The workout “Murph” has become a staple, not just in the CrossFit world, but in the fitness world in general. And we’re just a few weeks away from when thousands of people are going to tackle it. There’s running and pull-ups and push-ups and squats and more running. It’s long. It’s difficult. And people are rightly proud when they do it.
This will be our 9th year doing that workout on Memorial Day weekend at our gym. The first year, the only modifications we offered where that people could use rings or bands for pull-ups, and they could do push-ups from their knees. It was terrible. Nobody took longer than 90 minutes, but people were close. And they were debilitated for nearly a full week afterward. Now, we have seven distinct options for how to do the workout, and even mixing and matching to be sure that it’s appropriately customized to each person.
And every year, I hear people talk about whether they’re doing the “real” Murph or not.
There’s an idea that the “real” Murph is what we saw in the CrossFit Games in 2015 and 2016: a one mile run, followed by 100 pull-ups, then 200 push-ups, then 300 squats, then another one mile run, all while wearing a 20lb weight vest for men and a 14lb weight vest for women.
I’ve got two problems with that.
The first is a massive pet peeve I have with the CrossFit world: people use the CrossFit Games to define what CrossFit is. There are about 15,000 CrossFit gyms in the world right now. This year, 223,000 people registered for the CrossFit Open (the first stage of the year’s competitive CrossFit season). At its peak, in 2018, 415,000 people registered. Do you know how many people compete as individuals at the CrossFit Games? Sixty. Total. Thirty men and thirty women. That means that even on a low participation year, 99.976% of people do not make it into the CrossFit Games. CrossFit Games athletes are not normal. Their training regimens, their training volume and intensity, their work capacity is nearly unimaginable. A very cool thing about CrossFit is how accessible it is: everyone who does it has done workouts that are called the same things and have the same movements. But the Games athletes are elite to a degree that cannot be overstated. They should not be used as the standard for what counts as “real” CrossFit anything.
The second is forgetting that CrossFit works really well. Which means that over the years, people have gotten fitter. Which means that to get the same feeling as they did 10 years ago, athletes have to do more stuff. There was a time when a muscle up was almost inconceivable outside of a gymnastics studio. It’s still rare and impressive, but if you know what a muscle up is, you probably also at least one person who can do one. People are fitter. What was prescribed in the CrossFit Games in 2015 and 2016, what the Games athletes did, is what has become fashionable as the gold standard of how to do Murph: with a vest, and what we would call “unsegmented,” meaning all 100 pull-ups have to be done before moving onto the push-ups. All 200 push-ups have to be done before moving to the squats. And all 300 squats have to be done before going back to the mile.
But that’s not even how Murph was first written. That workout first appeared on crossfit.com on August 18, 2005. This is exactly what was published (view the post HERE):
For time:
1 mile Run
100 Pull-ups
200 Push-ups
300 Squats
1 mile RunIn memory of Navy Lieutenant Michael Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y., who was killed in Afghanistan June 28th, 2005.
This workout was one of Mike’s favorites and he’d named it “Body Armor”. From here on it will be referred to as “Murph” in honor of the focused warrior and great American who wanted nothing more in life than to serve this great country and the beautiful people who make it what it is.
Partition the pull-ups, push-ups, and squats as needed. Start and finish with a mile run. If you’ve got a twenty pound vest or body armor, wear it.
So what does “real” Murph even mean? Does it mean the way it was originally published, in which case breaking up the pull-ups, push-ups, and squats, and even doing it without a vest, definitely counts? Does it mean that it doesn’t count if you do it with a 14-lb vest because it didn’t say “fourteen pounds” in the first description? Does it mean the way the 0.024% of people who compete at the CrossFit Games like to do it? Does it mean the way that we imagine the 2% of the US Military who are in Special Operations might do it?
Here are the words, from the original post, that define this workout for me: “in honor of the focused warrior and great American who wanted nothing more in life than to serve this great country and the beautiful people who make it what it is.”
In our gym, this workout, no matter what the variation looks like, is about remembering a spirit of service, about doing hard things instead of easy things, about the beauty and greatness that exist in our country still, despite everything, about how that beauty and greatness is worth effort and struggle and pain, and about how decency and kindness and courage and doing the right thing – traits embodied by Michael Murphy – are among the traits that we value and celebrate most of all.
And if that’s the spirit in which you tackle Murph this Memorial Day weekend…
Then it’s the real one in my book.