What CrossFit Taught Me About Building a Startup
I spent nearly three years training for a single handstand pushup. One year into building Halogen, that's still the lesson I keep coming back to — the breakthrough never comes on day one.
I spent nearly three years training for a single handstand pushup. That same lesson is the one carrying me through year one of building Halogen.
I'm Mario V. Adoc, co-founder and CEO of Halogen.
From 2016 to 2020, CrossFit was part of my weekly routine, right up until my gym closed during the pandemic. Looking back, it's still the fittest I've ever been. I built skills I never thought my body could do: snatches, double unders, muscle ups. I even competed in the CrossFit Open, the qualifying competition open to any athlete in the world willing to register and show up.
Here's what I've learned, a year into building Halogen, that I first learned in a gym.
The breakthrough never comes on day one.
In 2018, during that year's CrossFit Open, I did my first handstand pushup. It took nearly three years of training to get there.
It wasn't a lucky day. It was nearly three years of failed attempts, small adjustments, and showing up anyway, even on the days I didn't feel like it.
I'm one year into building Halogen. I'm not at my handstand pushup moment yet. But I've watched myself build skills I didn't have twelve months ago, the same way I built skills in the gym I didn't have three years before that breakthrough.
You can't specialize your way through it.
CrossFit is built to punish specialists. You might be excellent at lifting heavy weight, but if you can't also run, climb a rope, and string together gymnastics movements, the workout finds you out. The sport rewards the athlete who is decent at almost everything over the athlete who is great at only one thing.
Startups work the same way. One day you're closing a sale. The next you're debugging a product issue. The day after that you're running payroll. You cannot specialize your way out of it. You have to be a generalist who's willing to get uncomfortable, often, in places you have no formal training.
Knowing when to sprint, and when to pace, is its own skill.
Every CrossFit workout forces a decision before you even start: go hard now and risk blowing up before the finish, or hold back and risk not finding out what you're capable of. Reading the workout, and reading your own body, is a skill on its own, separate from strength or endurance.
Startups demand the same judgment. Burn cash fast and try to grab the market, or conserve and play the long game. Push the team hard toward a launch date, or slow down and get it right. The "workout" lasts years instead of minutes, but the decision-making muscle is the same one.
Building Halogen Presence™ taught me the same thing about brand visibility. The signal of how AI describes you changes slowly, and you only win it by reading it consistently over time, not in a single sprint.
Does the analogy hold up? Mostly. Here's where it stretches.
CrossFit gives you an immediate scoreboard. Time, weight, reps. You know within minutes whether you won the workout. Startups rarely offer that clarity. You can work for months, even years, without a clean signal on whether you're winning. That ambiguity is real, and it's harder to train for than any physical movement.
CrossFit failure is also usually bounded. You drop the bar, you're sore, you try again tomorrow. Startup failure can mean missed payroll or a damaged partnership. Higher stakes, slower feedback. The analogy holds up in shape, not in consequence.
What the research backs up.
This isn't just a personal theory. The data points in the same direction.
Of everyone who registers for the CrossFit Open each year, only about 0.1% go on to qualify for the CrossFit Games, the sport's championship event, according to CrossFit Games' own published numbers. The Open isn't designed to crown the best athlete in the room. It's designed to let anyone train toward something hard, log their result, and see where persistence takes them over years of trying.
Persistence shows up just as clearly in entrepreneurship research. Psychologist Angela Duckworth's landmark study on grit, the combination of passion and sustained effort toward long-term goals, found that grit predicted achievement across fields as different as the Scripps National Spelling Bee and West Point's most demanding summer training program, often more than talent alone.
And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks something similar in business survival. According to BLS data, about half of small businesses fail within their first five years. The ones that survive usually aren't the ones with the flashiest launch. They're the ones who kept training through the failed attempts.
What this means for you.
I learned this under a barbell. You're probably learning your version of it somewhere else right now. The breakthrough is rarely about talent. It's about whether you're still showing up after the tenth failed attempt.
I believe Halogen's breakthrough moment is still ahead of us. I just have to keep training for it.
Mario V. Adoc is co-founder and CEO of Halogen.