One Goal, a Lot of Grit – The Journey to Our First HYROX
Our journey to Hyrox started when I gifted a Hyrox doubles entry for Tara as her birthday present in October 2025. Admittedly, we’d reached a point where we were both a little bored… Traditional weight training alone wasn’t quite scratching the itch. We didn’t just want to be strong – we wanted to be athletic, push our limits and test ourselves against something so demanding you question all your life choices… And there it was – Hyrox.
We had two and half months to prepare ourselves for the race, which was quite nerve-wracking – even for us coaches! – but what better way to conquer the winter blues than training for a race in the middle of winter… and in Switzerland at that. Even though we knew that we were strong and fit, we had never done anything like Hyrox before, and both of us coming from strength training backgrounds meant that we had a lot of work to do building our aerobic capacity. There was no time to waste.
All preparations were going well and we felt really confident until…4 weeks out from race day, Tara’s shins got very inflamed with shin splints which meant all her running training had to cease (not at all what you want to hear in the middle of training for a race that is 60% running…).
If that wasn’t gutting enough, pain also started to occur in some of the Hyrox movements too, so not only was running off the cards but suddenly so were burpee broad jumps, wall balls and lunges.
With so much uncertainty, we did our best to quickly (and creatively) adapt Tara’s training to give her the best chance of making it to the race start line.
Feeling rather deflated and searching for any glimmer of hope, we did some research and found out that actually, a large amount of Hyrox athletes utilise Erg work and the bike to build their aerobic base instead of doing endless amounts of running, so that they can reduce the load on their legs and prevent exactly what Tara was going through. Learning this meant that doubt and uncertainty were replaced with optimism, reassurance and determination. We remembered that setbacks don’t stop strong people, they shape them and hard work still counts, even when the plan changes.
Above all, what matters most is a positive, resilient mindset and doing the best you can, with what you have.
After 3 rounds of shockwave therapy, physiotherapy appointments, a hefty amount of sport tape, freeze roll (from Pure Sport) and a bike as Tara’s new best friend – things started to look up and suddenly race day was nearly here!
Two days before the race, a message pops up with our flight check in reminder! How exciting – it’s all feeling very real now. Training has been the opposite of what we expected, but we’re so close now and we’ve worked so hard for this…. “Sorry. Your flight is overbooked”. What? First the shin splints and now no flight? Is this the universe telling us not to do this race? Thankfully, after a lot of panicking, we were able to secure our seats on the flight after all and it was time to start packing!
Nutrition, gels, clothes, tape, and more – all the essentials packed meticulously to a “T” with the amount of each calculated to perfection. At the crack of dawn, off we go to the airport, Hyrox St. Gallen here we come! But not before the airport security saga… Of course things had started to run a little too smoothly again, so when only one gel made it through, and the rest were a little too suspicious and had to be confiscated, we just had to laugh and accept that at this point, it’ll be the Hyrox DJ carrying us through the race, and not our energy gels as planned. Clearly airport security knew just how good our High5 gels are, they wanted some for themselves (or so we convinced ourselves).
Touchdown in Zurich, Switzerland – yay! Onto the final leg of our journey to make it to our accommodation in St. Gallen near the race venue. Exhausted from the travel, we decided to be efficient and book our train tickets on the go as we walked to the train platform. We confirm the tickets are purchased and our train is arriving at the platform right on time, phew! Life is good again and it is such a relief to finally be sitting on the train, we can finally relax and watch the beautiful Swiss scenery… oh what short lived joy! Here comes the ticket inspector. He sighs very loudly and sits down opposite us. It’s at that point we realise he’s either so thrilled and starstruck to meet Hyrox athletes-to-be from London that he had to take a moment to sit down, or something has gone terribly wrong… again. It was the latter, of course.
“How is it possible you are already on a train tomorrow when it is today?” He asks sarcastically, with an eyebrow raised. With us obviously confused, he explains further. “These dates are not for today, they are for tomorrow, you will have to buy new tickets”.
Embarrassed, we apologise and explain the honest mistake, “We are meant to come back to Zurich tomorrow so the website must have saved our last search and we completely missed not changing the dates back. We are not Swiss and we are only here for 2 nights, is there anything we can do?”
We desperately hope for a positive outcome and we try to explain we are not purposely evading train fares, we simply made an honest mistake. But no. He remains firm and is not being very nice at all, and whilst surely he could have done something about it, he instead threatens us with a fine of 120 Swiss francs each. So, we reluctantly paid for our new tickets and continued our journey. By this point, we were so exhausted, all had headaches and all we needed was to get to our accommodation.
At long last, we made it to St. Gallen. Marjo pulls up the instructions from the accommodation host on how to enter and all we need to do is enter the pin code we’ve been given into the lock box to access the key to our room. Simple right? – No, of course not. Come on, you’ve read this far, you already know that’d be far too straightforward. The pin code doesn’t work. Perhaps they gave us the wrong lock box number?
So there we were, checking the pin we’d be given on every. Single. Lock. Box. Of which there were around 30. At this point, all we could do was laugh or we’d cry. Not only were we accused of attempting to avoid train fares just moments before, now we look like we’re trying to break and enter too! At this rate, we’ll be ending up with new, free accommodation – behind bars!!
