I finally tried a Hyrox workout, and I totally get the hype now
A decade ago, we here in the Multisport.ph team would cover triathlons and run races. Those were very much the “in” sports and athletic pursuits of the 2010s. We would be up well before the crack of dawn, sometimes not having even slept at all, seeing for ourselves how athletes and enthusiasts of all ages would take on these endurance sports.
Not something I saw myself doing
Triathlon (and its variants, the duathlon and aquathlon) was the most fascinating beast. Multisport races were totally the playground of the upper-middle-class and above—only those with a boatload of money would be able to compete in destination events with gear worth hundreds of thousands of pesos.
It was a sport that allowed them to compete with others in their age group, yes, but it was mostly a way to see whether you could endure the grueling trials of a race like that.
Running was the same, especially if you did marathons. The barrier to entry was much lower—you just need a really good and expensive pair of supportive and high-tech running shoes, and the rest can be McGyvered—but others made competing in destination marathons a thing. Sydney, Tokyo, Chicago, New York, London, Boston, and so on; that was the bucket list for well-off locals and pros competing.
I never thought I’d ever be like that. I was a lifter, and I was a pro wrestler. We had destination cards to compete in, but they weren’t as glamorous as your Ironmans or overseas marathons. My matches abroad certainly weren’t fitness enthusiast status symbols, especially as I would just put myself in humble accommodations.
But then I finally tried a Hyrox workout, and now I’m totally envisioning doing the overseas thing.
An introduction to Hyrox
My girlfriend got us into this, as she had been expressing her desire to try Hyrox for a while now. We had been doing functional workouts at F45 branches all around the metro, and they were among the first ones to advertise Hyrox training. I had actually already written about how Gold’s Gym officially established a legit Hyrox training center, but still hadn’t been able to go and try it out for myself.
When nearby gym Kilos PH (more on them when they officially hard launch) started offering a Hyrox basics session on Classpass, that was the sign for us to go and try out what we’d only been seeing on reels and TikTok videos.
A recap of the basics: eight stations of various lifts and movements (the SkiErg, rows, sled pushes and pulls, burpee broad jumps, kettlebell farmer’s carry, sandbag walking lunge, and wall ball throws), with a grueling one kilometer of running in between each station, with variations in some weights, according to sex.
Hyrox athlete and Philippine national team Muay Thai boxer Mauro Lumba was the coach for this foundation’s class, and he made the whole thing easy to follow with his clear and graceful teaching, while keeping it challenging with the actual beginner workout we had to do at the end of the 1.5-hour session.
This initial intro workout was all for time (two minutes per set, compared to concrete and established distances and reps in the real thing), but that was already challenging enough for a minor weekend warrior athlete such as myself. I was able to run two rounds of the gauntlet, and figured that with enough rest (and the stimulus of having someone push me as a team to keep working), a real Hyrox race might just be something I could wrangle.
A test against your own mettle
The good thing about the actual races is that they are run exactly like triathlons and marathons—they are a test against your own mettle first and foremost, before they are a test against other people. You are allowed to rest and recharge as needed, and manage your pace and energy to complete the entire workout without running yourself completely into the ground.
Going back to the thing I said about potentially competing: the intro Hyrox workout is challenging, but relatively easy enough to give you the idea that you can do this, and you can do a race, even if you’re not going to log pro-level sub-one-hour times. The constant and dynamic movements of the eight stations, for us, are certainly much more entertaining and engaging than a monotonous endurance race.
And that taste of being able to pull it off means we’re already looking into joining the right first event sometime next year at somewhere close, if not here in the Philippines. This, I finally found out, is the rush that gets triathletes and marathoners to book flights for races abroad.
And the best thing is I wouldn’t have to buy a road bike worth six digits, and I certainly wouldn’t have to train my swimming. See you out there soon enough.
