Before the fame, Bob Harper was just a personal trainer who knew that if he wanted to get a break, he’d have to move to California and work hard. So he packed up his car and drove roughly 2,000 miles from Tennessee to the West Coast.
When he arrived, he “hit the ground running.”
He worked at various large gyms in the Los Angeles area and even spent time behind the front desk. Finally, he got enough paying clients to sustain him.
“I was working six, seven days a week. I was just ... pushing myself, going as hard as I could because no one was ever gonna give it to me,” Harper tells CrossFit HQ’s Pat Sherwood.
He adds: “If I was gonna eat, I was gonna have to work my ass off, and that’s how I’ve always been.”
Today, Harper is a trainer on the wildly popular TV show “The Biggest Loser,” which boasts of millions of viewers over 15 seasons. And he’s an athlete at Brick CrossFit in West Hollywood. There, Harper says he’s found people he can call “family.”
“I can be myself. I can come in here. I can be a smartass,” he says.
Harper continues: “I’m just a guy that loves CrossFit. I want to compete with myself, I want to be a little better.”
Video by Jonathan Glancy, Pat Sherwood and Ian Wittenber.
5min 59sec
HD file size: 110 MB
SD mov file size: 42 MB
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Additional reading: The New Good Old Days of CrossFit by Darrell “Bingo” White, published Oct. 18, 2012.