and coaches and gyms that deserve to be recognized for their unique contributions. Best of all, I’ve loved telling people contributors get subscriptions and access to previous issues—that the love and care we’ve put into the magazine keeps helping people, months and years and decades later. (I’m thrilled that all of the articles will now be publicly available for everyone for free.)
I started writing for the Performance Menu at the tail end of a past life as a glorified sales representative, and editing at the tail end of a past life as a middle school teacher. As a fledgling freelancer, I relied on my steady Performance Menu check to pay my half of the rent, the only bill I couldn’t put on credit. Now I own a home and have a mortgage and, after 11 years of freelancing, a “real” job.But back then, it was always nice to have a steady monthly assignment that was interesting and for someone as laid back and cool and badass as Greg Everett.
As I’ve traveled, the question I heard most often was, “Do you know Greg?” This was asked both by coaches thirsty for an Instagram following (and expecting me to negotiate one from their behalf, which is a lost cause on many levels) and by athletes appreciative of Greg’s no-nonsense approach, on-point lifting pointers, and enough free content to fill 500 e-books you can get for the low introductory price of $59.99 (except for free, though).
As much of a blast as I’ve had over the years, I do regret not always engaging more with the material. Many of my 87 (!) articles are either sanitized versions of rants about bad coaches and bad coaching, or app roundups, or about massage therapy or other forms of recovery. I regret somehow managed to miss every single one of Greg’s Oly certs, even though attending one (and writing about it in the PM pages) had been on my to-do list for years. In fact, we only hung out in person for a rushed on-the-road meal before it was everyone else’s strict bedtime.
In some ways, I was not the ideal Performance Menu managing editor. I switched from CrossFit Lite to grappling and Olylifting but then pivoted to being a full-time couch potato. I got addicted to sugar (boo! hiss!) in grad school. During COVID I switched to (gasp!) online yoga videos and Orange Theory videos (don’t tell anyone!) and these days, I aspire to ride my bike and go on hikes and do three classes a week in a small gym with group fitness classes that typically include treadmill intervals and well as isolation exercises, a gym where all the snatches are done with dumbbells. I’ve slowly felt more distance between myself and this great community, as physical fitness (and obsessively following UFC) has become less and less pivotal in my life. And I got less enthusiastic about editing the Performance Menu over time, as work burnout set in, as I transitioned from freelancing to a full-time job covering digital security and online privacy, and as I increasingly wanted to spend my spare time cooking non-Paleo meals, playing guitar, editing photographs, reading a book, watching something on TV, or working on technology projects.
On some level, the Performance Menu was starting to feel stagnant, and I wondered how many people read it compared to the blog. And pulling articles out of people on deadline kept increasing in difficulty. Plans to find four or five regular columnists, with the occasional guest article, never materialized. We did give away free year-long subscriptions as part of some fun promotions, and took steps to try to improve sales, but I do always wonder if there was a way to tap into and leverage the huge Catalyst Athletics audience into many more subscriptions. But as the world moves away from PDF downloads and towards mobile-first reading, in some ways the magazine itself felt outdated.
I will miss the Performance Menu community, as distanced from it as I’ve sometimes felt, but most of all I will miss working with Greg. Of course, it was Greg who introduced me to both Keurig coffee and Barkboxes, and we’ve talked shop about the trials and tribulations of publishing. I could always bounce drafts off of Greg, telling him I didn’t like it but was in a bad mood, and get an honest answer that was witty, to-the-point, and made sense. No matter what personal or professional or political issue I was dealing with, I could send random texts every few months and get the exact kind of support from Greg that I needed—in the form of pithy answers and humor, matter-of-fact responses without unnecessary flourishes, just one Henry Rollins enthusiast to another.
LinkedIn tells me I started my stint as a managing editor in 2009. We used to send each other articles via email, until I discovered this fairly new service called Dropbox, which is like a folder that syncs. My first article, an interview with MMA fighter Roxanne Modaferri, was published in April 2007. Back then she had 12 professional fights. Now she’s had 44. Coincidentally, Modafferi plans to retire after her February 12, 2022 matchup against Casey O’Neill at UFC 271.
I’m not really sure how to end this punk rock love letter to The Performance Menu, and have never been too great at goodbyes. So, I’ll just say that I’m not hard to find on the socials (@yaelwrites on Twitter, @yaelgrauer on Insta, both of those on Facebook, etc.) and in person, mostly in Phoenix, and I do hope to keep in touch with some of you, if it makes sense to do so.
It has been a great journey, and however this phoenix rises up from the ash, I plan to be cheering from the sidelines. I have always been #TeamGreg and #TeamAimee, and I always will be.
And I do still aspire to learn how to do a semi-decent snatch with a respectable weight. I’m sure they will be there if and when that happens.
