Memorial Day ‘Murph': Could you complete this military fitness challenge?
As Americans honor the day in their own ways, people across the country will be participating in a tough fitness challenge honoring fallen Navy SEAL Lt. Michael Murphy.
The challenge, known as "the Murph," consists of a variety of strength training and cardio activities, which Murphy himself used to complete during SEAL training.
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Murphy's former SEAL roommate, Kaj Larsen, told Fox News Digital how he also participated in these workouts, which have turned into a national movement of patriotism.
"Murph and I would often run to the pull-up bars and then do this workout where we did 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups and 300 air squats, and then we'd run back to our barracks room," Larsen said.
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"The total run was about a mile to the pull-up bars and a mile back, and this became one of Murph's favorite workouts."
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Murphy would often wear his body armor as a challenge, originally calling the workout "Body Armor."
Now, tens of thousands of people on Memorial Day complete "the Murph."
"It's a really beautiful way to honor him," Larsen said. "Murph would have loved the idea of thousands of people sacrificing through sweat. That was right up his alley."
He added, "He loved working out. And I think he's smiling down on us as he sees us all doing one of his favorite workouts."
The classic Murph consists of the following exercises, in order or broken up:
one-mile run
100 pull-ups
200 push-ups
300 air squats
another one-mile run
Murphy and Larsen would often do the workout with a 20-pound weighted vest, which is optional.
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For those looking to attempt the Murph this Memorial Day, Larsen said there is "no one way" to do it.
While some people train all year for the Murph, modifications are acceptable.
This can include partitioning the reps of push-ups, pull-ups and squats into sets, or subbing out pull-ups for jumping pull-ups or assisted pull-ups with a band. The runs can also be walked, Larsen noted.
"The point is to do something hard that challenges yourself in recognition and honor of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice," he said. "And if you do that, you have done the Murph."
Larsen, currently head of military investing and communications at Siebert.Valor, the military arm of Siebert Financial, spent 13 years in Naval Special Warfare as a SEAL and left the military at the rank of lieutenant commander.
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The veteran spent his rookie years with Murphy, who joined through Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training (BUDS) in 2001.
SEAL Officer Murphy, the son of a New York firefighter who is originally from Long Island, was part of a team that specialized in long distance and special reconnaissance.
In 2005, during his first combat deployment to Afghanistan, Murphy was part of Operation Red Wings, designed to go after a senior-level Taliban operative, Larsen described.
The operation has been memorialized as one of the greatest losses in Naval Special Warfare history.
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Murphy's team was compromised, overwhelmed by superior forces as a firefight broke out. There were no survivors except for one SEAL, Marcus Luttrell.
A Quick Reaction Force (QRF) helicopter with eight SEALs flew in to support the SEALs on the ground, Larsen said.
This helicopter arrived due to Murphy's moment of heroism, where he exposed himself to "excessive enemy fire" to reach radio communication, Larsen recalled.
"He got up on top of a boulder, which was the only place that he could make comms to call in the quick reaction force," he said. "This ended up saving the life of Marcus Luttrell."
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"Mike was killed on June 28, 2005, in Afghanistan. They identified him in part because underneath his uniform, he was wearing a New York Fire Department T-shirt – FDNY T-Shirt – as a tribute to his dad, Daniel Murphy."
Murphy received the Medal of Honor for his actions that day, and the U.S. Navy commissioned a battleship named the USS Michael Murphy.
Operation Red Wings has since been immortalized in a book by Marcus Luttrell and in the movie "Lone Survivor" starring Mark Wahlberg.
A museum in Murphy's honor was also built in his hometown of West Sayville, New York.
Murphy's workout was also picked up after his death by the CrossFit community, which turned it into a "massive cultural movement," Larsen said.
"The Murph is hard, and it's designed to be hard," he added.
"And I, for one, just appreciate everybody continuing to keep Murph and other soldiers like him who have paid the ultimate sacrifice in their hearts and in their minds."Original article source: Memorial Day 'Murph': Could you complete this military fitness challenge?
