Well this year we at ALTRA Zero Drop Footwear stepped outside of the running specific world and flew down to Southern California to take part as a vendor of the 2011 CrossFit Games. If you are unfamiliar with what CrossFit is I will quote from their site.

CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.
Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general, and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports, and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.
The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.

Basically it is a short duration workout with high intensity and varied fitness regimens. This allows for the body to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. It is a test of fitness in all aspects for an extremely short duration – usually 2-12 minutes in length. CrossFit, from my experience, is not meant to replace your sport of choice, but to help you to better succeed at it. As you can see in the statement above it is for those needing to be physically fit. It is really a new style of cross training. There are becoming more and more elite endurance athletes that are using CrossFit workouts to get stronger, faster, and in better shape. Many are also finding it a way to reduce injury because they are more flexible and stronger.

As I visited the games this year with Patton from Natural Running Store we were able to converse with many CrossFitters from across the world. They are looking for flat shoes and the foot-shape really excites them as well, so that they can have more balance and power in their WOD (Workout Of the Day). We had great response over the three days that we were out there. We even had the 3rd place Masters male purchase our shoes on Friday and compete Saturday and Sunday in them. The games were a great success for ALTRA Zero Drop Footwear.