GETTING HY ON FITNESS

ONE IMPOSSIBLE CHALLENGE.TWO WEEKS TO TRAIN.GO

I HAVE 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