The Story Behind Jack’s Triangle Hero WOD

The following is adapted from a video interview between CrossFit’s Stephane Rochet and Brad Anderson, a former Reconnaissance Marine, CrossFit pioneer, and collegiate strength coach from Helena, Montana. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Some stories deserve to be told. The Hero WOD program exists to ensure the men and women behind the workouts are never reduced to just a name on a whiteboard. Brad Anderson reached out to CrossFit to request a Hero WOD for his friend Kevin “Jack” Dempsey, killed in action in Iraq on Nov. 13, 2004. What followed was a conversation about combat, friendship, loss, and why CrossFit has always meant something different to the people who’ve needed it most. 

Jack’s Triangle

On a 23-minute clock, for total reps:
Minutes 0:00-2:00:
Max deadlifts (155/225 lb)

Minutes 2:00-21:00:
As many rounds and reps as possible in 19 minutes of:
4 strict pull-ups
11 box jumps
13 hand-release push-ups
23-calorie bike

Minutes 21:00-23:00
Max deadlifts

155-lb barbell, 24-inch box

225-lb barbell, 30-inch box

You signed up for the Marines right before Sept. 11. Did that change your decision?

I signed up in June of 2001, so right before. During that year in the delayed entry program, you didn’t have to go. After 9/11, I still had the option not to ship to boot camp. But I did it.

What was the appeal of the Marine Corps?

I’m the type of person who wants to be the best, and I like to blow stuff up, so the Marine Corps made sense. But beyond that, I had the opportunity to be part of a unit that’s the best in the Marine Corps, and that really appealed to me.

So you went straight into the Recon pipeline?

I signed a contract to potentially become a Recon Marine. That just meant they’d put you in the pipeline, not that you were going to make it. I did boot camp, School of Infantry at Camp Pendleton, then Amphibious Reconnaissance Course on the East Coast. I also fractured my hip in training at one point and developed stress fractures in my femoral neck, so the whole process took closer to two years.

Where did CrossFit enter the picture?

Around 2003, 2004. The military wasn’t training smart: training to failure all the time, making meathead mistakes, no periodization, no long-term planning for how training was conducted. CrossFit was something different. In the moment, it was like, “Man, this just sucks.” But then you’d start seeing it in your everyday work as a Marine. Every once in a while, we’d make it out to the local box, mostly to meet women. CrossFit women are the kind of women you want to meet. But it was also a method to the madness, to be as good a war fighter as we could be.

How did CrossFit actually transfer to what you were doing operationally?

There are two facets: physical and psychological. Physically, take a goblet squat hold. You’re just sitting there. Well, out on the range, you’re holding a rifle up on target constantly. At the level we were at, there are no ifs, ands, or buts. You have to hit your target every single time. If that starts to go downrange and you’re not able to hold that rifle in position, you or your buddy is going to die, and it’s probably going to be your buddy if you fail.

You also need to sprint, cover long distances, and pull yourself up into a house or over a wall, which mimics a rope climb. Strength is always critical, too. I don’t care if you’re a marathon runner or a shot putter; strength and power matter.

Then there’s the psychological side. I don’t fully buy into the idea of mental toughness. If you have it, you have it. But if you train in a mentally tough environment over and over again, even if you’re not naturally mentally tough, you’ll learn how to react when things get hard. CrossFit is a constant challenge, and that carries over.

Tell us about Kevin Dempsey — Jack.

I met Jack at ARC, the reconnaissance course. He was a retread; he’d gotten injured or failed at some point, and they let him come back. He ended up making it, and we finished together.

He was a fighter, a brawler, and a former high school football player who found the good even in the worst situations. In ARC, we could be out there just miserable, and he’d have a grin on his face. You just wanted to beat him because of that smile. He’d be laughing at you because you dropped, and that just made you want to push harder. He was just a good person.

What happened on Nov. 13?