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Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: The Stratford Festival of theater rediscovers a beating Canadian heart
STRATFORD, ONTARIO — Settling in my seat for 'Annie' at the Stratford Festival of Canada, I awaited with perennial pleasure the overture's trumpet solo for 'Tomorrow,' followed by the chirpy sounds of 'It's the Hard-Knock Life,' a masterful little combo that first argues for optimism at all times before empathizing with our daily grinds. But it didn't happen. Instead, the 1,800 people inside the sold-out Festival Theatre here rose to their feet and sang the music of Calixa Lavallée, not Charles Strouse: 'O Canada, Our Home and Native Land.' The moment was striking because in some 30 years of attending Canada's most prominent theater festival every summer, I'd never heard the Canadian national anthem sung at a regular performance of a show. The Stratford Festival, founded by a British man, dedicated to a British playwright and popular with Chicagoans and other Americans for decades, had always existed within a kind of multinational, English-language detente. This year, surely as a reaction to President Donald Trump's rhetorical campaign to render Canada the 51st state, it just felt a whole lot more Canadian. At the Avon Theatre, during the intermission for that most Canadian of stories, 'Anne of Green Gables,' my eyes fell on the ice cream case, as they are wont to do. The outside of the fridge said Breyers. But inside was a local Ontario brand, McFadden's. Delicious. All that said, Americans, the festival says, have been returning to Stratford this year: U.S. visitation is up by 4% year-over-year. There is also something of a local campaign in town to make them feel especially welcome. At Revel, a local coffee house and distinguished pastry purveyor, a sign on the counter asks American visitors to identify themselves. If they do, they are treated to a free coffee beverage, courtesy not of the cafe but of a local benefactor who prefers to just go by Stuart and who gets billed daily, and who wants Americans to feel welcome to the point of funding their cappuccinos. He's the local version of Daddy Warbucks, whose crew likes to sing about how Annie 'put sweet dreams upon our menu.' As indeed she does. The year's Canadian vibe, a very lively and ebulliently choreographed 'Annie' aside, extends to most of the shows I saw here. The big hit this year is 'Anne of Green Gables,' a beloved Canadian coming-of-age story by Lucy Maud Montgomery about another outspoken redheaded orphan, this one a denizen not of N.Y.C. but of Canada's Prince Edward Island. As played by Caroline Toal, Anne 'with an e' captures her audience almost the moment she walks out on stage. A pre-existing relationship and familiarity surely helped, although that can be a double-edged sword. I watched young Canadian girls and women all around me sizing up the ebullient but vulnerable Toal in a matter of seconds and deciding she will do very, very well. Indeed. Improbably, the spunky Toal is the star of the Stratford summer. The new adaptation, written and directed by Kat Sandler, first sets the story within an outer frame, a book club taking on Montgomery's novel, which is a conventional meta approach. It then makes the far bolder choice of abandoning the period setting halfway through and asking the question, 'What would Anne be like today?' The idea works strikingly well, partly because we've already experienced the heroine in her actual period, so it doesn't feel as much like an imposition as other modernizations but instead feels helpfully ruminative, a stand-in for what every contemporary fan of the book typically wonders as they read. 'Anne of Green Gables' engages in a reconstruction of a broken family (not unlike 'Annie,' which builds its own) and the key, whatever the period, is the relationship between Anne and her two surrogate parents, wound-tight Marilla (Sarah Dodd) and deadened Matthew (Tim Campbell). Although possessive of a very Canadian stoicism, the two siblings blossom once Anne comes into their lives and all three of these actors understand what they are about and their journeys are consistently honest and moving. I'd argue Sandler's conceit, which is just as fun when Anne is dealing with her friends and love interests, overstays its welcome by a few minutes in the contemporary section. But with some judicious cutting, 'Anne of Green Gables,' which has much akin with 'John Proctor is the Villain,' and the same target demographic, strikes me as a very viable Broadway show. Other evidence here suggests that Canadian theater, and Canadians in general, are doing better than their neighbors to the south at focusing on the core values that hold the nation together. Take, for example, 'Forgiveness,' a new play by Hiro Kanagawa that is based on a memoir by Mark Sakamoto exploring how Canadians of Japanese origin with treated during World War II. As was the case in the U.S., anyone who looked Japanese was rounded up in Canada and treated poorly in work camps and the like, decimating families and traumatizing those who felt as Canadian as anyone else. 