About
Marietta (Mari) Taylor resides in Raleigh, NC with her husband of seventeen years and her two teenage daughters. The move from Chicago, IL to Raleigh proved a breeding ground for dusting off her dream of writing. Mari is the author of Devotions to Go …Surviving Unemployment and Girlfriends On…Surviving Unemployment, both scheduled to be released in April 2010. Mari strives to show women how to manage the critical aspects of their lives elegantly, frugally and cohesively. Now if she could just get her two high maintenance daughters and one high maintenance husband on board. That ultimately will be the true test of her skill!
Mari has a bachelor’s degree in Biology and currently works in Healthcare IT. She loves forensics and Cafe World on Facebook. She’s a work in progress and ever evolving. The most important thing to her is that through her writing, others would come to know, accept and adore the God who has created such a crazy jumble of things that make her who she is.
Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness
Description
<p><b>The absorbing, definitive account of CrossFit's origins, its explosive grassroots growth, and its emergence as a global phenomenon.</b><br /> <br />One of the most illuminating books ever on a sports subculture, <i>Learning to Breathe Fire </i>combines vivid sports writing with a thoughtful meditation on what it means to be human. In the book, veteran journalist J.C. Herz explains the science of maximum effort, why the modern gym fails an obese society, and the psychic rewards of ending up on the floor feeling as though you're about to die. <br /> <br />The story traces CrossFit’s rise, from a single underground gym in Santa Cruz to its adoption as the workout of choice for elite special forces, firefighters and cops, to its popularity as the go-to fitness routine for regular Joes and Janes. Especially riveting is Herz’s description of The CrossFit Games, which begin as an informal throw-down on a California ranch and evolve into a televised global proving ground for the fittest men and women on Earth, as well as hundreds of thousands of lesser mortals. <br /> <br />In her portrayal of the sport's star athletes, its passionate coaches and its “chief armorer,” Rogue Fitness, Herz powerfully evokes the uniqueness of a fitness culture that cultivates primal fierceness in average people. And in the shared ordeal of an all-consuming workout, she unearths the ritual intensity that's been with us since humans invented sports, showing us how, on a deep level, we're all tribal hunters and first responders, waiting for the signal to go all-out. </p>
Story Behind The Book
After moving to North Carolina my husband job transfer fell through. We had no support system in Raleigh so we were "alone" in this situation. For the next 2 1/2 years he was either unemployed or underemployed. I had no intention of ever writing about our experience but God would not leave me alone about it. Each devotion tells a story from our life during that time and is followed by a brief "apply it to your own life" page. Unemployment is a tough situation and if telling my family's story encourages someone and helps them hang on, then the book has done its job!
