Journey to Hyrox

April 13, 2026

I think my friend is trying to kill me

I was with my friends Liz, Ryan and Spencer at Blue Bottle coffee in downtown Palo Alto when we are discussing how we can build lore this year. After an insane of lore building over the summmer, we had to find a way to keep up the energy. Given this, we whipped out the notes app and started brainstorming. We had a multitude of ideas, ranging from hiking a volcano in South America to exploring camps and parks in California. Then the idea pops into Liz’s head.

“Why don’t we do an international Hyrox race?”

Immediatly, I determine she’s insane because I’ve seen the videos on TikTok and I know whats involved. There is no world where we are the type of people to compete in this competition. I point out I nearly died the last time she dragged me along on an adventerous atheltic challenge, where I nearly found myself sunken at the bottom of a lake. My gut reaction is absolutely not, there is no way I’m doing this…

Why we’re doing this.

Okay, since we’re reading this article, it’s obvious I wasn’t too hard to convince. After another trip to Blue Bottle, it came up again, and we decided What the Hell, why not. The plan started to formualte, and we set a goal of competing in an international Hyrox by quarter 1 of 2027. This would theoretically give us enough time with dedication to be able to compete in the beginner tier of the Hyrox race. The plan is simple, we’ll train independently and re-convene for monthly benchmarks. During these benchmarks, we’ll measure our times doing each type of exercise and track our progression thorughout the year. Given the data, we should be able to track and see if this was possible.

The plan

Okay, now we have a rough idea about how we want to go about this, but it was time to build a real plan. Liz, Ryan, and I head to the office, and while I get some work done, Liz is creating the training plan. Shortly after, I get a calendar invite for the first of our Hyrox benchmarks.

Great, and with that, she provided the list of exercises we’ll be doing during this first benchmark. For this part, I trusted she made reasonable decisions here. Going into the list, it’s also important to point out we are limited by our equipment, as we currently only have a 5-25 lb pair of dumbbells. This may change in the future, but for now, this is all we got.

With the workouts decided, we then get to the worst part… The running. Each exercise is prefaced with 1km of running, meaning we will be running a full 8km in the race. For the benchmark, we’ll reduce that to 800m per lap, which is still 6.4km. We’re keeping this exercise intentionally high as we both feel this will be the hardest part.

The data

The part we are both most excited about is the amount of data we’ll be able to collect during this experiment. Because of the nature of our jobs, we have both gotten very comfortable making dashboards with interesting plots. Data collection and visualizations will be a fun bonus we’re giving ourselves for our experience. All the data we collect will end up on: [https://international-hyrox.streamlit.app/?utm_medium=oembed](Streamlit Dashboard) We’re hoping as we get closer and closer to the date of the race, we can see our trends converging towards a more desirable figure.

Now what.

From this point, all I can do now is start. I’ll be trying to get as many prepatory works out as I can before the big day. Liz says I should avoid doing that so I can have a more impressive improvement, but I want to prevent looking like a fool in whatever country we end up in during the competition. All thats left to do is start…