Yahoo Sports A dark pit of exhaustion and despair – the reality of Mark Zuckerberg’s impossible fitness challenge
As I write this, my hands are hardly able to type, my arms feel like they’re made of old bike tyres and I seem to have acquired the legs of a 97-year-old man. I’ve just completed the fitness challenge Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg undertook earlier this week and my respect for the tech billionaire has never been more intense. Whatever your feelings about the personal data economy, the man can do press-ups.
When you think of Zuckerberg working out, it’s tempting to picture him performing mouse clicks to build finger strength or revolving in his programming chair. Speaking as someone who has just taken on his latest feat of athletic prowess, I’m well-placed to say the geek stereotype is officially dead, buried and has had its ashes scattered on the lawn of Facebook HQ.
Zuckerberg just did the Murph Challenge, the cult workout popularised as a tribute to Lt Michael P Murphy, killed in action in Afghanistan in 2005, to raise money for charity. Lt Murphy performed an act of heroic self-sacrifice when his Navy Seals unit came under attack. As well as being hugely brave, Murphy was tremendously fit and the challenge is based on one of his favourite workouts. It’s a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and then another one-mile run.
Before you all rush out to your local park to try this for yourselves, there’s a catch. Murphy did all this wearing his military body armour. So we’re all clear, that’s a mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 squats and another mile while wearing a vest that weighs just under 10kg. I see you slinking back to your armchairs…
Zuckerberg completed his Murph earlier this week in 39 minutes and 58 seconds. (His older two daughters, aged seven and five, completed a quarter-Murph, unweighted, in 15 minutes.) Understandably, he posted a sweaty, muscular and rather impressive selfie explaining the meaning of the homage and how it felt. He was one of thousands around the world.
The Murph Challenge is a CrossFit hero Workout of the Day (WOD); a workout issued by the fitness network which members are challenged to complete in the fastest time possible.
There are a number of hero WODs – created as a tribute to fallen military service people, and there are more than 23,000 posts on the Instagram hashtag themurph, featuring pictures of happy and very buff competitors.
Key to the challenge is a weighted vest. Designed like a thick waistcoat, with small weights distributed evenly in pockets, these are available online and do indeed look like body armour.
Zuckerberg in his own social post is wearing a natty military-themed khaki design. I don’t own one of these so I filled a running rucksack with weight plates wrapped in a towel for padding. This is one of the worst things a person can do when attempting the Murph.
The CEO of Meta gave up running in favour of surfing and jiu-jitsu – a martial art he’s become so good at that he’s won competitions. Like the tech entrepreneur, I’m also dedicated to exercise – I lift weights, I run and also practice martial arts. But unlike the 39-year-old Zuckerberg, I’m 60 next birthday – there are exactly 20 years between us. I soon realised matching his achievement needed a little research.
I prepared by reading up and watching videos by CrossFit experts in an attempt to tackle this epic calmly and in an efficient manner. Everything I read and heard made my stomach churn with anxiety. I was running montages in my head that ranged from me on a stretcher mumbling about Zuckerberg to a baffled ambulance crew to me slumped and weeping while mothers tugged their children away.
The formatting of the exercises is crucial. The hardest way to Murph is to run straight through all the elements consecutively – so you literally do 100 weighted pull-ups in a row. Within the rules of the challenge, as long as you perform the mile runs at either end, you can intersperse the pull-ups, push-ups and squats however you like. I’ll admit right now, I googled “easiest Murph” with a prayer in my heart. The least horrible way to complete the challenge is 50 sets of two pull-ups, four push-ups and six squats. In other words, do two pull-ups, then four push-ups, then six squats and then repeat this sequence another 49 times.
I set up my timer, my set counter and my running app and started to jog around my local park. The weights in the towel soon found the vertebrae they were going to bully and torture. I weigh only 11 stone (I’m 5ft 7in) so 10kg took about five minutes to feel really tiresome.
Finally, I completed my mile and stood before the pull-ups bar and set my phone down and started the set counter. It was set 20 when my morale really started to flag. The spirit of the challenge is that it is meant to be a slog. This is a homage to people who sacrificed their lives in conflict. The hideous rucksack became a skin-scorching pain device and the push-ups began to sear my shoulders.
By set 30 I was pausing before the pull-ups – my form had gone to pieces and my facial expressions were all scrunching agony. Baffled dog walkers hurried past the lunatic with his counter and his look of intense struggle.
I’ll admit I began talking to myself aloud by set 38 – “Come ON, Phil”. The light at the end of this self-built tunnel was visible but very small. Everything was competing to be my Achilles heel – legs were aflame, arms were screaming, shoulders begging for mercy. But probably the skin where the rucksack dug into my shoulders won the discomfort award.
I started to think about how it must feel to exert yourself to this degree in a situation where your life was in danger. The north London park where I was experiencing this hell was full of people shouting at poorly behaved dogs – irritating, but not life-threatening.
Just as I dipped into a dark pit of exhaustion and despair, the challenge decided to really kick in. I completed my 50th set but I had another mile to run… with a rucksack that now seemed to weigh as much as a small cow and was made of barbed wire.
This final plodding stretch was where the Murph really made me think about grit. I love fitness but cannot remember a time when I have pushed myself this far, to the very limits of my capabilities. Knowing that Mark Zuckerberg, someone who could sit in a hot tub while underlings fed him caviar, chose to do this awful test, told me something about the human need for physical hardship.
But more than anything, it gave me a tiny glimpse of what it means to do something truly difficult – the hero tribute workout is a genuinely humbling tiny window into life for those who experience real danger on our behalf.
Oh, my time was one hour 20 minutes including stoppages to adjust my towel-wrapped weights. Never again.
Mark, if ever you’re in north London, fancy another Murph and you’re looking for a British training partner who really knows the area, please call anyone but me.
