memorial day murph

After a lovely Memorial Day Weekend spent at Lake LBJ, outside of Austin:




I came home to this:




And this:




Which, secretly, was a bit more lovely than the weekend itself. Heartburn + sunburn + hangover + eating shit all weekend is not a good feeling, amirite?

So, rather than snuggle up on the couch with the pups and indulge in whatever episode of Law and Order happened to be on at the moment, I arrived back in Houston, where the temp was 92 and the humidity was 146%, and thought, “HEY! Let’s go make myself feel even WORSE and do a CrossFit workout at the box!” So off I dragged my ass.

For anyone not familiar with CrossFit, I can’t explain it all without boring you to tears, but basically it’s a kick-ass, high intensity workout designed around functional bodyweight movements (push-ups, squats, pull-ups), Olympic lifting, and gymnastics movements. It is perfect for the ADHD child in me, since you rarely do the same workout twice (and if you do, it will be months apart, as a means of benchmarking your progress). Also, it is infinitely scalable – you can always lift less weight, do push-ups on your knees, etc. In the same vein, there is always room for improvement and always a goal. Plus, what girl secretly doesn’t want to feel bad ass like the boys and throw some weight around?

I’ve been CrossFitting since September 2011, and Memorial Day was the first time I would be tackling one of the most respected benchmark workouts: MURPH. CrossFit has multiple benchmark workouts named in honor of men and women who have lost their lives in combat, and loved to CrossFit. Murph is named for Lt. Michael Murphy, a Medal of Honor winner, who was killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005. It looks a little something like this:

1 mile run
100 pull-ups
200 push-ups
300 squats
1 mile run
(20/12 lb weight vest for men/women)

You can break up the pull-ups/push-ups/squats however you want, but they must be bookended by the mile runs. Other hero workout rules: 1) Don’t cheat 2) Don’t quit

Let me just say – this workout is no joke. Even though I used a band for pull-ups and (duhh) did not wear a weight vest, I wasn’t breezing through this shit. It certainly didn’t help that concrete that has been baking in the sun all day is hot as hell. When I hit the ground for my first push-up, I felt like I was laying on a tanning bed.

I broke the workout up into 20 rounds of 5 pull-ups/10 push-ups/15 squats. More than 10 push-ups in a row would be pushing it for me with this (ha ha, see what I did there? “pushing” it? ha ha). Thanks to not having the ability to do regular pull-ups and having to use a band, my hands didn’t rip. But my quads were on fire about halfway through. And you wanna know what sucked? That last mile run. I thought “oh, haaay, I’ll just jog the last mile real slow, no biggie”. HA. I walked about 1/3 of it.

BUT – I finished. (Without going to my knees for push-ups!!) And so did everyone else. I’m happy to have this workout under my belt, and glad to have done SOMETHING mildly patriotic for Memorial Day, rather than just posting some bullshit on my Facebook timeline and calling it a day. While doing a hero workout may be mildly selfish (because secretly, I was also doing it to burn off the 47 million beers I consumed over the weekend), I think it’s really cool that my CrossFit box, and others around the country, do this workout every Memorial Day to remind us all that, hey, this may kick the crap out of you, but it ain’t SHIT compared to serving in the Middle East, so take your torn hands and sore quads and STFU. Or something like that. Happy summer, y’all!