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Every year in the week before Memorial Day, something shifts around here.
People start asking each other the same questions. Are you doing Murph? What's your plan? Have you been training for it? And by the time Saturday morning arrives, the parking lot is full before the sun is properly up.
If you've never done Murph, or you've heard the name and never known what it actually involves, this is the guide. If you've done it before and you want to be smarter about it this year, the preparation section is where you should skip to.
Before the workout, the person.
Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy was a U.S. Navy SEAL from Patchogue, New York. On June 28, 2005, during Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan, he was leading a four-man reconnaissance team when they were ambushed by a much larger force. Under fire and badly wounded, he moved into open ground to use his satellite phone and call for help, fully exposing himself in order to get a signal. He was killed that day. He was twenty-nine.
He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the first Navy SEAL to receive it since Vietnam. Before joining the SEALs, he trained with a workout he called "Body Armor." It was renamed in his honor in 2005 and has been done every Memorial Day weekend since, in thousands of gyms.
We do it because remembering people who gave everything, and choosing to do something hard in their name, is worth an hour of your Saturday.
For time:
Done as prescribed, it's performed wearing a weighted vest, traditionally 20 lb for men and 14 lb for women.
That's the whole thing. Simple on paper, genuinely humbling in practice.
The difficulty isn't in any one movement. There's no skill you either have or don't, no weight you might fail. It's the volume. Two miles of running wrapped around six hundred reps of bodyweight work.
The push-ups are where nearly everyone runs into trouble. They feel completely manageable for the first third and then they turn on you. If Murph has a defining feature, it's the moment around rep 120 when push-ups stop being a movement and become a negotiation.
Rough brackets, for orientation rather than judgment:
Most people doing the full version on their own land somewhere around fifty minutes, which is a perfectly good target to aim at. Our gym record is 28 minutes with a 20 lb vest. [CONFIRM: is 28 minutes still the standing record?]
The intent of the workout is to finish in roughly an hour or less. If you're heading past ninety minutes, the intensity has dropped far enough that the workout isn't doing what it's meant to do, and that's a signal to scale rather than to grind. Scaling is not a lesser version. It's what makes the workout appropriate for you, which is the entire point.
This is the most important decision you'll make, and you make it before you start.
Do not attempt the pull-ups, push-ups, and squats in large blocks. It looks efficient and it is not. You'll get through the pull-ups feeling fine, hit a wall in the push-ups, and spend forty minutes there.
The approach that works for nearly everyone is to break the middle section into twenty rounds of five pull-ups, ten push-ups, and fifteen air squats.
Run the math: twenty rounds of five is a hundred pull-ups. Twenty rounds of ten is two hundred push-ups. Twenty rounds of fifteen is three hundred squats. You've done the entire six hundred reps in small chunks that keep your heart rate steady and let each muscle group recover while another one works.
Small sets, consistent pace, no heroics early. Every experienced person you see finishing strong is doing some version of this.
Not everyone has pull-ups. Not everyone has a vest, or two miles of road, or a pull-up bar. There's a version for wherever you are.
Full workout, no vest. Same reps, no added weight. The best entry point for most first-timers.
Half Murph, with or without a vest. Half-mile run, 50 pull-ups, 100 push-ups, 150 air squats, half-mile run. Excellent option and far more common than people assume.
No pull-up bar. Swap the pull-ups for 100 dumbbell bent-over rows.
No equipment at all. 1-mile run, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, 400 sit-ups, 1-mile run.
Nowhere to run. Swap each mile for 500 jumping jacks, or each half-mile for 250.
With a partner. Split the reps however works. One person works while the other rests, or alternate rounds. Partner Murph is a genuinely great way to do it the first time and it keeps the intensity higher throughout.
There is no version of this that doesn't count. Anyone who shows up and does the work is doing Murph.
Three weeks is enough time to meaningfully change how you feel on the day, if you're sensible about it.
Week one: build volume without going to failure. Accumulate pull-up and push-up reps across your normal training. Practice the partitioning by doing five to ten rounds of the five-ten-fifteen sequence and paying close attention to how your push-ups feel in rounds seven through ten. That's your early warning system. Add a couple of easy ten to fifteen minute runs. Don't wreck yourself.
Week two: simulate the middle. Pick a day and do the full twenty rounds with no runs attached. Time it. Note exactly where your push-ups start to slow you down. This is the single most valuable piece of information you'll have going in, because it tells you what set size you should actually be using. Keep the rest of the week moderate.
Week three: back off. Cut your volume significantly. Short sessions, a few sets of pull-ups, light running, some mobility work. You want to arrive fresh, not beaten up. The fitness is already banked. Nothing you do in the last week will add to it, but plenty could subtract.
Pace the first mile deliberately slower than feels right. Going out fast is the single most common way people ruin their push-ups.
Never go to failure on pull-ups or push-ups during the workout. Break early and break often, especially in the rounds where it still feels unnecessary.
Sleep well the two nights before, not just the night before. The second night out matters more than most people realize.
Eat an actual meal that morning. Coffee is not a meal.
Wear shoes you've trained in. This is not the day for the new ones.
And go in with a plan for what you'll do if it falls apart in the middle, because for some people it will. Usually the answer is to shrink the sets rather than to rest longer, and to keep moving.
Hard, obviously. But the thing most people remember afterward isn't the difficulty.
It's that they were in a room where a person doing the half version and a person in a weighted vest were treated exactly the same way, and the last person to finish got the loudest send-off of the morning.
Hard things done together mean something. That's why we keep doing it.
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