It was after Fallujah, and things were winding down. His team was on a foot patrol in Anbar Province, walking along a field near the Euphrates. It’s really green out there. They were walking along, and he found an IED. He told everybody else to get back, but he stood over it, thinking it wasn’t going to go off. Somebody was watching that time, and it went off.

You’ll hear this term from other military members: It literally turned him into a purple mist. The engineer behind him got hit, too. They tried to resuscitate Jack, but it wasn’t possible.

It was absolutely awful. It’s been 22 years, and it still hurts.

You came back to CrossFit after a long break. What brought you back?

I had quite the hiatus. I was in a very bad mental state when I got out. I got into college strength and conditioning and Olympic weightlifting. Then, one day, I met someone affiliated with Seven Devils CrossFit here in Helena. I was poking around about it, and she told me, “You can’t handle it.”

Wrong thing to say.

I went over one day. I’m focused on coaching, so I wanted to see how coaches actually coached. I gave them the rigmarole, told them I might be back or I might not, but in the back of my head, I was like, “Yeah, that’s the place for me.”

My first week back was Veterans Day, and I ran headlong into the Hero workout Jack. I had no idea that was there. I learned that they had all these workouts named after guys killed in action, and I was sold.

And then you submitted the request for a Hero WOD named after Jack?

Yeah, because Jack deserved one. If it weren’t for the military, what CrossFit has wouldn’t exist. We should be giving back to those foundations.

What do you want people to feel when they do this workout?

Give your best effort. Zero complaining. You can complain about any other workout at any other time, but on a Hero workout, there’s zero complaining. And for Jack’s workout specifically, you have to smile the whole time. Pay homage to who he was.

You have a background as a collegiate strength coach. What’s your take on how CrossFit should be applied in a military setting?

You need to account for fatigue. Fatigue isn’t constrained to that day or even that week; it compounds. You’re three weeks out, and you’re still realizing the fatigue from week one. You can continue training on what you need to; you just have to make adjustments.

Simple indicators help. How hard did this workout feel today? It should have been an RPE of seven, and if someone’s telling me it was a 10, we have a problem. A smart coach can find this information pretty quickly, and then it’s just a matter of knowing what to do.

The hard nut to crack with the military is tradition. Physical fitness has always been done a certain way. You’ve got some crusty guy who’s been around for 20 years telling you, “We’re just gonna run marathons all the time.” That’s hard to change.

What’s your approach to your own training?

I actually deload every nine to 10 weeks. I’ll just do half the reps on whatever’s on the board, go slowly, and watch people suffer. Drop off the fatigue, testosterone rebounds, cortisol drops off, and you can actually perform at a higher level. Remember, this is a long game.

People talk about getting older like it’s time to take it easy, but that’s not how I see it. As soon as you stop, you start declining. Even when you push hard, you’re going to decline a little bit, so you can’t take your foot off the gas. I tweaked my back a while back, and if I sat around, I got really stiff. But if I went to CrossFit and moved my body, I felt great. I guess I’ve got to keep moving.

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Montana native, Marine Corps veteran, and lifelong outdoorsman, Brad Anderson discovered CrossFit while serving with 2nd Recon BN, a program that helped him excel on the battlefield in Al Anbar, Iraq, from Sept. 2004 to April 2005. The experience turned his passion for fitness into a science-backed pursuit, leading him to earn degrees in Exercise Science (UM) and Coaching & Sport Performance (ETSU). He has coached collegiate football and baseball as a strength and conditioning coach, competed as a weightlifter, and now serves veterans as a Prosthetic Representative at the VA. A proud member of Seven Devils CrossFit in Helena, MT, Brad earned his Level 1 in March 2026 and is working toward stepping onto the coaching floor.

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About the Author

Stephane Rochet is a Senior Content Writer for CrossFit. He has worked as a Flowmaster on the CrossFit Seminar Staff and has over 15 years of experience as a collegiate/tactical strength and conditioning coach. He is a Certified CrossFit Trainer (CF-L3) and trains athletes in his garage.