This is the original big-daddy hero workout
1-Mile Run
100 Pull-ups
200 Push-ups
300 Air Squats
1-Mile Run
You can partition the pull-ups, push-ups, and squats any way you choose. There is no wrong way to do this, as long as you go hard. A good way for most people is to do 20 rounds of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, and 15 air squats. Wear your body armor or a weight vest; the weight doesn't really matter.
“I graduated from medical school on May 11, 2005,” he says. And that’s when things got hot. He was on a plane to Afghanistan two days later. “Then on June 28, we got the call that a Chinook [helicopter] had been shot down and a Navy SEAL team was missing.”
Operation Red Wings went as tragically as a mission can. Early on the morning of the 28th, the military dropped four SEALs—Lieutenant Michael Murphy and Petty Officers Danny Dietz, Matthew Axelson, and Marcus Luttrell—about 10,000 feet high in the Hindu Kush Mountains. The team was to provide reconnaissance for an impending action against guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah.
The plan twisted southward when some goat-herders caught the team’s position. Within hours, the SEALs were taking fire on three sides by a force of more than 50 anti-coalition militiamen. The SEALs, all wounded, were pinned against cliffs, which blocked the signal they needed to make a distress call. Understanding his team’s deathly predicament, Murphy, according to the Navy, “unhesitatingly and with complete disregard for his own life moved into the open, where he could gain a better position to transmit a call to get help for his men. . . . This deliberate and heroic act deprived him of cover and made him a target for the enemy. . . . He was shot in the back, causing him to drop the transmitter. Murphy picked it back up, completed the call and continued firing at the enemy who was closing in.”
Murphy, Dietz, and Axelson died on that mountainside. As did the 16 Special Forces service members whose helicopter was shot down while racing in to extract the four SEALs. Luttrell escaped. Locals discovered him and carried him to a nearby village, where they kept him for three days. Luttrell’s story is told in the book and movie Lone Survivor. “I was the pararescue team leader that rescued Marcus Luttrell and recovered Michael Murphy and Danny Dietz,” Dr. Appel says.
He kept the body armor he wore when he recovered Murphy’s body. Two years later, after he’d started with CrossFit and realized that the Murph workout on the board was, in fact, the same Murph, he went to the owner of Albany CrossFit and was like, “Hey, we should get everyone together and do a hero workout on Memorial Day.” Dr. Appel suggested Murph. “We had 13, maybe 15 people. I thought it would be cool if everybody did Murph, so everyone has the same goal and is working towards the same thing.” He wore his body armor.
“It was very unifying and brought all kinds of people together,” Dr. Appel says. “It wasn’t a race. It was just going out and suffering together for Memorial Day and thinking about the people that have sacrificed everything. Just imagine how the people storming the beaches of Normandy or hiking the jungles of Vietnam or liberating Iraq felt like. It sounds kind of corny, but it drives and motivates you.” Dr. Appel wondered, Could it be bigger? “I thought this should be a national thing,” he says.