The Performance Menu is dead. Long live the Performance Menu!
Back then the community seemed so much smaller, and a skeptic like me who was clearly a beginner but was still always asking questions really stood out. I wanted to dig deeper, to see the studies, to get answers when I tested things out for a while and they didn’t work as planned. Sometimes questions weren’t exactly welcome, or they were meant to be sacrificed on the altar of tradition, or respecting authority, or something—which is why you had full gyms of people following the Zone diet and not getting results, or getting unnecessary colonics because a coach said so, or being convinced that walking barefoot sucks up electrons from the earth into your body, or that rubbing castor oil on the outside of your skin somehow seeps into your internal organs and cures your liver. Or something.
I was attracted to the Performance Menu because I saw it as CrossFit-esque, but for smart people—former CrossFitters who often had moved onto Olympic weightlifting or another sport, or even current CrossFitters who wanted to exercise in a way that was customized for their experience and goals, and with smart progressions and recovery, rather than just swallowing whatever came up on a website. People who were interested in the scientific research Robb Wolf cited, and who wanted to experiment with their diets and supplements beyond following Zone ratios because somebody said so.
The Performance Menu has never been perfect. Tempers have flared in the now-defunct forum, magazine deadlines have been missed (I never cried over this, but have wanted to), and every once in a blue moon (gasp!) mistakes have even been published. (I think only once or twice!) In April 2011, we did not publish a photo in a handstand walking story by the legendary Beast Skills creator (and now Head of Fitness at Nerd Fitness) Jim Bathurst, a photo that would’ve made the sentence “How about handstand walking in your underwear on asphalt in the winter in front of a crowd of people?” make sense. And that I will forever regret.
Besides that, we’re a community filled with extremists with an unhealthy hatred of bicep curls and need to refer to exercises that get one’s heartrate up as metabolic conditioning rather than Voldemort…er, I mean cardio. Some people brag about getting piss ass drunk (which is apparently Paleo if you use clear liquor), but are far above touching a piece of fruit, because an apple is just not that healthy. And I will never see eye-to-eye with people who deny that global warming is caused by humans or think that coaches could learn anything other than what not to do from the movie Whiplash, and the abusive music teacher so many idolize for some reason. I, too, have had difficulty with healthy habits and have fallen for some fads that others would either rightfully laugh at or take with a healthy grain of salt or whatever other seasoning was available. (I speak as a recovering Weston Price true believer who was once obsessed with oil pulling, as someone who still sings the praises of ashwagandha, as someone who hasn’t quite won the temperance battle with chocolate and sugar, as someone who knows better and yet perpetually stays up past her bedtime.) And yet somehow I think if we were all in a room together, we could find common ground and all get along.
Despite all our differences (and difference of opinion), the philosophy behind this magazine has been pretty damn close to perfect, and I’m thrilled that I got to be a part of it for so long.
Some of our writers have gone on to author books (the consistently impressive and prolific Matt Foreman and, of course, Greg Everett himself, to name just a few). Former PM columnist Beth Skwarecki is a senior health editor at Lifehacker. My friends Leigh Kramarczuk—who I worked with when I helped edit Bed, Bath & Beyond’s blog through an agency— shared some legendary cooking tips, and is still writing for a living, as far as I know.
It was through the Performance Menu that I got to edit absolute legends like osteopath and mixed martial artists Rosi Sexton, with lawyer extraordinaire Amber Sheppard, with top tier coach Brian Tabor, and so many others (I can’t name them all) who I convinced to put their experience into words that people could learn from, regardless of what some awful high school English teacher may have told them about their writing. I talked Jeff Beran, the best physical therapist I’ve ever had, to pen a story. I even convinced my husband to write an article on training for a race back in 2016. And who could forget the legendary recipes from Scotty Hagnas?
(There are so many more names I could drop here. We have had 216 contributors, and unfortunately there’s no space to do them all justice.)
Editing the Performance Menu was a lot of spellcheck and using find and replace to turn double spaces to single spaces, teaching people how to use hyperlinks instead of footnotes, and getting JPG and GIF files instead of cut-and-pasted images or ones we couldn’t actually publish because someone else had the copyright. It also helped me learn how to work with non-writers who are amazing and intelligent and have a lot to say, guiding people to form thoughts into cohesive sentences and paragraphs and sections, and developing my own patience when doing so didn’t come naturally to them—the way that exercises don’t always come naturally to me, and to so many of us. And it felt good to not only pay people for their work, but to promote athletes and coaches and gyms that deserve to be recognized for their unique contributions. Best of all, I’ve loved telling people contributors get subscriptions and access to previous issues—that the love and care we’ve put into the magazine keeps helping people, months and years and decades later. (I’m thrilled that all of the articles will now be publicly available for everyone for free.)
