THE LEGEND OF MURPH
MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, 2007. Joshua Appel, M.D., 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, no doubt. But Dr. 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.
Dr. 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; do 100 pullups, 200 pushups, and 300 squats; then run one more mile. All as fast as possible while wearing a weight vest or body armor.
Dr. 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 med 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. And that’s
