As many of you know, we have a tradition of doing “Murph” on Memorial Day, as many other CrossFit gyms do. Murph is an especially challenging workout that gives us time to reflect on the life of US Navy Lt. Michael Murphy and all other warriors who never came home.
Last year we decided to make our theme for May “Hero Month”, and spend the whole month celebrating heroes who have gone before us, once again culminating with Murph on Memorial Day. We’re happy to announce we are going to repeat this theme in 2019! We will have different workouts, but the same warning order: expect at least one Hero WOD during the week of classes, in addition to our traditional Saturday group Hero WOD. This allows us to do two important things, one a mental exercise and one decidedly physical:
– We can spend the entire month of May thinking about and thanking our fallen heroes, whether they be military or civilian, American or foreign. Certainly you will see all sorts of heroes represented in our lineup of Hero WODs in May, as heroes come from many walks of life.
– We can spend the entire month of May preparing our bodies for Murph. Murph is an extremely demanding and intimidating workout due to the length of time that we’re expected to work – generally about 60 minutes – and the extremely high number of repetitions of pull-ups, push-ups, and squats. Coming into this workout mentally unprepared may cause you to lose focus and not get the best result you could. Coming into it physically unprepared may cause serious harm to your body, maybe even land you in the hospital. Respect the workout and respect yourself, and put the work in to prepare during the upcoming month.
Continuing with the theme of physical preparation, we encourage you especially this month to take your recovery seriously. Youngsters, take it from us newly minted “old folks” – taking on a lot more work and not spending time to recover afterwards is a losing strategy. As always, we will have well-thought-out mobility techniques before and after each workout programmed into the class. Please do not leave early! Take the time to understand why we are using certain techniques to recover – ask your coach! And then do them. That decision will help keep you safe and healthy through the month of extra effort, and then those mobility habits will stay with you for a lifetime of limberness.
In addition to recovery inside the gym, pay attention to your body during the other 23 hours of the day. You might need more sleep if you’re putting more physical stress on your body. You might need to drink more water, and less wine.
A final touch on this year’s Hero Month comes from Coach Jason, who in addition to remembering that Mother’s Day is the 2nd Sunday of May, he thought we should do something about it in the gym. Bonus points!! His idea was to do a week of “Girl” benchmark workouts in honor of all the female heroes that we call wives and mothers. And the rest of us coaches said, “sounds cool, let’s do it!”
The “Girl” WODs are some of the first workouts that Coach Greg Glassman ever conceived as different fitness tests for his athletes, and indeed if you go back to look at CrossFit programming in 2003 they would do these workouts very often, although most did not yet have names (2001 is the earliest recorded WOD on CrossFit.com). Because we label them as max-effort tests, the intensity level seems to be elevated on these relatively short workouts.
So there you have it folks, a solid month of intensity coming your way, scaleable of course to every level, but still a special challenge for everyone. Lean into it, and you’ll achieve an increase in your fitness, but maybe even better you’ll feel a closer bond with some of our named fallen heroes, and hopefully with the military operators, civil protectors, and moms in your life as well.
Ryan
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