Lessons From Murph

I’ve been doing Murph once a month for the last two years after being inspired by the book Killing Comfort by Jerred Moon.

If you aren’t familiar with the workout Murph, it’s as follows:

1 mile run

100 Pull Ups

200 Push Ups

300 Air Squats

1 mile run

All while wearing a 20# weighted vest for men and 14# for women.

In the book Killing Comfort, Moon talks about how he and his clients would utilize challenging workouts to develop mental toughness on a regular basis. They called this “Meet Yourself Saturdays”.

Now, I’m fully aware there are some people that have done Murph every week for a year, every day for an entire year, and even 19 times in 24 hours, so this is not me “bragging” that I did something hard once a month.

The concept: do this hard workout once a month, no matter what, to maintain a sense of accountability and mental toughness that will hopefully translate to other aspects of my life.

I usually did it on Sundays, always ran outside and did it unpartitioned with a vest 90% of the time. I also set a 60-minute time cap for myself since the workout intensity and difficulty changes dramatically if you had an unlimited amount of time to complete the prescribed work.

After doing this for 24 straight months, I’ve noticed a lot of correlation between what I experienced each workout and what someone may experience in life.

Here they are:

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1. It always sucks, but you feel more prepared.

If you’ve ever done Murph, you know that “ugh” feeling before tackling it. Even doing it over and over again, that feeling never went away for me.

But, since I had been there before and knew what to expect, I felt more prepared to face the challenge.

In life, when you constantly challenge yourself, challenging things become less challenging. If you live a sheltered life avoiding adversity at all costs, a minor inconvenience becomes catastrophic.

“Difficulties strengthen the mind as labor does the body.” – Seneca

2. That voice in your head never goes away

As is true with almost any hard workout, that little voice in your head eventually shows up trying to convince you to slow down or quit. At first, I thought as I put more Murph’s behind me, the little voice would come later and later in the workout before eventually not coming at all.

That turned out to not be the case.

What ended up happening was I came to always expect that internal voice telling me to give up and was better able to ignore it or “talk back” to it.

Sometimes it happened early in the workout, usually half way into the push-ups, other times it happened later in the workout during the squats. It was never consistent.

So, any time something happens in life, and you start to tell yourself “I can’t do this”, just know this doesn’t have to be a one-way dialogue.

“We suffer more in imagination than reality.” - Seneca

3. The PRs stack early on but get fewer and further between

Before I first started this, I had only ever done Murph partitioned into 20 rounds and without a weighted vest.

Once I started to introduce a vest and go unpartitioned, I was able to eventually stack some early personal records on how fast I could finish the workout.

This didn’t last very long as eventually I started to hit a plateau and had to push even harder for a PR.

Much like trying to lose weight, learn a new skill, or start a business, the gains can be fast in the beginning but become harder and harder to achieve as you get further into your journey.

Rapid gains help keep you motivated early but you’ll need discipline to keep going when these same gains start to slow down dramatically.

"Slow success builds character, fast success builds ego." - Ratan Tata

4. You can still find enjoyment in the suck

It’s not always doom and gloom, and neither was every Murph.

I pretty much always did the workout during open gym so made a playlist of songs I could rock out to while “in the suck”.

I also had a few people join me some months which added a sense of camaraderie as I wasn’t suffering alone.

As much as I didn’t look forward to the workout, there was always a small part of me that was excited for the music and company.

If you can find the silver lining in any case of adversity, you make it that much more tolerable.

"The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty." - Churchill

5. The longer you sulk, the longer you suffer

I distinctly remember the worst soreness I’ve ever had after a Murph. I did the workout on New Years Eve in 2023 and did absolutely nothing except lounge around on the couch all New Years Day. This resulted in some of the most intense quad soreness I’ve ever experienced. It was to the point where just touching my thighs caused discomfort and felt like someone took a baseball bat to my legs.

As a PT by trade, you’d think I’d know better not to do this, but we all make mistakes!

Early on, I would take 2 days off after Murph due to delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Eventually, I reduced this to one day of rest or even completed a light workout the very next day which helped reduce my soreness time considerably.

(This “active recovery” helps “flush” the muscles from the built-up inflammation sustained from microdamage that occurs during workouts.)

The lesson learned here: once you get through hard things in life, get back in the game as quickly as you can and don’t malinger over the challenge you faced. The quicker you can move on from it and onto the next thing, the quicker that challenging time becomes a distant memory.

"You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it" - Paulo Coelho

6. You’ll feel guilty avoiding discomfort

I had originally thought I’d alternate between wearing a vest vs. not wearing a vest and going through all the reps unpartitioned vs. breaking them up into 20 rounds.

I’d drive to the gym with the plan of partitioning all the reps and not going for a PR but would eventually feel guilty that I was taking the “easy way out” and complete the workout vested and unpartitioned.

Just like for workouts, you can develop this “productivity guilt” in life by constantly pushing yourself to do hard things. Eventually, you’ll feel guilty for not doing hard things and you’ll be wired to embrace adversity which will help you grow as a person.

Think of a “hard thing” as something you don’t want to do. Some days that may be a workout like Murph, other days it may be something as trivial as doing the dishes.

“The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding.”- Dipen Parmar

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Again, this is not a blog for me to boast about doing Murph once a month. Many people have done much harder things much more frequently.

This was also not something unique I came up with, just an idea that I read in a book written by someone who did something similar.

The point of this blog is to hopefully encourage you to challenge yourself the same way.

Maybe your Murph is a 5k, a marathon, fasting for 36 hours, or some other challenging hero workout.

Pick something, set it in stone, consistently show up no matter the excuses, embrace the lessons learned, apply this to your everyday life, and watch yourself grow into a more resilient person!