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Smurf

In a way, this blog post almost feels like cheating. I covered the basic outline of the story over on the CrossFit blog I maintain, so I know roughly what I'm going to write. However, there's a bunch more background and lead-up to the story there, plus a highly amusing epilogue. So, I figured there was enough "bonus" material to warrant its own blog post here.

First, let's start with the setting. I go to a CrossFit class at work, and I have for a while. In fact, I've written about it once or twice here, because it leads to a good number of laughs. Well, because I've known these folks for a while, two things have happened. First, I've become friends with a bunch of the people, from the coach and his wife to a bunch of the people in the class. Secondly, because I've been going for so long, I'm something like one of the senpais. In short, I'm something like one of the "senior" students who can help mentor or fill in under the right circumstances.

Because I am someone who's been around a few times, though, that means people have no qualms with cracking jokes at my expense. That includes our coach, who will occasionally say things like, "don't cheat on these reps like Sam used to" or "don't take this the wrong way, but you have a smaller range of motion." It's all in fun, and I've never once been offended by any of it. It's all good-natured ribbing.

Anyhow, one of the things that the CrossFit community does is do tough work outs in honor of soldiers or law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. These are commonly referred to as Hero WODs (Workout Of the Day). The folks at our work gym aren't all that different in that regard, and we wanted to pay our respects by doing one of these after Memorial Day. So, we asked to do our own version of Murph. I say "our own version" because we don't have the proper set up to do large numbers of pull ups with a bunch of people, nor can we easily run outside to run a mile. We knew we'd have to modify it a bit, but it was the same workout in spirit.

Well, on the day of, our coach needed to bail because of a family emergency. He passed along the workout to us, and left it in our hands to do the work out. There are several people who have been around long enough that it's not a big deal. That includes me, mind you.

Now, I've never done Murph proper, so I looked it up. The link above is actually from the main CrossFit headquarters site. I figured we could just follow that, we couldn't go wrong. I mean, sure, we were substituting some exercises, but it's not like we were changing the number of reps per exercise or adding in any other restrictions.

So, when it came time to explain the WOD to our class, I piped up. That link says it's okay to partition up the pull ups, push ups, and squats. So, I said as much to the class. I would later find out that this sounded wrong to one of the other senior members of our class, but she chose not to question me. It was still a really good workout (doing 300 of anything as fast as you can will do that to you), but we basically did it that way on my say-so.

Well, I was wrong. Our coach didn't want us to split up the exercises. He wanted us to do all of one exercise first, then all of the second exercise, and so on. Normally, it's okay to split it up. But since we were already substituting exercises and the substitutions were arguably easier, he wanted us to keep it all together. That'd keep some of the intensity intact. In fact, he quickly dubbed the version we'd done "Smurf" instead of "Murph."

Remember, we did it that way because I said it was okay. Also, our coach is the same person who likes to give me crap for having a shorter range of motion. I knew he wasn't referring to me being short in this case, but the timing was too good. I cracked up when I saw all of the emails about this. In fact, I was laughing to myself for pretty much the whole afternoon. I really was that amused.

In fact, I was so amused that I shared this exchange with the coach's wife on Facebook. She also does CrossFit, and she used to come down to our class, as well, so she knows some of the folks involved. I was amused as all heck, so I tagged our coach, too. I wasn't trying to tattle on him, I was letting him in on the joke. That led to the following exchange, roughly paraphrased:

Me: "Haha, Coach said we did Smurf instead of Murph. And it had nothing to do with me being short!"
Coach: "That's not what I meant! That's hilarious, but not what I meant!"
Coach's Wife: "I'm so going to kick him in the shins for that"

I had a very hard time being serious about work for the rest of the day after that. I'm not even kidding, I still chuckled about it the next morning. Hell, I'm having a hard time keeping a straight face when writing about it now.

Who knew that exercise could be this funny?

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