'Oh Canada,' one Japanese Canadian character cries out. 'I don't know if I can ever forgive you,' which is a central question of the show. There are, of course, many angry plays looking back on radicalized ill-treatment from the past. Most of such U.S. pieces fundamentally are accusatory. But the aptly named 'Forgiveness' also explores how conscripted Canadian servicemen were treated by the Japanese forces, who subjected them to horrific camps of their own, thus in part explaining (in this play) the challenges Canadian veterans in supporting the subsequent interracial marriage of their own children. The piece, which is directed by Stafford Arima, is too subtle and sophisticated to claim equivalence, or to try and argue which was worse than the other. But the reality of most theater, of course is that the audience skews older, whatever efforts are made to the contrary, and the retirees who flock to genteel Stratford each summer are only one generation removed from those remembering World War II. 'Forgiveness' functions not as a reckoning but as a dramatic truth and reconciliation committee that takes its viewers by the hand and helps them move forward to a multi-cultural and unified nation together. The piece is a tad lugubrious and struggles some with the common issues of dramatized memoirs that range across space and time. But Arima and his excellent cast keep us focused on arriving at the most moving of conclusions. I took a while getting out of my seat after director Antony Cimolino's production of 'The Winter's Tale,' which I've long felt to be the most moving of Shakespeare's last plays, given that it proffers the ability to bring a loved one back from the dead, and someone who died due to the main character's folly of myopia and narcissism. If you know the play, you'll recall that the jealous King Leontes not only effectively kills his faithful wife, Hermione, but tries to get rid of his daughter, Perdita, who is saved only by an underling whisking her away in the nick of time. Thanks to merciful powers and his own much delayed self-knowledge, Leontes gets another chance with both of those loved ones. That's always moving, especially when you have a deep well of an actor like Graham Abbey playing Leontes. But Shakespeare leaves Leontes and Hermione's son, Mamillius, dead. He died from distress at his mother's arrest and he usually just lingers at the end, unseen and unspoken. Not here. In this production, he arrives accompanied by an angel. Leontes thinks he has got him back, too. But no. Not all of our mistakes can be corrected, Cimolino first seems to be saying. But the exquisite moment then suggests that Mamillius can still forgive from immortality, and thus Leontes still can be forgiven. It's affirmative and deeply sad. I won't quickly forget the end of this summer telling of 'The Winter's Tale.' On this trip, that leaves me with director Robert Lepage's 'Macbeth,' a wacky production that imagines the Scottish play as a feud between coke-snorting bikers. Settings include a roadside motel, from a balcony wherein Lucy Peacock's all-in Lady M falls most theatrically, a gas station and a parking lot with outdoor grills, the flame-throwing lair of the twisted sisters. When Macbeth meets his pre-ordained fate, Birnam Wood arrives in the form of bikers riding what look like real bikes, all carrying little verdant trees on their handlebars. There's another rub too. Tom McCamus, who plays Macbeth, is a 70-year-old actor and a great veteran star of this festival, as is Peacock, a fine foil. That's a cool idea. Most of Shakespeare's characters shift in age according to which scene you are in. No reason not to push that envelope a bit with an actor of this skill and lucidity, Alas the concept, which uses the cinematically fused iconography familiar to we longtime fans of LaPage, doesn't really work because it doesn't establish enough gravitas among the biker gangs to really make you believe they are dealing with matters of honor and destiny; it is as if the characters are putting on the drama, which can work fine with many of the Bard's works, but not this one. Macbeth is meta all by itself. It does not need any frame for it work its horrors. Still, any festival of Canadian identity — even if I think that mostly is unconscious — has to deal with the Quebecois, the yang to the yin of rural Ontario, which isn't far removed from Minnesota nice. That only gets you so far with the Scottish play. Lepage always offers a little Francophone disruption wheresoever he roams, disruptingly, and 'Macbeth' never really works, anyway. Except on us poor suckers who fall prey to its curses.
