Murph

I finished my FIRST Murph at 11: 21am on Saturday, July 3, 2010 after 1 hour and 6 minutes of mind-numbing effort. I seriously think that Murph was the hardest thing that I’ve tried to do in recent memory.


I had spent the week leading up to this experience anxious and doubtful. At first I had only planned to do a “half Murph” because I could not imagine that I would be able to complete the full mile run/100 pullups/200 pushups/300 squats/mile run.

But after some encouragement/hazing from my box-mates on Facebook, I started to think that maybe I could try partitioning the pull-ups/pushups/squats into 20 rounds of Cindy (5 pullups, 10 pushups, 15 squats). Although Cindy is by no means a pleasurable experience, she’s familiar – not an “unknown” the way Murph was for me.

And really – that seems to be the source of a lot of my Crossfit anxiety: the unknown

The programming is constantly throwing something in that is new or different to try and achieve “muscle confusion”. That unknown element is always extremely intimidating to me: “what if I cannot do this?”

The night before Murph, that was the phrase that was going through my head. I went to bed early that night reassuring myself that I could still scale down to a half Murph if things started to turn bad.

Saturday morning: once I got through the 1-mile run and started my initial rounds of Cindy, I somehow started to get used to the idea of allowing myself to consider doing a full Murph. Each round of Cindy took me closer to this goal…until finally, covered in a chalk and sweat, it happened.

I won’t lie, once I got through the 20 rounds of Cindy, I kind of cruised through that final 1-mile run and even walked part of it – I knew that I was going to finish – that was my only goal, I was not really even thinking about the time.

But now that I’ve had some time to process this experience, I think that it was a mistake to not focus more attention on the time. After the Performance Intelligence seminar last year, they taught us to approach these challenging WODs from the perspective of what can be “controlled”…and when it comes to Murph, the easiest element to control is the pace – any able-bodied individual can get through Murph as the movements are very simple – it’s just the pace/intensity and the amount of time it takes to complete the full workout that will cause you to run out of steam/hit-the-wall prematurely. Pushing yourself to go faster through the movements is certainly going to make it harder – but by slowing down to a more manageable pace, there is no reason to think that a reasonably athletic person cannot finish a WOD like Murph in about an hour (as I finally proved to myself).

I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday replaying this experience in my head…I was more than a little dehydrated, sore and callused, but very, very happy.