Six Things I Wish I Knew Before My First Hyrox Race

A little over a week ago, my fellow Lifehacker writer Beth Skwarecki and I competed in the women’s doubles at Hyrox New York. Our final time was 01:36:48, not too shabby, considering the average time is 1:24:20 for women’s doubles, and we had pretty minimal training.

Still, upon seeing videos of myself at this race, I looked less like a sleek athlete (what I pictured in my head) and a little bit more like a floppy balloon man trying to wave you into a car dealership. Now that we’ve had some time to reflect on our experiences, here's what I wish I had known about Hyrox races going in.

Focus on proper form, not just overall fitness

Going into this, I was most scared of the feats of strength and coordination, while Beth was most afraid of the running. In the five weeks we had to train, I focused mostly on getting my strength up. What I wish I had understood better? This isn't CrossFit! In other words, you don't need to be professionally strong to finish.

By race day, the weight standards weren't as devastating as I feared. For women's doubles in the open division, the sled push comes in at 102 kg (around 225 lbs) including the sled. The sled pull is 78 kg (around 172 lbs) including the sled. Farmers carry uses 2 × 16 kg (around 35.2 lbs) kettlebells for 200 meters. The sandbag lunges are done with a 10 kg (22 lbs) bag for 100 meters. And wall balls use a 4 kg (8.8 lbs) ball thrown to a 2.70 m target for 100 reps.

What caught me off guard instead was form and coordination. Some of these were still unfamiliar movement patterns for me, and doing them on fatigued legs made everything feel more awkward. I wish I had focused more on specific movement patterns during my training, so that I didn’t waste so much time navigating basic mechanics mid-race.

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Each Hyrox station feels completely different during race day

There's a significant gap between practicing a wall ball in a fresh gym session and performing your 75th rep after you've already run several kilometers, pushed a sled, and done a farmers carry. Every station takes on a different character when it arrives in context.

Luckily, this isn't a reason to panic, just all the more reason to train with specificity. It’s not enough to just practice the movements in isolation. You need to practice them tired, and practice them in sequence when you can. The simulation experience (more on that in a moment) exists precisely for this reason. When you finally step onto the race floor, you want the movements to feel familiar even in their fatigued form, not just when you're fresh and focused in a 45-minute workout class.

Take a Hyrox-specific class, but don't stop there

The Hyrox-specific studio classes I took at F45 beforehand were completely necessary. A prep class gives you exposure to most of the Hyrox stations and, ideally, to the specific standards that Hyrox enforces. But one class can only take you so far, depending on the resources of your gym. For instance, I really wish I had been able to practice Hyrox-specific wall balls before showing up on race day.

Do a Hyrox simulation, but know the penalties before you walk in

A full Hyrox simulation is highly recommended. I did not do one. Beth did, however, and she learned something important: the people running your simulation may not enforce the penalty rules strictly, or may not know all of them.

Hyrox has specific penalties for standards violations, things like failing to hit the wall ball target, not reaching full depth on lunges, or spacing your hands and feet too far apart during burpees. In a simulation run by someone who isn't an official judge, you may breeze through movements that would have earned you penalty burpees on race day. So, walk into your simulation already knowing the standards and the consequences. Use it to practice pace and sequencing, and make sure you hold yourself to the real rules, even if no one else in the room is.

In doubles, transitions are a race within the race

If you're competing in doubles, you’ll quickly discover how transitions are a discipline unto themselves. In fact, Beth and I had a great time sharing Instagram reels focused solely on transition ideas throughout our training. The handoff between partners at each station, contingency plans for splitting the workload, the split-second decisions about whether your partner needs you to take an extra rep: all of this should be worked out in advance, and ideally practiced until it's automatic.

It’s also important to note that a strategy might feel obvious when you're fresh, but it will feel much less obvious when you're both gassed after running another kilometer and the sled is sitting there staring at you. Our tip would be to decide who leads on each one, what the signal is to swap, and what you do if one partner is struggling.

For instance, it often makes sense to have the stronger runner be the one who starts and finishes each station, so that the other athlete has more time to rest between the running portions. For Beth and myself, we ran a tad slower than my typical recovery pace, and that turned out to be the right call. It meant we arrived at each station with something left in the tank, which was the thing that allowed me, a person who had been terrified of the strength work, to move through it without falling apart.

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The takeaway here is that the more decisions you can make in advance, the fewer you'll have to make under duress.

Have an actual Hyrox race strategy, not just a workout plan

Ultimately, there's a big difference between training for Hyrox and racing Hyrox. A lot of first-timers (myself included) instinctively approach it like a really hard workout. You think to yourself that you’ll push when you can, you survive when you can't, and you see what time comes out. That works, but it certainly leaves time on the table.

A real race strategy means knowing how exactly to hack each station. Research is your best friend. Sometimes the most efficient movement won’t feel like the “proper form” you’ve practiced in a workout class, or it simply won’t be intuitive to you personally. At least, that was my experience with wall balls. And hey, I hope to put all this to the test and compete in another Hyrox race. Maybe in the singles division this time, to really put my money where my mouth is. Stay tuned.