By month 6, the Murph Challenge was on the radar. Murph is another of the “named” workout sequences, in this case a particularly challenging workout named for a fallen US Soldier. On Memorial Day, a bunch of people signed up for this special workout that I found quite intimidating – 1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups and 300 air squats followed by another 1 mile run, all while wearing a 20lb weighted vest. That’s the Rx version anyway – you can scale it to not include the vest. As part of a regular class several weeks before Memorial Day, the class did a half Murph workout. Even that I found tough. So I was not planning on signing up. There were many people that did – people I felt were in much better shape than me and so, it figured. They even did extra Murph training sessions on Saturday mornings in the weeks leading up to it. Then one of the coaches suggested a few of us put a team together – maybe 3 or 4 people to split up the work and do it as a team WOD. Suddenly that seemed manageable.
The “Murph” WOD
For time
1600m run
100 pullups
200 pushups
300 air squats
1600m run
Rx is the above while wearing a 20lb weighted vest. 1/2 Murph is the FULL run distances, but half of each of the middle movements.
So we recruited a few people via Facebook and I was a part of a team of 4 set to split up Murph with about 2 weeks before Memorial Day. A day before, we lost 2 of the 4 team members to shifting work schedules and an injury, and we hurriedly pulled one more person in to join us. On Memorial Day, we picked our time and went to the box to participate. It was a tough workout, but we were all feeling pretty good and feeding off of each others energy – so much so that we decided to do a half Murph each rather than split it 3 ways – and even as we were completing that, we briefly considered doing a full each – though it’s probably best that we didn’t. But we had a blast.
In the end, I was partnered with 2 other guys with whom I worked out regularly – Rob and Jason. And fortunately we all have different strengths. We collectively decided that our strategy would be to break up the middle portion of movements across our team and rotating between them too so we each had equal shares (of course). So instead of all of us banging out our portion of the pull-ups, we each did a small set of each movement, then rotated. So when we started, Rob did 5 pull-ups, I did 10 pushups and Jason did 15 squats. We repeated this for 20 rounds, trading movements for each round as we went, gradually building up to the half of each of the movements, and each alternating between movements, so we never got completely exhausted on any one of them.
And then a week later, a variation on Murph was done in memory of 3 RCMP officers from Moncton, subbing sit-ups in place of push-ups. I tackled that as well, using the same strategy we had on Murph – and it worked really well.
