Okay, let’s get something out of the way. To be clear, this
blog post is about Hyrox – the running-esque race, not Hydrox the
Oreo-esque cookie, or Hyrax the rodent-esque furry rotund woodland animal
(which is technically a mammal).
If you’re here for tea on the salacious Oreo-versus-Hydrox
cookie wars, enjoy a cup: https://www.kcur.org/history/2024-03-06/remember-hydrox-kansas-city-created-the-original-oreo-cookie.
Or, if Hyrax porn is your thing, have at it: https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/rock-hyrax.
Okay, now that everyone else has left… what is Hyrox, you
ask?
Fair question. Hyrox is a fitness race!
Wait! What? Fitness race? What the fuck does that even mean,
you wonder?
Well, it’s an 8-kilometer race where participants must
perform various feats of strength each kilometer, such as pushing a 335-pound
sled or doing walking-lunges with a 44-pound sandbag on their shoulders.
Ah! Okay. It’s basically CrossFit, you proclaim, satisfied.
No! No! Absolutely not! No! By the beard of Zeus, fuck no!!!
CrossFit is a fitness class (and technically also a cult) where they
teach you the correct way to do pullups incorrectly.
Hyrox on the other hand is a race. A serious running race! A super-serious running race… held inside a convention center with loud pop music, laser light shows, and confetti… where the runners periodically stop to perform seemingly random exercises. You know what, never mind, just watch this 53 second video:
How it started
“Hey Mom, not sure if you heard. I’m doing a Hyrox!”
“You mean the cookie, right?” my mother nervously asks, hoping
I’m not referring to the woodland creature. I immediately picture her trying
not to picture me caressing a Guinea pig in the soft candlelight.
“No, it’s a race!” I clarify. “A running race… with a bunch
of weight-lifting stuff mixed in.”
“Oh…” she lightly gasps, “Is that going to be okay with your
bad back?” she asks nervously, referring to the fact that I’ve just completed 6
months of physical therapy for a severely herniated L4/L5 lumbar disk in my
spine, which the doctors all agreed will require surgery if I ever want to be
“functional” again.
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. The race isn’t really that hard,” I assure her. Spoiler alert: that tweet did not age well, as they say. The race actually is that hard. Ridiculously hard. But I digress.
How it really started
[Note: This next section goes into a lengthy discussion
of my spinal injury and how I managed to rehab it without surgery. If you’re
just here for the Hyrox and want to skip the lecture on back/spine health, feel
free to jump ahead to the next section, “Okay, Back to Hyrox”.]
I’ve struggled, on and off, with lower back pain for nearly
20 years. Every few years, I’d see a chiropractor when the pain got bad enough
– usually at the point when it started to get so bad that I wasn’t able to put
my socks on in the morning.
A visit or two to the chiropractor would usually do the
trick. Hot/cold compress, electrical “stim” treatment, ultrasound treatment,
and a nice massage and I was good to go. But over the years, the frequency of
flair ups began to increase, as did the required number of treatments. What
used to take one or two visits now took four or five.
Finally, one day in early January 2023, while out mountain
biking with my teenage son, I noticed that my right foot was going numb. “Huh,
that’s probably not good” I thought to myself.
The next morning, I woke up with the worst pain I’ve ever
experienced in my life – pain so intense that all I wanted to do was drop to
the ground and cry. Yet it hurt too much to even move, so all I could do was
stand there clutching at my leg while screaming a string of incoherent
profanities.
The pain was so bad that I nearly asked my wife to call an
ambulance, even though I knew they wouldn’t be able to do anything in the ER
except prescribe some narcotics and maybe order an MRI. I called my doctor who
prescribed a variety of pain killers, nerve blockers, and anti-inflammatory
steroids.
The next few days were absolute hell. I dreaded falling asleep
at night because climbing in and out of bed was excruciatingly painful, with
even the slightest wrong movement sending a spasm of electric pain down my
entire side.
During the next weeks I read everything I could find online
about herniated discs. I scoured through scholarly articles. I learned to quickly
spot snake-oil charlatans and quack doctors hawking miracle cures like magnetic-crystal
therapy or “injectable sealants”.
I learned that while surgery can provide immediate relief, it
often results in worse long-term outcomes. The consensus seemed to be that if
you can endure the first few days of intense pain and are willing to put in the
time (often 6-18 months), it’s best to let your back heal on its own.
I decided that I was going to give myself a year to see if I
could recover on my own without surgery. At the end of the year, I would
re-evaluate. So, I got to work.
On the advice of my doctor, I took up swimming, which is low
impact and provides some spinal decompression. I also replaced my office chair
at home with a standing desk and an under-desk treadmill so that I could walk
(albeit slowly) instead of sitting all day.
And finally, I started practicing “cat yoga”— which is
essentially just regular yoga, except that your cats see you laying on the
ground and take it as an invitation to climb on top of you like a kitty jungle
gym.
I’m not sure if it was the rest, the swimming, or the cat yoga that eventually did the trick, but gradually over time my back started to improve.
Okay, Back to Hyrox?
I don’t remember why I initially decided to sign up for a
Hyrox race. Maybe it’s because I heard Lance Armstrong had just won his age
group at a Hyrox race, and being in the same age bracket as him, I thought it
would be cool to try and kick his butt. [Note: I know full well that Lance Armstrong
is a cheater, a bully, a narcissist, and a psychotic asshole. Yet, I do also admire his single-minded focus,
his killer instinct, his and ability to embrace pain. If I’m honest, I see a
bit of myself in him. My love-hatred of him is complicated.]
However, I think the thing that most appealed to me about
Hyrox is the notion that if I could successfully complete this grueling event, where
you push a 335-pound sled, it would be a huge “fuck you” to my team of doctors
who suggested that I would need surgery if I ever wanted to be “functional”
again.
