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Chasing Excellence
Ben Bergeron
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What is Chasing Excellence about?
Coach Ben Bergeron has trained some of CrossFit's most dominant champions. Here he reveals the mental game behind elite performance: commitment, grit, positivity, and process. Learn how to build the character traits that separate good from great in any arena, on the gym floor or off it.
Key ideas of Chasing Excellence
Process Over Outcome
Focusing on daily habits and who you are becoming matters more than chasing results or comparing scores with rivals.
Grit Through Deliberate Practice
Sustained improvement comes from working on your weaknesses with relentless repetition, not from relying on natural talent.
Controlling Your Response
Champions accept that they can only control training, nutrition, sleep, recovery, and mindset, and they ignore everything else.
Read an excerpt from the summary
Opening: The Beach and the Grain of Sand
Picture a grain of sand. Not the beach, not the dunes, not the whole sweep of shoreline running off into the distance. Just one grain. That is where Ben Bergeron tells his athletes to put their attention, hour by hour, rep by rep, day after day. After a full day of focusing on one grain at a time, you finally look up and see the beach you walked across. That is the trick the book is built around, and it is the reason a quiet coach from a no-name strip-mall gym in Massachusetts has ended up training more CrossFit Games champions than anyone else alive.
The foreword comes from Katrín Davíðsdóttir, the Icelandic athlete who won the CrossFit Games in 2015 and 2016. She does not start with a victory. She starts with a humiliation. Copenhagen, May 2014, the European Regional. Ten legless rope climbs for time. She is sitting first overall and within a single foot of the top of the rope on the seventh climb when her grip gives out. She tries again, fails again, and ends up crying on the mat as the clock runs out. She finishes sixth. She misses qualification for the CrossFit Games for the second year in a row.
Her phone buzzes. It is a text from a coach she barely knows in Boston. "I know you might not see this right now, but this could be the best thing that ever happened to you." It takes her a week to write back. A few months later she moves to Massachusetts and walks into a gym called CrossFit New England. That coach, Ben Bergeron, is about to spend the next year teaching her that better people make better athletes, that whining and complaining are forbidden, and that she does not need to be the strongest woman in the room to be the best one in the world. She just needs to commit to a process and stop watching the leaderboard.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to build mental toughness and understands that mindset is trained, not inherited.
- Anyone who feels stuck at a plateau and needs a concrete framework for what deliberate improvement actually looks like.
- Anyone who coaches, leads, or manages others and wants to develop character alongside performance.
- Anyone who competes in any field and wants to stop being driven by the scoreboard and start running their own race.
About the author: Ben Bergeron
Ben Bergeron is a CrossFit coach based in Massachusetts and the founder of CrossFit New England. He has trained multiple CrossFit Games champions, including two-time champion Katrín Davíðsdóttir and Mat Fraser, who went on to become one of the most dominant athletes in the sport's history.
Bergeron is widely recognized for his emphasis on character development, mindset, and process-driven training over results-chasing. He also hosts a coaching podcast and has become an influential voice on high performance beyond the world of CrossFit.
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