Memorial Day Murph

For most of us residing here in the US, Memorial day is a relaxing holiday characterized primarily by BBQ and beer. For cross-trainingters, it is characterized by Murph.

Murph is a workout named after Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy of Patchogue, N.Y., who was killed in Afghanistan June 28th, 2005. This guy must have been seriously tough, because he apparently liked doing the workout that now bears his name. It is this:

1. 1 mile run
2. 100 pullups
3. 200 pushups
4. 300 air squats
5. 1 mile run

Murphy himself named this workout “Body Armor” because he did it while wearing his protective military gear. Today, the Games-standards version of Murph is performed wearing a weight vest: 20 lbs for men; 14 for women. However, the workout is often done without the vest, simply because the unweighted version is already excruciating.

Murph is Cross Training’s paradigmatic endurance benchmark. Our aggregate performance on this workout will show us how fit we are as a Box, and help us to set appropriate goals for the coming year. It will also show us how far we’ve come since last year.

Of currently active members (who logged their scores in Wodify), 14 participated in Murph last year. The gender distribution was surprisingly equal!

8 performed a scaled version; 6 did it as prescribed.

Here is the distribution of completion times for the Rx and Scaled divisions. Across both divisions, the mean time was 50 minutes (Rx: 47 minutes; Scaled: 52 minutes).

Time [minutes]#

As you can probably tell, we didn’t have much data to work with from last year. We’re hoping that this year will generate a whole lot more and that we will see improvements (both in terms of the # of participating athletes and scores!). For those of you who’ve never done the workout before, check out the following video from last year’s Cross Training Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbGPDK8r5Kg. Two important things to keep in mind during the workout: Stay hydrated and have fun!

Kathi