Last weekend, I did my second Hyrox event after a solid five months of preparation. You may remember my
first Hyrox event back in November was messed up by injury so I had barely trained for preceeding two months.
The Hyrox is a multi-fitness event, where you run 8 x 1km with an exercise in between each of the runs. This includes 1000m row, sled pushes, sled pulls, farmers carry, lunges, burpees and more. The event was held in London Olympia, taking over the whole building. It was a very impressive set up, handling over 10,000 competitors during the three days.
The event went well, it felt completely different to the last time I did it. Unlike a marathon, where you all start together, every 10 minutes a new batch of competitors enter the course, they pump you up in the entry tunnel and you come charging out. This time I could also back up the early energy and really was able to push it throughout.
It is a funny event in that, after just the first few minutes you are questioning whether you can do it at that intensity. The beauty of the hyrox is that mentally you never are doing one exercise for more than a few minutes at a time. You run 1km, then you are doing an exercise, a few minutes later you are back running again. The way the arena is set up is that you have your friends able to be right next to you to shout support which drives you on yet further.
I ran it in 1 hour 14 mins and 48 seconds, which was 17 minutes faster than my first one. This placed me 408th out of 1835 people overall and 23rd of 173 in my age group. If you understand marathon times better, it is probably equivalent to running it in 3 hour 30 minutes. I am happy with this as my preparation was solid but lingering injuries meant I did very little medium distance work at higher intensties which would have improved my running a lot more.
There are two elements to a fitness challenge, one is how much preparation, focus and training do you put into the 3,6 or 12 months+ before the event. This determines pretty much what performance brackett you will fall into on the day. The other element is do you perform your best on the day, do you delve into another part of you to get through the hard bits of performance as desired.
For me, I nailed this latter part and pretty much put everything out there and paced it well. The preparation period was solid enough with hardly any real injuries causing me to miss exercise time but as mentioned above, the missed longer fast distances did not help. For this next preparation period I should be able to add this back in. In the five months building upto this Hyrox I did just short of a 150 training sesisons, including 70 runs totally almost 600 km, 30 strength sessions and 18
track group sessions.
What Does This Mean For You?
I had eight people come to watch me on Sunday and three of them now want to do the Hyrox in some form, but should you do it? This comes back to who you are, I think Hyrox should, and already is gettting a place on the ‘fitness things to do before I die’ type thing like running a marathon has been for decades. It is so accessible for everyone to do, from children to 70+, fast to slow (many people take 3 hours plus) and all body sizes. You can bring all your family and friends to watch and unlike the marathon where they just see you to wave once as you go past they can watch you for the whole event and cheer you on up close.
It is a healthy challenge in that you need to be fit and strong so you must develop both at the same time. I would highly recommend you consider joining in the fun. You can do it on your own, in pairs or as part of a team relay. There is a heavier and lighter category for the weights. I am doing the heavier doubles event in Birmingham in October and another solo in Sweden in December. To sample the training you can of course come to my
Fri-Rox class, which is a Hyrox style fitness group on Friday nights in Battersea.
Photo – Some photos from the Hyrox last weekend of my friends after the race and myself doing the various exercises –
