Getting Hy On Fitness
Hyrox is the world’s biggest indoor fitness competition, pitting athletes against each other in a battle of burpees, sled drags, wall balls and every move you love to hate – with a dash of running thrown in, too. MH’s David Morton signed up for the toughest 90 minutes of his life
Ihave done some silly things to fly the Men’s Health flag in the near decade and a half that I’ve worked for the brand. I’ve completed an Olympic-distance triathlon with very little training, suffered thickly numb extremities in a 4.5°C Scottish loch and fought (and lost) a professional MMA fight.
All of which is why, when asked by another athlete in the start pen, 30 seconds before I began my first Hyrox race, if I was at all as nervous as he was, my answer was, ‘What’s the point? We’re going to do it anyway.’
In retrospect, I perhaps should’ve been a touch jittery. Conceived in Germany, developed on mainland Europe and reaching maturity at extreme scale in the US, Hyrox is the biggest indoor fitness event in the world. The concept is deceptively simple. The competition starts with a 1km run, followed by a functional workout. You repeat this eight times, with a different workout after each 1km lap. In order, they are: 1km on the
SkiErg, a 50m sled push, a 50m sled pull, 80m of burpee broad-jumps, a 1km row, a 200m kettlebell farmer’s carry, 100m of sandbag lunges, then 100 wall balls.
The distances and order of the movements are always the same. From New York to Hanover, Los Angeles to Maastricht, every race is consistent, which allows regular competitors to better themselves and the elite athletes to rank on a global leader board. There are no Olympic lifts or muscle-ups, meaning skill acquisition is no barrier to entry. It is functional fitness in the very purest sense.
After signing up for January’s Manchester event, I knew I wasn’t going to worry the top athletes in the world. But I did want to arrive prepared and had Hyrox master trainer Jade Skillen as my guide to the realities of conditioning specifically for the sport. A former semi-pro footballer whose career was prematurely ended by serious illness while studying biomechanics in the
US, Skillen switched to competing in Spartan races and was the UK champion in 2018. After segueing into Hyrox with similar success as an athlete, she began sharing her learning through training before Covid hit. As the brand prepared its move into the UK, she became the one and only in-house coach.
Skillen’s programme tasks me with a lot of running, as well as performing the various functional components in a pre-exhausted state. ‘A lot of people look at the 1km distance and think that, because they can run a fast 5K or 10K, they’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘But each workout element kills their pace and they end up walking. Oh, and the sled. People are very shocked about how the sled feels!’ The sled weights in my division are 125kg for the push and 75kg for the pull. During training, it definitely shocks me.
I meet Skillen the evening before the event at the Manchester Central Convention Complex. Formerly the city’s major train terminus, the cavernous space is already primed with all the equipment, Puma hoardings, spectator zones and a small vendor village. All that’s missing is the other 2,499 registered competitors. MH Elite coaches Faisal Abdalla and Gustavo
Vaz Tostes, who are the MCs for the event, are each busy going through their soundchecks.
Skillen and I run through a few movements in the warm-up area, so she can provide me with some last-minute cues. We establish my pacing on the ski and the row, which feel comfortable enough. I push the sled with more weight than necessary to make 125kg feel easy the next day. It all seems great. I mentally, secretly, set myself the goal of completing the race in a time of 1:20 while on my way back to my hotel and then climb into bed. I sleep terribly.
TIME TO ROX
With my heat starting at 1.10pm, I have plenty of time to watch a lot of very fit people running, repping and generally fitnessing extremely quickly. I resolve to start slowly and pick up speed in the second half. Aiming for negative splits (the technical name for this race strategy) feels professional and right. And I want to be professional about it.
Just seconds after my words of encouragement to my nervy fellow competitor, we shoot from the starting pen into the 2.5 laps around the outside of the hall that is the first 1km. I run slowly, holding a 5:15 pace. Or at least I think I do. When I reach the first station in the middle of the running track, which is a 1,000m jaunt on the SkiErg, I am blowing like one of the steam trains that once puffed in and out of this same building.
There’s a timing chip around my ankle and a giant scoreboard halfway around the course that tells me what stage I’m currently on; what lap of which run and, when I’m about to complete the 1km loop, which of the eight workouts I’m doing next. Fail to complete the full distance before each workout and you’re penalised, with five minutes added to your time per error. Complete the workouts in the wrong order and you get the same penalty. I am concerned now, already worryingly exhausted, about getting a penalty. I stare at my feet and hope for the best.
