THE LEGEND OF MURPH
Memorial day weekend, 2007. Dr Joshua Appel, now chief of emergency medicine for the Southern Arizona Veterans Administration Health Care System, was a medical resident in Albany, New York, when he had an idea. The holiday had become a thing of beers and barbecues and bargains on mattresses and refrigerators. All of which are great. But Appel wanted to do something to remind himself and a few willing others of the day’s purpose. A way to contemplate with mind and body those who’d laid down their lives for us.
Appel had recently begun training at CrossFit Albany. “And I heard about this hero workout of the day called Murph,” he says. Hero WODs are dedicated to the memory of a military member or first responder killed in the line of duty. “And I was like, ‘I wonder if that’s the same Murph’. ”
It was one of CrossFit’s hardest workouts, a prolonged thresher that blended endurance and calisthenics with a whole lot of time in your head, beating back millions of years of human wiring telling you to slow down or tap out. Went like this: you’d run one mile (1.6km); do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 squats; then run one more mile. All as fast as possible while wearing a weight vest or body armour.
Appel wasn’t a typical medical resident. He’d been in the military since 1994 as an Air Force pararescueman, which is a combat search-and-rescue specialist trained to retrieve wounded service members. He enrolled in medical school in 2001. His rescue unit was activated and deployed to Turkey after 9/11, but his teammates told him he should stay in school, knowing how hard he’d worked to get in.
“I graduated from medical school on May 11, 2005,” he says.
