Yeah that is a long word. When you break it down into rhabdo + myo + lysis it means striated muscle breakdown.

Muscle breakdown is normal. everybody knows that there are small micro lesions that occur when you exert your muscle. then when you rest, it repairs and is stronger for the next time you exert that energy or force through that same movement. It is your body adapting to the stress you put it under.

What I didn’t know in 2018, was what would happen if you pushed past that normal fatigue. And I would definitely pay for it.

The Workout

You may have heard of the Murph. But if you haven’t it is a workout that was popularized by Crossfit and thousands of people do it every memorial day as a tribute to the person who invented and was killed in action while serving in the U.S. military.

The workout goes like this:

• Run 1 mile

• Do 100 pull ups, 200 pushups and 300 air-squats

• Run 1 mile
  

There are different difficulty levels to it so it can be modified to a person’s level.

In 2017, I did it and broke the middle part into 10 sets of 10 pull ups, 20 push ups and 30 air squats. I did it, no problem. and I had a great time.

In 2018, I decided I would challenge myself by doing all of the pull ups before moving onto the pushups before moving onto the squats. And my body was not ready for it.

I was so tired, that when I went to do the last mile run, I couldn’t hold my arms at a 90 degree angle to pump them. I just thought that I was really tired and knew I hadn’t been training super hard leading up to the event. I wasn’t doing a lot of upper body work at the time because I was training for zones and nationals and all of my effort was going into diving practices and dryland for that, which does not involve a lot of upper body strength work.

The next 72 hours didn’t go well either

First, I was more sore than I had ever been and unbeknownst to me, my arm muscle was leaking into my blood-stream and beginning to clog my kidneys.

The Murph was done on a Monday.

Tuesday, I stayed home and skipped school because I didn’t feel well…duh

I couldn’t skip Wednesday because we had our senior physics field trip to six flags New England. I continued to get more dehydrated that day and was in pretty immense pain. At this point, I couldn’t move my arms away from 90 degrees without hearing and feeling a grinding noise and shooting pain in my elbow joint. On top of that, my arms had already swelled a good amount and there was almost no muscle definition. it was practically a straight line from my shoulder to my hand. no curves, no veins visible. Overall, not good.

That night, when I was getting ready for bed, the final clue really hit me. Prepare yourself for TMI. I was peeing right before bed so that I wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night when something a bit alarming happened. instead of a nice clear stream, or even a yellow stream (afterall, I knew I was probably dehydrated.) it was a dark brownish black.

I repeat, my pee was very dark and I was officially nervous about what was going on. I got out my phone and typed in black pee and muscle aches… and what do you know, theres a condition for that…

And no way, you get it from overexertion?!

And, you can have kidney failure… or compartment syndrome and irreversible liver damage. So, we were off to the hospital that night.

There’s a bit more to the story from there but the gist of it is that I spent a week in the hospital, missed all of my summer training, didn’t get to go to nationals, lost some friends and a large part of my identity at the time. All before going to the University of Florida to dive in the worst shape of my life.

But that was just the hand I was dealt. And I learned a lot from it. Here are the amazing life lessons that I learned and the exact reasons why i wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.