After exhausting all attempts with the lock boxes and our accommodation host not answering the phone, we try knocking on the door. Luckily a cleaner appears and lets us in. She confirms we were given an incorrect code. Typical. All finally seems well, until… We open the door to our room and we find our room to be the exact opposite to what was advertised. Our private kitchen and bathroom were nowhere to be seen. We’d somehow found ourselves in a student accommodation type replica sharing a bathroom with 6 others and a kitchen with around 12 others, if not more. The icing on the cake was the “complimentary toiletries” being a suspicious pink liquid in a condiment shaped bottle by the shower. But hey, on a more positive note, at least we were literally only a few minutes walk away from the race venue!
It turned out many other Hyrox athletes seemed to have the same idea in terms of accommodation and as the evening went on, more and more people seemed to appear… This meant taking turns in the shared kitchen, with everyone cooking different variations of pasta dishes as we were all carb loading.
Day one finally comes to a close, we are carb-ed up and ready to get a good night’s sleep so we are ready to go in the morning. Off to bed we go! We plonk onto the mattresses and initially things feel comfortable, however, the longer we lay there, the more our heads seem to sink.. now our feet are suddenly higher than our heads? Oh well, apparently it’s beneficial for the circulation to elevate your feet and perhaps this is just another undisclosed feature of our wonderful accommodation — who doesn’t love surprises!
After a (sort of) restful sleep, race day has finally arrived! We are in good spirits and raring to go. We’ve trained for this moment and now it’s time for us to go out there and give it our all. However, as this was our first race, one is never quite certain what to expect. We went in relatively confident, thinking we understood “race pace”. Turns out we didn’t. People will talk about being in the “pain cave”, but you will never truly understand the extent of it until you are so deep in it.
Our first run felt controlled, almost comfortable – and that should have been the first warning sign. We flew through the SkiErg but after the sled push, (which by the way — Tara is very strong! She was stopping for no one and almost took out a camera man who was too slow to move out of the way!) reality kicked in. Our legs got heavier and heavier, breathing got ragged and suddenly this wasn’t just fitness anymore… It was a fight. It was deep, heavy, full body fatigue where everything slows down, time seems to stop and your brain starts offering you every exit imaginable: ease off, slow down, stop or you’ll die — but we kept moving. That then became our sole goal; no matter how bad it feels, just don’t stop!
We took each station as it came and chipped away gradually. We took advantage of our strong upper bodies for the sled pull but then the burpee broad jumps felt endless and the urge to stay lying face down on the floor mid-burpee was tempting to say the least.
The Row Erg gave us a brief illusion of recovery, it was such a relief to be able to sit down for a moment! However, the joy was short-lived and once we started to run again, our legs quickly reminded us they were no longer on our team. Lunges — pure grind but funnily enough that’s Marjo’s favorite station, so much so that every picture the photographer took in this station was Marjo carrying the sandbag with her middle fingers up (and no, not on purpose funnily enough!). Although, lunges are station 7 after all, so if you’re not saying “F you!” by that point, you must not be working hard enough!
Finally we made it onto the final run and all we had left was the dreaded wall balls. Somehow, with very little left in the tank, we managed to dig even deeper and stuck to our pre-race wall ball strategy and it worked out really well! Every rep was followed with an encouraging “Jawohl!” from our judge and we climbed our way through the 100 reps at decent speed. Marjo finished the final few wall balls and as soon as she hit the 100 reps, Tara found a completely new gear and sprinted off at the speed of light to the finishers platform, Marjo trying to catch up with her!
Crossing that finish line wasn’t about the clock. It was about the moment everything in us wanted to stop… and we didn’t. We went deeper into that dark place than we ever have before — past the doubt, past the pain, past the voice telling us to slow down — and we stayed there. We fought through it. Together.
We’ve learnt that Hyrox isn’t just a fitness race. It strips you back and shows you what you’re really made of. It asks how long you can sit in discomfort, in exhaustion, in chaos… and still choose to keep moving forward.
And somehow, after feeling all of that… we’ve signed up to do it all over again. Because there’s something immensely powerful about proving to yourself that you can go there… and not break.
Hyrox really is a sport for everyone. In a world where fitness trends come and go, Hyrox has carved out something rare. It’s a sport that feels truly accessible, yet undeniably challenging. It’s not just another competition, it’s a movement built on inclusivity, shared struggle, and an electric race day atmosphere. You don’t need to be the fastest runner or the strongest lifter. You just need to show up willing to push yourself. You are not just racing against people – you’re racing beside them, against yourself and all the doubts you ever had about yourself.
The Hyrox atmosphere is like nothing else out there. It’s loud. It’s intense. And it’s incredibly motivating!
For many, Hyrox becomes more than a competition – it becomes a lifestyle. People return not just to beat their own time, but to reconnect with the community they’ve become part of and to remind themselves that although your comfort zone will make you feel safe, nothing there will ever change you.
On the surface it’s “The World Series of Fitness Racing”, but beyond that, it’s about proving something to yourself. That you can keep going when it gets hard. That you belong on the race floor, regardless of your starting point, age, gender, appearance, background or ability. Everyone has a chance. And everyone crosses the same finish line. Whether you are chasing performance or simply looking for a new challenge, Hyrox offers something rare. A sport where the real victory isn’t just finishing fast, it’s showing up, pushing through and becoming something bigger than yourself. It’s about showing up and finishing what most people wouldn’t even start.
