What Happened in Vegas…

HYROX Vegas 2025

I’ve run trails, summited Kili, safaried, and survived dubious bush planes with my friend Jason. More than once we shared moments when I’ve thought, “well at least this would make a cool eulogy”. He has a strong heart — figuratively and literally. He can climb anything. Fast. I can’t keep up but love trying. So thank you Jason for taking the time to write up your latest challenge — HYROX fitness racing. Over to you:

I love climbing mountains. If nothing else were ever required of me, I would probably spend nearly all of my time doing so. When I lived in Colorado (up until August of 2024,) satisfying this desire was as simple as driving 10 mins to my local 9,000-ft peak, getting to the base of a 14’er in under 2 hours, or simply walking out my back door to climb 1,000 vertical feet without ever leaving my neighborhood.

Then 6 months ago a job change took me to Seattle. The area nearby has mountain-ish terrain, to be sure, but not really of the Colorado sort of mountains. So my climbing took a pretty big hit following the move.

I’ve spent most of the previous year rehabbing from an Achilles tendon rupture and surgical repair, and I was at the gym working to build back cardio fitness and raw strength. It was going fine, but I noticed I was lacking the driving force of an ambitious goal ahead of me to pull me forward and create that anticipation and motivation we often crave. Then I overheard a fellow sportsman talk about a new competition he had just heard about and was thinking of trying. And it caught my attention.

A vaguely Crossfitty-type event, this contest is a blend of strength and endurance events, was invented by a German gold medalist in field hockey, and held its first competition in Hamburg in 2017 before quickly spreading throughout Europe, the U.S., and beyond. The competition is called HYROX, and it consists of 16 mini-events each requiring 3-6ish minutes to complete, with all of them performed in immediate succession. The clock starts running when you begin the first and stops when you’ve completed them all.

8 out of the 16 events are 1 km indoor runs. That’s what kicks off the race, and the running track encircles a sizeable “infield” type area (called the RockZone) which houses all of the 8 other fitness events. So you run a kilometer, zip over to your first station to complete the fitness task, then back out to the track for another 1km run, and so on until you’re done with all 16 events.

HYROX sounded like exactly what I needed. It requires both endurance and strength, has a competition element, and was something I could begin training for immediately. There’s a bit of special equipment required for the competition (rower, medicine balls, sled, etc,) though each item was either something I owned or was easy to come by via Amazon or at the gym where I already was training.

I dove into training quickly and found that the first thing I needed to do was start running a lot more. I once was a marathoner, have completed a few ultras including a 50-miler, and have logged a fair number of miles since my mid-40s. But that was before the Achilles injury, and before my focus turned much more to building muscle and developing a well-rounded physique as opposed to being a slim, (modestly) speedy jackrabbit. But half of this contest is running, so I figured I’d better get back out on the roads. I started covering 20-30 miles a week to get back some level of conditioning for the runs.

For my other workouts, I used a blend of training the exact exercise required for the race, along with something else that may mimic or support that training. For example, box jumps helped out for the burpee broad jumps, deadlift assisted my farmers carry, and incline presses and squat-thrusters were good for the wall balls event.

What I quickly discovered in my first efforts at training (and timing) the events is that each movement is a relatively easy action to undertake in isolation. There’s no particularly tricky training required for any of the events. Just about anyone reading this can push a sled, toss a 14 lb medicine ball 10 feet in the air, or bang out a few lunges with 45 lbs on your back. No problem. What makes it challenging is keeping this up for the required distance or reps. Those easy lunges start to bite once you’re 2-3 minutes into the task. The most fearsome moves I encountered in my early training were the burpee broad jumps and the dreaded 100 wall balls, which are sadistically structured to be the last event of the contest, so that you get your entire event to imagine them doing you in at the very end.

HYROX had a half-dozen or so competition locations that fit my preferred time frame, and I selected the February event in Las Vegas and registered for the competition. By this time my fiancé Katrese, a triathlete and half-marathoner, had grown curious about this new pattern of training I had undertaken, and she decided it would be fun to join the competition as well. So we continued to both work on getting ready for Vegas, and finally the time came to compete. We flew down and got there mid-afternoon on Saturday in time to watch the first day’s contest (our event day was Sunday.)

It was great to be there a day early to watch the competition in action, get a feel for the flow of events, and to see the layout of the event center floor before being thrown into it. We watched a continuous stream of athletes enter and eventually finish the course, as the competition features repeated staggered starts, with new competitors added to the course every 10 minutes. Those who began their race an hour or two earlier roll in to the finish, hear their name called by the PA announcer, and see their name and time pop up momentarily at the top of the finisher board. The average time to completion for all racers is about 95 minutes; first-timers average more like 100 minutes to finish. I pronounced my goal of 90 minutes and Katrese set out to beat 110 minutes.

