Honouring a hero

Sometime ago on this blog, I made a promise. It was a public commitment, but also a very personal goal. I promised that the next time I saw Murph, that I would do the whole thing. Murph is the name of one of the hero workouts, hardcore workouts named after true heroes.  I first encountered Murph when I was a CrossFit newbie and scaled it down by half to make it doable at my fitness level. At the time I was in awe of the strength of those who could do the whole thing and I wanted to be able to do the same.

When I made my rather grand (and frankly naive) promise, I honestly wasn't expecting to see this particular hero again quite so soon. So when I saw the workout last Saturday morning I was surprised (and not necessarily in a good way!) but I put on a brave face and arrived announcing that I was going to tackle the lot. No scaling down for me. Little did I know that before I arrived, the others were starting to talk about scaling down - I could have got away with it! But in the end we all took it on.

And this is what we did:

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

I broke the middle part down into 20 sets of 5 (jumping) pull-ups, 10 push-ups and 15 squats. I worked at a consistent pace, my 16 month old niece bellowing encouragement from the sidelines in her own special toddler-speak - that really kept me smiling through this hardest of workouts. No CrossFit workout should be easy, but this was a whole new level of hard.

And in the end it took me 64 minutes and 40 seconds. Not that I cared about the time, I just wanted to get through it. And I'm pretty damn proud of myself actually.