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Memorial Day Murph Madness Notes
Or
Why am I trying to do The Hock if I'm already married?
I may someday recover my grip strength and stop being sore, but I haven’t yet. Around pull up 75 I texted a friend: Mother Mary save me from my bad decisions.
I had been planning to run Murph on Memorial Day for months. Not out of any particular sense of patriotism, so much as thinking it was a good workout to get myself to do some conditioning. A buddy of mine from BJJ was having a big group over to his farm to run it, and I figured it would be a good way to motivate myself to work on my cardio and hold myself accountable.
It’s a simple calisthenic workout: Run one mile, do 100 pull ups 200 push ups and 300 squats, then run one mile. If you’re serious about it, you wear a 20lb vest.
I’d been training it without the vest for a while, and managed a full unweighted run in just under an hour. Then I picked up a series of BJJ injuries, nursing a back injury one week and I put off using the vest for a bit, and then a little brother gashed my face open with an elbow the next, and I didn’t get in as much training as I would have liked.
So I was unsure of how I would do with a full, weighted run on Memorial Day. I was a little worried about the vest, would I be able to get the reps in? Even short sets with the vest my breathing was so restricted it felt pretty rough.
Then the weekend hit and one of the bjj coaches announced a 6am class for Memorial Day. I, having shot off my big mouth and loudly lobbied for 6am classes and vowed to come to every 6am class, was obligated to go. And my best friend was going, so I was obligated to roll and roll hard.
So the day of, I’m up at 5am, I drink a double espresso to wash down a Modafinil, hit everything with the Theragun, and away I go. Perfect BJJ class: my favorite coach, and eight guys who are all adult men around my size. We learn some Americanas (love the theme), and then everyone wants to do a gauntlet style where we all line up and roll a four minute round, then shuffle one guy to the left and roll four minutes, and so on until everyone rolls with everyone. I’m feeling good, I’m not about to say no to that, and I got some great rolls in, but man I was wearing down by the end of the gauntlet. My last roll was against the coach, and the roll before that really wore me out, I had gotten lucky on him last time and he was coming at me hard, we fought through a lot of positions. Then the bell rings and I’m laying there on my back, panting, and I look up and the coach is looking at me, with his hand out to slap hands before we start the round, standing over me like a sleep paralysis demon. By the time I was done at 8am, my forearms, biceps, and triceps were pumped and my legs were exhausted. Great start, with the run starting in two hours.
Went home, showered, walked the dog, hung out with my parents, theragunned again, then drank a preworkout while I drove over to do the Murph. It was a way bigger event than I though, my friend had a big social circle in the crossfit community and a lot of veterans turned out to do it as a way to remember their buddies who didn’t make it back through suffering. I felt like I had discovered a lost land where everyone was either a bottle blonde hot fitness MILF, or a guy with at least one patriotism related tattoo.
I got started ok, but my legs were killing me from the beginning, and the rest caught up pretty quick. Adding the 20lb vest didn’t actually make me that much slower, surprisingly, though it may be that I'm just already about as slow as it gets. Neither did getting my ass kicked all morning. Both did make it suck way more. My calf was bruised from a series of leg locks, my triceps were already aching before I started, and running uphill was agony on my legs. But I kept moving ok, I just couldn’t breathe as well with the vest.
I’m very grateful I wasn’t overly occupied with my time or competition, because I’m going to take a second to bitch anonymously on the internet and say: GOOD LORD THE SHITTY HALF REPS I SAW. The vest is totally optional, you can run the whole thing without it. But I saw so many guys with the vest on cheating on reps, and I’m kinda like huh, what’s the point? Why put on the 20lb vest to make it harder and then not even do your push ups to parallel? Shit, I saw a guy doing push ups from his knees girl style; I'd sooner just take a DNF. Why do 100 pull ups and not get your chin anywhere near the bar? Like, look, I’m pro-kipping if you’re going to do competitive pull up reps for time, because otherwise it turns into a game of cheating, but some of these sets of pull ups were just like a weird wave spasm in the bottom half of the RoM for a few seconds.
I slugged through the calisthenics and got back on the trail to finish the second mile. It was brutal, I was slow. The second mile was pretty weak, which I thought to myself “I’m doing it half-assed to honor the US effort in Afghanistan” and started giggling and immediately thought I shouldn’t say that to anyone here.
Overall, fantastic Memorial Day workout for me, proving a point no one cares about to no one other than myself.
Leftovers:
— I need a new dumb goal to pursue. I think I want to get back to the KB Pentathlon, I’m thinking I want to try to hit max reps with my 20kg bell. It’s a weight I can normally pick up without a warmup, but somehow the extra 4kg makes it much better technically than the 16kg. It’s also the heaviest weight I can throw in my car for a long drive without serious packing efforts, so it can come with me on beach trips all summer. Technically doing all the reps with a 20kg would be less points than my previous PR by Pentathlon scoring, but I want to FINALLY hit max snatch reps in a set.
-- The facial stitches have healed pretty well. My wife thinks it's kind of hot, which I can tell is true from her behavior, and her refusal to admit it. Go figure. Might just be the novelty.
-- It's amazing how quickly BJJ went from something I was doing in lieu of working out, to something I was working out to get better at.
-- My hair loss, previously noted as looming, seems to have become less of an issue with long-term consistent use of Nutrafol. I'm unwilling to try anything stronger, so if I can buy a year or two out of it that's worth the effort for little harm. A year or three left of getting my summer coat in.
-- The post workout soreness from the Murph is a new animal for me, in that when I warm up to work out Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, the pain goes away, but leaves behind weakness, and I pump out too fast. Cost of
greatnesspremium mediocrity.I've said it before and I'll say it again: A hundred pull-ups is (are?) no joke. I can probably do 100 push-ups (though reading back through I see it's supposed to be twice that.) I can imagine a situation where I could do 300 squats. I can even run (though maybe not after all that pulling pushing squatting.) But 100 pull-ups. Put a gun to my head and I'd have to eat the bullet around 10. How do we get to the point of 100 pull-ups? Big strong men can be stymied by the pull-up because they're actually fatasses but strong. Wiry guys are put off because their arms just aren't strong enough (probably where I am). You have to be in some zone of badassery to do 100 pull-ups. Is this just me? Can everyone on the Motte do 100 pull-ups?
You're allowed to segment them, most people go 5 pull ups - 10 Push Ups - 15 squats. So if you can do 5 pull ups, it's not that you're "doing" 100 pull ups it's that you're doing 5 pull ups twenty times. So the gun-to-the-head scenario is more of a SAW style kidnapping, at worst, than a murder.
I see you in my mind's eye doing the whole goddam set at once because to not would be p**sy. Don't interfere with my placing of the pedestal, just hop up on it.
This is the kind of comment that isn’t really a Quality Contribution, but it is a great contribution to brightening someone’s day, and also I just really respect the commitment to the bit.
You made me laugh out loud in the barbershop, so congratulations, man.
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