Having seen enough of the prelims, we set off to find a light dinner and get to bed early, excited and slightly anxious about the next day’s events. Sunday AM came quickly, and we headed over to the start. After I checked in, warmed up for about 15 minutes, and pondered for the last time my mental keys to each event, I finally entered the corral from which my heat was about to be released. And then I was off running.

“Pace yourself…” was my mantra from the very first lap. I knew from running a couple dozen other races the ease with which one can be swept into the energy and surge from the starting line. A month before, Katrese and I had done a mini-HYROX PFT, basically a super condensed version of the contest that takes about 25 minutes. The PFT is designed to let athletes see if this is something they would like to pursue…and hopefully to get you hooked. I enjoyed that contest, but I pushed myself pretty hard in the run and the hand-release pushup event (not an official HYROX event,) so I was gassed when I got to the wall balls and struggled through them. I was determined not to let that happen again.

Before I knew it, I was in for the ski-erg, then back out on the course again. Next up was the sled push, which at roughly 350 lbs for 50m is a fairly serious effort. I had spoken with a very fit and competitive gentleman that morning who was aiming to win a spot at nationals based on his performance in Vegas. He told me, “the race doesn’t even start until the broad-jumps.” Essentially he meant, do not blow out your effort on either of the sleds; get through them with steady, focused effort, as a heart-rate spike in the first few events with much of the race still to come can be a big mistake. The sled pull went easier than expected for me (it was one of my best events on a relative basis,) and I started to settle into a rhythm of getting out on the track, hitting my pace, then back in for an event.

I was ready for the burpees. I had trained very hard for them, trying to hit 150 pushups a day, and training the jumps with 5-minute stints of uninterrupted box jumps 1-2 times per week. I also focused on my technique, staying low on the jump and using a step-up technique to get in position for the next jump rather than a more energy-consuming frog-hop. This served me well, as I finished the broad jumps in a top quintile time without blowing out the effort. The farmer carries were a breeze (they are the fastest event for nearly everyone,) and I was down to 2 tests left. Here I reached the point where I think I could have improved my results with the hindsight of experience.

I had decided early on that the runs would be my “rest” throughout the event, so I set a target pace that would let my heart rate settle down on each run after having risen noticeably during each strength event. With 2 runs left, I continued that strategy and did rest somewhat on both of them, keeping essentially the same pace I had throughout the entire event. In hindsight, I had more in the tank. After the farmer carries, I could have pushed one level harder on run 7, cranked through the lunges more quickly than I did, and legged it out even a bit more on the final run. I had taken my pacing strategy slightly too deep in the race.

The benefit of this, however, is that the wall balls were not the obstacle I had feared. Yes, they were hard, but they didn’t really start to bite until about rep 70 or so, after which point the end is near enough that you can mentally grind it out with the knowledge that the pain will soon be over after just another few tosses of the weighty sphere. Eventually I dropped the ball to the ground and sprinted across the finish line to achieve a total time of 1 hour and 28 minutes. I was happy that I’d hit my goal, but especially thrilled to be done exerting for that day!

Soon Katrese had her chance to toe the starting line, and she ran, pushed, jumped, rowed, and carried her way through the events. Women participate in all the same events that men do, though the weights they use for the sled push/pull, lunges, farmer carry, and wall balls are lower than the men’s weights (and they do 75 wall balls instead of 100.) It was fun to track her throughout the events, get a lot of good pics, watch her tough it out when things got a little challenging at the burpee broad jumps, and cheer her on to the finish in just under her goal time. It was also a chance for me to reflect on my own performances and to make mental notes on where I could shave off seconds (or maybe even minutes) in future races. We then headed off for a hard-earned dinner of Hawaiian pork and a barley pop or two.

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked since the HYROX event is whether I would compete in it again. My answer: “Absolutely.” I don’t intend to make this an all-consuming obsession or anything, but I would enjoy pushing that completion time down by a few minutes, and it does make for a fun way to keep both strength and endurance training in mind through the winter months in Seattle or Colorado. So perhaps one competition a year is in my future.

But next up: Elevation Everest. At my favorite ski resort, I’ll be seeking to climb the mountain at least 12 times (maybe more if I can) and gain over 19,000 feet of elevation (that’s roughly the elevation of the Mt Kilimanjaro summit) under my own power in 12 hours.

My training for this event – move uphill. A lot. My training plan calls for over 100,000 feet of elevation gain before the event this fall. So time to stop writing…I’ve got some climbing to do.