New York Post
3 hours ago
- New York Post
Prince Harry ‘desperate' to win back royal family with latest peace offering to King Charles: expert
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Fordwich noted that, according to palace insiders, the king 'has expressed being 'cautious and wary' regarding fearing further unsavory leaks, [especially] private royal family gatherings being publicized yet again.' 'Also, overall doubt still prevails in Prince William's camp,' Fordwich claimed. 'He considers any reconciliation at all as a 'grave mistake.' His senior royal courtiers are understood to be just as wary and immensely protective of the future monarch. They only see [a reconciliation] as creating more bombshells, as well as instability.' 7 Prince Harry has reportedly offered to share his diary of engagements with the royal family. AP Advertisement According to the outlet, Harry's proposal will allow transparency, avoiding conflicts between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's public outings and the British royal family's engagements. This will also attempt to quash rumors the Sussexes are trying to overshadow the royal family. 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USA Today
4 hours ago
- USA Today
Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad triggers liberals. She looks good. They don't.
Sales revenue from the new 'Sydney Jean' will benefit a crisis phone line. Instead of focusing on the positive, liberals have attacked actress Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle. Actress Sydney Sweeney and I share a few things. We're both blonde (mine is natural; I'm not sure about hers). We have blue eyes. We have the same birthday. And we were born in the Pacific Northwest − she in Washington, I in Oregon. Sadly for me, that's where the similarities end. And it's why I work for a newspaper and Sweeney is on the big screen. Sweeney is beautiful in a classic girl-next-door kind of way. No wonder American Eagle recently chose the 27-year-old to star in some sexy new ads for the clothing company's jeans. The advertising campaign showcases Sweeney's 'great jeans,' with a playful reference to her 'genes.' She clearly was gifted with good ones. 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,' Sweeney says in one ad. 'My jeans are blue.' It's clever and fun. So why am I even talking about this? Because liberals have lost their minds over it, accusing both American Eagle and Sweeney of sending a racist message. Some have outright called the ads 'Nazi propaganda' and an example of 'White supremacy.' It's a ridiculous overreaction to an advertisement featuring a successful, attractive celebrity. And it's the latest example of how the left refuses to let go of their woke agenda and identity politics, which were soundly rejected in the 2024 election. Leno's right: Colbert got canned because Americans are tired of left's lectures | Opinion Is Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad 'tone-deaf'? Not at all. After American Eagle announced its collaboration with Sweeney on July 23, its stock jumped, signaling the market understood this was a smart move. 'Sweeney's girl next door charm and main character energy − paired with her ability to not take herself too seriously − is the hallmark of this bold, playful campaign,' American Eagle wrote on its website. The fall campaign features 'The Sydney Jean,' created in partnership with Sweeney. All the revenue from the sales will be donated to the Crisis Text Line, which offers free mental health support. Rather than focus on the positive, however, progressives turned to mob mode, calling names and threatening to boycott the company and Sweeney. 'During a time when DEI is under attack and there are mass deportations occurring daily, an ad campaign centered on how awesome it is to be white and blonde-haired and blue-eyed reads as rather tone-deaf,' a writer for Vulture muses. Vanity Fair asks, 'Does Sydney Sweeney have 'great jeans,' or has the American Eagle brand simply had a very, very bad idea?' while noting that the campaign is 'based around a play on words that may seem harmless − but has been criticized by onlookers who see a sinister message lurking beneath the pun.' Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store. Yet, that same Vulture article also mentions how Sweeney's ad campaign is a direct nod to one Brooke Shields did for Calvin Klein in the 1980s. Americans are sick of DEI. Sweeney's ad signals a reset. Maybe the American Eagle-Sweeney collaboration is simply a throwback and not eugenics-promoting? In a recent interview with NPR, former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (and rumored 2028 Democratic presidential contender) acknowledged that Democrats have been 'slow to understand some of the cultural changes that have been happening.' 'I think there's a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board, or that we were only for you if you fit into a certain identity bucket,' Buttigieg said. That's exactly what Democrats have done, focusing on race and gender identity to the point that it's ostracized a large number of voters. Opinion: Democrats waste $20 million to learn why they lost men. Here's my free advice. Whether progressives want to admit it, the country is still majority White and these Americans are tired of being made to feel evil or unworthy simply because of their immutable characteristics. No one should be made to feel that way. Companies and colleges are starting to roll back their diversity, equality and inclusion adherence that has felt oppressive in recent years and led to more division – not less. Sweeney is a young woman who's capitalizing on her good looks and charm. Good for her. And good for American Eagle for bucking the DEI trend. Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@ or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
