Exactly What I Needed
EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED - Walking with Rory Post #1
I tore both of my shoulders.
Not one. Both. Same afternoon, same jump into the same water, like a man who really wanted to make a point. July 26, 2025. Full-thickness supraspinatus tears on both sides, biceps tendons along for the ride. The kind of thing where the MRI tech gets quiet.
Two surgeries later — right one in August, left one in December — I'm going to tell you something that took me a year to be able to say out loud.
That was exactly what I fucking needed.
Nobody Was Going to Talk Me Out of It
Here's the thing about being a four-time CrossFit Games athlete who's been coaching since 2008: you don't stop. Not because you're disciplined. Because you're incapable.
I was never going to wake up one Tuesday at 47 and think, you know what, maybe I'll dial back the heavy squats and spend some real time on my thoracic spine. That's not a decision I was going to arrive at through wisdom. There was no version of me who got there voluntarily. I'd have kept chasing numbers until something made the choice for me.
Something made the choice for me.
And the strange, annoying, almost embarrassing truth is that the thing I built while I couldn't lift anything — the thing I built out of pure frustration, sitting on a bench with two rebuilt shoulders and nothing to do — is the best training I've done in a decade.
I feel better now than I did competing. Let that sit there for a second. I feel better now.
Welcome to the Trade-Off Years
Forty to sixty is a negotiation. Every single day.
Success in CrossFit was probably bad for my longevity. I'll say that as a guy who loved it, who built a career in it, who'd do most of it again. But heavy lifting takes more from me now than it gives back. That's not a moral failing and it's not a sad story. It's just the math, and the math changed.
So let's run the questions.
Am I a competitive CrossFit athlete? No.
Am I going to PR my squat this year? No.
Ever? Also no. Next question.
Does that bother me? Some days. I'm not going to pretend I'm enlightened about it.
But here's what I get in exchange: I can reach the top shelf. I can throw a bag in an overhead bin without doing the little pre-flight shoulder assessment. I can get on the floor and get back up without narrating it. I can go outside on a Friday and move for three hours and not pay for it Saturday.
Those are the trade-offs. You don't get to skip them. You only get to choose which side of the ledger you're funding.
So What Is This Thing
Tragically Fit is mobility-first training for people in exactly that negotiation. Built for Gen X — the youngest of the old people — though nobody's checking IDs.
The format is four pieces:
The Heart Race — 5 minutes. Get the blood moving.
Tragically Fit Mobility™ — 25 minutes. This is the engine. It works the fringes of movement: the outer edges of your range, internal and external rotation layered into real positions, loaded end-range work. The stuff every program says it values and almost none of them actually program.
The Workout, if you dare — 10 to 20 minutes.
The Close — 5 minutes.
Call it 45 to 55 minutes end to end.
And here's the part that matters most: it's modular on purpose. Stop after any section and you did the program. Not a scaled-down version of the program. The program. Ten minutes on a garbage day counts exactly the same as the full fifty on a good one. I built it that way because I know what your Tuesday looks like.
You can also just steal the mobility block. Run it as the front end of your CrossFit class, your lifting session, your trail run. Most warm-ups are two minutes of arm circles and a jog. This isn't that. Bolt it onto whatever you're already doing and everything downstream gets safer.
The Point
I didn't build this because I got wise. I built it because I got hurt, and then I got bored, and then I got curious, and then I accidentally solved a problem I didn't know I had.
You probably have the same problem. You just haven't torn anything yet.
Let's not wait for that.
— G-ro