HYROX: the Best an Athlete Can Get?
This new, grueling fitness competition is rocking the fitness world… and I’ve just entered it.
As a rower, I’m pretty familiar with my quads being filled to the brim with lactic acid. I have finished 2km ergo tests and been unable to walk (or speak, for that matter) for minutes.
In fact, every time I finish such a test, I’m left a quivering, blubbering wreck on the ground, and it takes me hours if not a day or two to fully recover full walking mobility.
I think HYROX is going to be a little bit like that, except worse.
HYROX: the structure
If you aren’t familiar, here’s what every HYROX event involves:
- 1km ski erg
- 50m sled push (125kg)
- 50m sled pull (75kg)
- 80m burpee broad jumps
- 1km row
- 200m farmers carry (24kg each side)
- 100m sandbag lunges (20kg)
- 100 wall balls (6kg)
(Numbers in brackets are for Pro Women or Open Men, they are slightly lighter for Open Women and slightly heavier for Pro Men.)
That sounds pretty bad, but not awful, right? Except I left out one part: before the ski erg, and before each exercise, you also have to run 1km.
Somehow, that just makes it so much worse.
But I’ve entered it. 15th October, Birmingham, UK. I’ll be there, sweating through every pore my poor body has to offer. It might just be the hardest thing I’ve ever done — harder even than my marathon, I wonder?
The strategy
The great thing about HYROX is that everybody has their own strengths. Really good runners or triathletes often enter it and absolutely pace the 1km runs and then hit a brick wall (almost literally) on the sled pulls and pushes.
Some CrossFitters, rugby players, or weightlifters jog the 1km runs but go beast-mode when it comes to powerful ski ergs, rows, and weights exercises. 24kg in each hand for a farmers carry is nothing if your arms have the girth of a small tree — and that’s exactly where the slender triathlete will struggle.
Therefore, each person has to approach HYROX differently.
For myself, I like to think of myself as something of a jack of all trades, master of none — or maybe one. I’m a smalltime-weightlifter-turned-rower-and-runner. I’m 6-foot-nothing, weigh about 83kg, and have a fair bit of muscle but not enough to weigh me down. I think I’ll be average at pretty much everything — except the rowing machine.
I am planning on slamming the competition on that machine, where I currently spend most of my life. If I don’t come in the top 10% on the rowing machine, I’ll be pretty disappointed in myself.
I doubt that’ll make too much of a difference on the time — each exercise station (including the runs) is expected to take 4–5, maybe 6, minutes total. But a few seconds here or there is useful.
The timings
The interesting thing about HYROX is that you are tracked everywhere you go and the timings are done automatically. A small ankle tag monitors when you enter or exit a particular zone — say, the running track, or the rower zone, or the farmers carry zone. It then includes your transition time in each calculation and adds up your total time for your end result, which is what you are then ranked on. You also get ranked individually according to each exercise, and by your age category.
The average HYROX-er comes in somewhere around 90 minutes. A good HYROXer will be about 75 minutes. The world record (by Hunter Macintyre, an American obstacle-course legend) is about 55 minutes. I’m aiming for a sub-80 minute HYROX for my first time — I think that’s pretty fair, for me. Slightly above average, but not too far.
Confusingly, but because there simply isn’t enough equipment or space to go around the many thousands who enter each event, you are set off in a wave of a few dozen people who might be of very different abilities. You then mix in with waves of people who are already going. So you can be overtaking incredibly slow people, be overtaken by incredibly quick people, and (so I’m told) completely lose track of how far you are ahead of or behind the rest of your age category.
The best an athlete can get?
YouTuber Mark Lewis has been popularising HYROX through his (it has to be said) immensely down-to-earth and extremely enjoyable channel, which I have spent far too long watching of late.
He has entered his wife and himself into the Mixed Doubles HYROX at Birmingham (yes, team HYROX is a thing!) in order to give her a good fitness target and a test of her overall strength and endurance.
Both Mark Lewis and Hunter Macintyre, the HYROX legend and current world-record holder, refer to HYROX as something along the lines of ‘the best an athlete can get’. The exercises are so varied, the strength needed so great, the endurance ability so crucial, that it really does test every fibre of an athlete’s body.
That’s exactly why I entered it. When I was running that marathon (yes, that one, which went just catastrophically badly), I was thinking to myself “Well, at least I am a stronger weightlifter than most people here.” When I’m climbing and fail on a route that another boulderer just flashes, I think “At least I can row better than most people here. When I’m losing in a rowing race, I think “At least I’ve got the edge in X, Y, or Z”. And so on, and so on.
HYROX doesn’t give me the chance to make those excuses. HYROX will test almost every single ability I have in one neat package of pain. It’ll be perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever done to myself — but also the best.
I’ll be making myself a training plan next month, after my rowing season is over, and I’ll update that here!
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