So, I got to work and started training. In my mind, I was Rocky Balboa, sweaty and shirtless, sprinting up a snowy mountain, carrying a giant log on my back. But sadly, much of my training took place in a suburban gym filled with retirees and tech workers doing their lunchtime cardio sessions, while staring into their phones. Not really training-montage material.
Vegas Baby, Vegas
Hyrox hosts races all around the world, but there’s only a handful
of races in the United States each year – and they sell out quick. Luckily, I
was able to grab a spot for Hyrox Las Vegas, which was the closest race to
California.
I arrived at the starting line in Las Vegas healthy but
undertrained. Unfortunately, a series of injuries, including a broken pinky
finger and a lingering groin pull, had limited my ability to train as hard as I
would have liked. I showed up in decent shape, but nowhere near where I needed
to be to try and beat Lance Armstrong.
Joining me in Las Vegas was another fellow San Jose athlete
– Jason Wong – with whom I had been training a bit. Jason and I are well
matched and were both hoping to run under 1:15:00. For comparison, Lance had
run 1:12:05, while the top pros usually go under an hour.
Hyrox events are huge, with thousands of athletes competing each day – with separate races held over 2 to 3 days. Due to the limited space and finite number of exercise stations, racers are typically released in waves – with 30-40 athletes going off every 10 minutes or so.
As I stood shirtless in the Red Bull start tunnel, shrouded
in smoke from the fog machine, unable to hear my racing hearts over the
deafening blare of the DJ blasting ACDC’s Hells Bells, my adrenaline began to surge
and I thought to myself, “John, you can win this thing!”
Spoiler alert. I did not win the thing. I didn’t even win my age group – or come anywhere close. I finished 450th overall (out of 1151), 30th in my age group, unremarkably mid-pack in a time of 1:26:54 – well shy from my goal of sub-1:15:00 and Lance Armstrong’s time of 1:12:05.
Where did it all go wrong?
Looking back on my race, I have more questions than answers.
I felt I ran a smart race tactically. I went out conservatively on the first
kilometer run, and I paced myself cautiously on the first station, the ski erg,
– careful to avoid spiking my heart rate. Yet, I still completely fell apart in
the second half of the race – needing to take rest breaks every few minutes.
So, where did it all go wrong?
Honestly, it was my training. While I trained my ass off, in retrospect I spent too much time focusing on the things I enjoy (i.e., running and cardio-based machines – bike erg, row, erg, ski erg) while somewhat neglecting the less-fun strength-based activities like as sled pull, sandbag lunges, and burpee broad jumps.
As you can see from the event list below, Hyrox is highly running-intensive with 8K of running, but it also requires a considerable amount of strength and muscular endurance, particularly for the sleds, farmer’s carry, and sandbag lunges.
1K Run Ski
Erg (1000m)
1K Run Sled Push (50m) 335
pounds
1K Run Sled Pull (50m) 227
pounds
1K Run Burpee Broad Jumps
(80m)
1K Run Row (1000m)
1K Run Farmer's Carry (200m)
106 pounds
1K Run Sandbag Lunges (100m)
44 pounds
1K Run Wall Balls (100
reps)
Fucking wall balls
Bent over, hands on my knees struggling to breath, I looked
up in desperation to see how many of the 100 wall balls I still had left to
complete. I did not like what I saw: 97! “Does that mean that I’ve done 97, or
that I still have 97 to go?” I asked.
“You’ve done 3. You’ve still got 97 more,” the judge chirped.
“Keep going, you’ve got this,” she lied cheerfully. We both knew I did not have
this.
At home, in practice, I could routinely crank out fifteen or
twenty wall balls at a time – dropping down into a deep squat and then
exploding upwards, thrusting a 14-pound medicine ball up into the air at a
small target 10 feet above my head. I’d rest a few seconds and then crank out twenty
more reps.
But now, at the end of this race, my quads completely shot and my shoulders burning with lactic acid, I was “cranking out” one rep at a time. 96 to go. 95 to go. 94 to go…
Thank God that’s over… where do I sign up again?
Thankfully, the volunteer judge assigned to count my reps
must have seen how badly I was suffering and took pity on me. Technically, you
are supposed to squarely hit the center of the target with the call each rep to
count. Otherwise, the judge can issue you a “no rep” and you receive no credit
for that rep.
If I’m honest, several dozen of my wall balls were of
questionable accuracy. A few hit the edge of the target, a couple fell a bit
short, and one sailed completely over the target. It was a shit show. But bless
her heart, my judge counted them all, clicking them off on her hand-held
counter.
After what felt like many hours, but was really just under 9
minutes, I had completed – or at least received credit for completing – all one-hundred
wall balls. I quickly sprinted up the black plywood finish ramp and crossed the
“finish line”, or at least what I assumed was the finish line – as the organizers
had not bothered to paint an actual finish line anywhere.
Ninety-nine percent certain that the race was over, I awkwardly
wandered off. Somebody handed me a bottle of water and a finisher’s patch. I
was now officially a Hyrox finisher. A Hyrox-er!? A Hyrox-ist?
“Oh God, that was terrible. I’m never doing another one of these again… ever!” I immediately proclaimed. An hour later, while enjoying a gourmet burger and an IPA, I found myself pulling out my phone and Googling the race calendar for next year. Looks like I will probably be back to give it another shot!
Afterward
My blog, RunningJohn, was recently included in the 30 Best Ultra Running Blogs and Websites in 2025. As it has been a minute since my last post (technically 462,304 minutes) I felt obligated to pen a new post. However, writing this missive reminded me how much I actually still enjoy blogging. So stay tuned for more posts… hopefully about running, but maybe about Hyrox, cookies, or rodents 😊.
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