The sled push, all things considered, goes well. The lanes on the carpet here seem notably stickier; that or I’m more weakened by the first 15 minutes than expected. It’s likely a bit of both. But I have no issue getting it moving and march halfway down each 12.5m length before breaking for a few seconds and then going again. I overtake quite a few competitors who push for entire lengths but then rest longer. It feels as if the plan is working.
Then I start running. Or, rather, I totter out on to the track on wobbly legs that refuse to do what they are told. I plod on, staring intently at the white line that divides the ‘fast’ lane from the ‘slow’ lane, which seems to help. I am aware that having my head down is not the most motivational of postures but persist all the same.
The sled pull, mercifully, is more a case of taking the strain with your arms and walking it back a few metres before regripping than it is a backwards run. Which makes the next actual run slightly easier. But the burpee broadjumps loom large in my mind. Of all the moves I practised, that 80m of burpees and forward leaps had my heart pumping fastest.
It’s even worse than in practice. I knock out the first 20m length of the 80m snaking track at a measured pace, moving to the middle to pass a slower athlete either side. Over the barrier, a man returning in the other direction is gasping every time his chest hits the floor and groaning as he stands up. Oddly, the rhythm of this distracts my mind enough to keep moving. But it feels endless.
By now, my running pace has slowed right down, though out of necessity rather than a strategic choice. The
The wall balls are known for breaking people when they’re close to the end
farmer’s walk with two 24kg kettlebells is another welcome break for my posterior chain, being a test of grip and core stability, both of which seem to hold out okay. During the 1km row, I feel my quads start to twang the first chords of cramp, but I hold my pace. Just about.
By this point, I’m a sleeping passenger on the runs, sat atop increasingly distant legs. The car crash that is the sandbag lunges jolts me awake. With the 20kg bag on my shoulders, I and my lanterne rouge comrades snake back and forth, each tap of the back knee on the floor a screaming temptation to kneel for a bit.
But on we go. The final movement before crossing the finish line, 100 wall balls, is known for breaking competitors when they are tantalisingly close to the end. As I start my eighth and last run, the beacon of positivity that is MC Faisal Abdalla loudly announces to the hall that they are waiting for me and have a wall-ball target reserved right at the front. The 2.5 laps go very, very slowly.
HY TIMES
Stood there at the death, my T-shirt discarded after the burpees, squatting and throwing the ball to hit the target rep after rep, Hyrox comes alive for me. With the two MCs imploring me to go for another set of 10 across the speakers, the spectators at the barrier a few metres away seem suddenly sharp and full of colour and noise. I go for the last 20 reps unbroken and almost get there. Five more and I let the ball drop and stagger across the line triumphant, albeit with the slump of a happily defeated man. Once across, I collapse on to my hands and knees in what is evolutionarily the pose of deference and submission.
I do not care. Moments later I’m up and receiving high fives from friends and strangers. After another little lie down to eat some sweets and begin a battle against dehydration, I feel... okay. I know the DOMS is en route but won’t arrive for 48 hours, so for the moment I revel in being done and walk around barefoot to try to cool down my feet.
My Hyrox finishing time is 1:35. Not far off my 1:20 goal, yet at the same time an age away. My Apple Watch reports that I burned 1,650 calories all in. My Whoop strain score for the day is a new record of 20.7 out of a possible – but supposedly near impossible to hit – 21. Most amusingly, my Whoop app tells me that I spent 57 minutes at 90% to 100% of my max heart rate, which, it informs me, is 57 more minutes than I ‘normally spend in this heart rate zone while exercising’. I finish 339th out of all men on the day, 94th in my 35 to 39 age group.
Metrics aside, Hyrox is a feel-good event. Considering there are waves of 20 competitors setting off from 8am until nearly 8pm, it’s as smooth and seamless an experience as you could hope for in a competition of this scale. The judges and stewards don’t hover over you, but nor do they allow any shortcuts in terms of movement standards.
Parts of it were hard for me. Very hard. But there was always a light at the end of the tunnel, even on the burpee broad-jumps and sandbag lunges. You resolve to do your best in each struggle. Then you put it behind you and look ahead to the next challenge as a chance to do better. Which is a laudable way to race and, in fact, live your life.
I didn’t realise any of this during the event. There was no endorphin-wracked epiphany. I just stared at my white line and plodded on. For that reason, I will be in that starting pen again. I will not be nervous. But I will hold my head up.
Hyrox will be concluding its first season in the UK at ExCeL London on 30 April 2022