What Is Murph? The Story Behind the Memorial Day Workout (And Why It Matters)

If you've been around a CrossFit gym in May, you've heard the word "Murph" tossed around like everyone's supposed to know what it means.

Here's what it means.

What Is Murph?

Murph is a workout. The Rx version looks like this:

1 mile run
100 pull-ups
200 push-ups
300 air squats
1 mile run

The pull-ups, push-ups, and squats can be partitioned however you want. Most people do 20 rounds of 5 pull-ups, 10 push-ups, 15 squats (sometimes called "Cindy splits"). If you've got a 14 or 20 lb weight vest, you wear it. The runs always happen at the start and finish, no breaking them up.

That's the workout. About 600 reps of bodyweight movement sandwiched between two miles of running. Most people finish in 35 to 60 minutes. It is, by any honest measure, brutal.

But Murph isn't really about the workout.

Who Was Lt. Michael Murphy?

Lieutenant Michael Murphy was a Navy SEAL from Patchogue, New York. He was 29 years old when he was killed in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, during Operation Red Wings.

His four-man recon team got pinned down by a much larger Taliban force in the mountains of Kunar Province. Outnumbered and taking heavy fire, Murphy moved into open ground to get a clear signal so he could call for backup for his team. He was mortally wounded while making that call.

He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions that day. He's the first Navy service member to receive it since the Vietnam War.

Why "Murph"? The Origin of the Name

Before the workout had his name on it, it had a different one. Mike called it Body Armor. He'd do it in his gear to prepare for the kind of effort combat actually demands. The runs. The reps. The weight on his shoulders. It was one of his favorites.

CrossFit posted it as an official Hero workout on August 18, 2005, about seven weeks after he was killed. The original write-up reads:

"This workout was one of Mike's favorites and he'd named it Body Armor. From here on, it will be referred to as Murph in honor of the focused warrior and great American who wanted nothing more in life than to serve this great country and the beautiful people who make it what it is."

That's how the name stuck. A workout he built for himself, renamed in his honor, now done by hundreds of thousands of people every year.

How Memorial Day Murph Became a Thing

Here's the part most people don't know: CrossFit headquarters never programmed Murph on Memorial Day. Not officially. Not as a directive. The whole tradition was built by the affiliate community, gym by gym, year by year.

Former CrossFit Director of Education Dave Castro put it this way:

"That the affiliates and the community came together on their own, independently together as all these micro gyms across the world to do this the same weekend, is an expression of the power of this community globally to an awe-inspiring degree. This was not an organized thing. This was not our organized effort to make Murph a thing on Memorial Day weekend. This was something that the community said, hey, we are going to do this on our own as independent gyms, and it's now this massive collective."

The earliest public mention of someone doing Murph on Memorial Day is a comment thread from 2006, one year after the workout was created. By the mid 2010s it had become near-universal. By now, you'd be hard pressed to find a CrossFit affiliate in the US that doesn't host some version of it on the last Monday of May.

It grew up from the gym floor. Which is fitting, because that's where Mike's legacy lives.

Why People Keep Coming Back to It

Three reasons, mostly.

Honor. Doing Murph is a way to spend an hour with someone who gave everything. You sweat, you suffer, you finish. Mike doesn't get to. That gap, sitting with it for an hour, is the point.

Community. Memorial Day Murph is the one workout of the year where the entire gym shows up together. People who haven't been in months come back for it. People who've never touched a barbell try a scaled version. It's the closest thing CrossFit has to a holiday.

Endurance. Murph is hard. Not "tough WOD" hard. Genuinely hard. Finishing it teaches you something about what you're made of, and gives you a small, honest taste of the kind of effort our service members put in every day.

CrossFit Managing Editor Nicole Peyton, who lost her husband Chad to suicide in 2021 and helped create the Hero workout in his name, put it this way: "There is no end to grief, it just evolves. So having something like a Hero workout to return to with each evolution really shines the light on how far you've come."

That's what Hero workouts do. They give you a way to show up.

Want to Train Smart for Murph?

A few hundred reps and two miles of running adds up fast. If you've never done Murph before, or if last year wrecked you for a week, training matters. So does warming up, pacing, and recovering properly.

A few resources from our team:

• The Perfect Murph Warmup: a 5 to 10 minute routine to open up your shoulders, hips, and back before you start
• Best Recovery Exercises After Murph: how to get your body back online after the workout instead of limping around for a week

We also have a piece coming this week on what to do in the 10 days leading up to Murph. We'll add the link here when it's live.

If you're worried about a nagging shoulder, a cranky knee, or a back that flares up every time you push volume, get it looked at before Memorial Day, not after. Book a free 15-minute call and we'll figure out if we can help.

Lace Up. Show Up. Honor.

You don't have to crush Murph to honor it. You don't have to wear the vest. You don't have to Rx it. You don't even have to finish it on the clock.

You just have to show up.

Whether you're doing the full version, scaling it down, or cheering from the sidelines with a coffee, the point is the same. One day a year, we put in real work in memory of someone who put in everything. That's it. That's the whole thing.

See you on Memorial Day.