Some context first: My fellow Lifehacker writer Beth Skwarecki is a weightlifter. I'm a marathon runner (my eighth is this October). A few weeks back, we figured we could make one reasonably competent Hyrox athlete. We put that theory to the test at the New York race on May 29, competing in the Women's Doubles.
Our Hyrox race results
We finished in 1:36:48, landing us in the top 65.6th percentile. These screenshots show how the Roxfit app breaks it down:
Credit: Meredith Dietz Credit: Meredith DietzThe spider diagram from Roxfit showing our performance across all stations reveals our relative strengths: sled push and burpee broad jump were our standout stations, while rowing and sandbag lunges yank that shape inward. I’d say that between the two of us, no one station was catastrophically weak. Still, what I see here is two athletes who are much better at some things than others, which is exactly what you'd expect from a runner and a lifter teaming up.
In prepping for the race, Beth helped me with a mental reframing I think is grossly underappreciated: the difference between "training mode" and "competition mode." In a workout class, you want to eliminate momentum. This is why you pause at the top of a rep and control the lowering. You make your muscles work harder so you get a better workout. But in a race, you actually want the opposite—you want to “hack” your body by taking advantage of every bit of momentum available to you, because the goal is speed, not hypertrophy.
What surprised me most about Hyrox as a runner
For women's doubles in the open division, the weight standards weren’t nearly as devastating as I feared. The sled push comes in at 102 kg (around 225 lbs), including the sled. The sled pull is 78 kg (around 172 lbs), including the sled. Farmers carry uses 2 × 16 kg (around 35.2 lbs) kettlebells for 200 meters. The sandbag lunges are done with a 10 kg (22 lbs) bag for 100 meters. And wall balls use a 4 kg (8.8 kg) ball thrown to a 2.70 m target for 100 reps.
A marathon tests your mind in a way that Hyrox, at least in doubles format, simply doesn't. For me, that's the crux of the whole comparison, even if it is apples-to-oranges in terms of physical fitness.
A marathon gives you hours of monotony, but that suffering is what makes a marathon a marathon. With Hyrox, so much constant variation means you're never really alone with yourself for long enough to start bargaining with a higher power. I've been thinking about what the solo experience would have been like, alone with my thoughts for the full hour and a half. That element might get closer to the mind games of racing a full marathon. But in doubles, Hyrox is almost mentally breezy by comparison. The stations break up the running in a way that I found relieving.
What I'd do differently next time I try Hyrox
From the community with other competitors, to the sense of fulfillment, to the physical challenge, to the mental resilience, I think road races are a deeper experience than Hyrox. I do get the appeal of the controlled chaos that comes with Hyrox’s nine different feats of physical fitness, and I want to be careful not to package my conclusion as "Hyrox was too easy," because it was not. We ran a smart race, had a solid partner dynamic, and still felt the burn. And again, I must emphasize that my form was, by my own assessment, less "sleek athlete" and more "inflatable tube man outside a car dealership." Still, that was after four to five weeks of frantic, targeted training. Who knows how I would’ve felt with a proper 12-week training program, or if we had run a less conservative pace, if I hadn’t had Beth around to do so much of the literal heavy lifting.
If I do compete in a Hyrox race again, I'd want more time to train the specific stations, as well learn as all the race-specific cheat codes available to you. The most important thing Hyrox and marathons have in common for me: After finishing one, I immediately want to sign up for another.
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