I started writing for the Performance Menu at the tail end of a past life as a glorified sales representative, and editing at the tail end of a past life as a middle school teacher. As a fledgling freelancer, I relied on my steady Performance Menu check to pay my half of the rent, the only bill I couldn’t put on credit. Now I own a home and have a mortgage and, after 11 years of freelancing, a “real” job.But back then, it was always nice to have a steady monthly assignment that was interesting and for someone as laid back and cool and badass as Greg Everett.
As I’ve traveled, the question I heard most often was, “Do you know Greg?” This was asked both by coaches thirsty for an Instagram following (and expecting me to negotiate one from their behalf, which is a lost cause on many levels) and by athletes appreciative of Greg’s no-nonsense approach, on-point lifting pointers, and enough free content to fill 500 e-books you can get for the low introductory price of $59.99 (except for free, though).
As much of a blast as I’ve had over the years, I do regret not always engaging more with the material. Many of my 87 (!) articles are either sanitized versions of rants about bad coaches and bad coaching, or app roundups, or about massage therapy or other forms of recovery. I regret somehow managed to miss every single one of Greg’s Oly certs, even though attending one (and writing about it in the PM pages) had been on my to-do list for years. In fact, we only hung out in person for a rushed on-the-road meal before it was everyone else’s strict bedtime.
In some ways, I was not the ideal Performance Menu managing editor. I switched from CrossFit Lite to grappling and Olylifting but then pivoted to being a full-time couch potato. I got addicted to sugar (boo! hiss!) in grad school. During COVID I switched to (gasp!) online yoga videos and Orange Theory videos (don’t tell anyone!) and these days, I aspire to ride my bike and go on hikes and do three classes a week in a small gym with group fitness classes that typically include treadmill intervals and well as isolation exercises, a gym where all the snatches are done with dumbbells. I’ve slowly felt more distance between myself and this great community, as physical fitness (and obsessively following UFC) has become less and less pivotal in my life. And I got less enthusiastic about editing the Performance Menu over time, as work burnout set in, as I transitioned from freelancing to a full-time job covering digital security and online privacy, and as I increasingly wanted to spend my spare time cooking non-Paleo meals, playing guitar, editing photographs, reading a book, watching something on TV, or working on technology projects.
On some level, the Performance Menu was starting to feel stagnant, and I wondered how many people read it compared to the blog. And pulling articles out of people on deadline kept increasing in difficulty. Plans to find four or five regular columnists, with the occasional guest article, never materialized. We did give away free year-long subscriptions as part of some fun promotions, and took steps to try to improve sales, but I do always wonder if there was a way to tap into and leverage the huge Catalyst Athletics audience into many more subscriptions. But as the world moves away from PDF downloads and towards mobile-first reading, in some ways the magazine itself felt outdated.
I will miss the Performance Menu community, as distanced from it as I’ve sometimes felt, but most of all I will miss working with Greg. Of course, it was Greg who introduced me to both Keurig coffee and Barkboxes, and we’ve talked shop about the trials and tribulations of publishing. I could always bounce drafts off of Greg, telling him I didn’t like it but was in a bad mood, and get an honest answer that was witty, to-the-point, and made sense. No matter what personal or professional or political issue I was dealing with, I could send random texts every few months and get the exact kind of support from Greg that I needed—in the form of pithy answers and humor, matter-of-fact responses without unnecessary flourishes, just one Henry Rollins enthusiast to another.
LinkedIn tells me I started my stint as a managing editor in 2009. We used to send each other articles via email, until I discovered this fairly new service called Dropbox, which is like a folder that syncs. My first article, an interview with MMA fighter Roxanne Modaferri, was published in April 2007. Back then she had 12 professional fights. Now she’s had 44. Coincidentally, Modafferi plans to retire after her February 12, 2022 matchup against Casey O’Neill at UFC 271.
I’m not really sure how to end this punk rock love letter to The Performance Menu, and have never been too great at goodbyes. So, I’ll just say that I’m not hard to find on the socials (@yaelwrites on Twitter, @yaelgrauer on Insta, both of those on Facebook, etc.) and in person, mostly in Phoenix, and I do hope to keep in touch with some of you, if it makes sense to do so.
It has been a great journey, and however this phoenix rises up from the ash, I plan to be cheering from the sidelines. I have always been #TeamGreg and #TeamAimee, and I always will be.
And I do still aspire to learn how to do a semi-decent snatch with a respectable weight. I’m sure they will be there if and when that happens.
The Performance Menu is dead. Long live the Performance Menu!
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Yael Grauer is an independent journalist, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blue belt, and managing editor of Performance Menu. Find her at https://www.yaelwrites.com or on Twitter.
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