{"id":12941,"date":"2014-06-18T14:42:40","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T09:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/?p=12941"},"modified":"2014-12-23T17:46:21","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T12:16:21","slug":"5-questions-with-best-selling-author-jc-herz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookbuzzr.com\/blog\/5-questions-with-best-selling-author-jc-herz\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Questions with Best Selling Author JC Herz"},"content":{"rendered":"

BookBuzzr author JC Herz<\/a>\u2019s book – ‘Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness<\/a>‘ recently hit the #1 spot on the Amazon. We reached out to JC Herz to learn more about her story.<\/p>\n

The screenshot below was taken on June 05, 2014.<\/em><\/p>\n

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1. Congratulations JC Herz. We\u2019re so excited to have you here with us. To start with, can you tell us a little about yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I started writing professionally as a teenage rock critic for The Boston Phoenix, while I was a Harvard undergraduate. It was my scheme to see bands in bars (they don\u2019t card people on the press list). Every time I wrote an album review I got $50. I thought it was amazing. In my senior year I stumbled into this thing that not very many people knew about, called the Internet, and wrote a book about it, published in 1994 (the white hot year of \u201ccyberspace\u201d – that book<\/a> was published in ten languages). Next book<\/a> was a history of videogames, which led to writing a column about computer game design for The New York Times. I didn\u2019t find a book topic that intrigued me as much as the Internet (when no-one knew about it) or videogames as a formative experience for Generation X, until CrossFit. Hopefully my cultural antennae are still well calibrated.<\/p>\n

I also co-wrote a children\u2019s e-book, A Dark & Dismal Flower<\/a>, just released on iTunes and Google Play. It\u2019s a gothic fairy tale filled with animated illustrations, published by Coliloquy. The illustrations are stunning – our aspiration was to create one of the first works of classic children\u2019s literature for a tablet device.
\n2. How did you come up with the idea for \u2018Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness\u2019? <\/strong><\/p>\n

My husband found CrossFit after a serious back injury (ruptured disc – the result of a stupid bootcamp workout at the Y) made him swear to make his core so strong that he\u2019d never have another back injury. He drank the Kool-Aid and started talking nonstop about CrossFit (The First Rule of CrossFit is, Always Talk About CrossFit). It was boring and annoying. So I figured, I had to try CrossFit for the sake of our marriage. If I liked it, I\u2019d enjoy talking the same gibberish and it\u2019d bring us together as a couple. If I didn\u2019t like it, at least I\u2019d get credit for trying, and I could start to draw some boundaries around Workout-of-the-Day dissertations at dinner time.<\/p>\n

Unlike my husband, I am not a stellar athlete – I\u2019m an excellent example of what you can do with zero genetic potential for sports. But the experience of CrossFit was so primal, and the tribal quality of the box was so powerful, that I realized something really interesting was going on, that deserved a book-length treatment. What makes CrossFit fun to write about is, it\u2019s mythic – the sportswriting passages in Learning to Breathe Fire<\/a> are present-tense, but also have an epic quality (barbells at the gates of Troy, sort of thing). Connecting the modern to the ancient – today\u2019s throwdowns to the genesis of sport in ancient human society – was revelatory. And it got me back in touch with some amazing classics scholars who have some mind-stretching perspectives on athletics.<\/p>\n