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There’s a distinct flavor of energy that exists only at the intersection of extreme human endurance and community. I thought I knew what that tasted like. I definitely got a sip of it when I was heavy into CrossFit more than a decade ago, and crossing 15 marathon finish lines gives you a whiff of it, too.

But then, thanks to an invitation from the team at Red Bull, I touched down in Stockholm for the HYROX World Championships. And let me tell you: I was not prepared for the beautifully chaotic, deeply inspiring world that is the HYROX fandom.

I spent my time wandering the venue that is Strawberry Arena, testing my own limits on an Output Sports simulator, and chatting with two influential powerhouses in the space: Mintra Tilly, the mastermind who helped architect the original HYROX format, and former CrossFit Games champion and Red Bull athlete Laura Horvath.

I left Sweden with a notebook full of scribbles, sore quads, and a completely shifted perspective. I thought I knew what this thing was following along loosely on Instagram, but boy was I wrong. Whether you’re a hybrid athlete or a runner who views “strength day” with a bit of skepticism, this week I’m digging into what I learned from my first trip into the HYROX pain cave.

HYROX launched its very first race in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 with just 650 initial participants. By 2023, that number reached 175,000 competitors. By 2024? It ballooned to over 650,000 global participants. Across the 2025/2026 season, the sport’s projecting a total of 1.2 million athletes will compete across more than 100 global events.

High-demand major metropolitan events—like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Birmingham—consistently sell out within minutes to a few hours of going live. For example, this year’s HYROX New York drop vanished in just 40 minutes. Demand has outstripped supply so heavily in markets like London that they had to implement a lottery ballot system, allocating 16,000 race slots to a massive pool of over 70,000 applicants.

As for structure, the race alternates between running and functional fitness. You begin with a one kilometer run, hit a station, and repeat. You will complete a designated number of laps (usually two to four, depending on the venue’s track layout) to hit exactly one kilometer before entering the center of the arena for each of the following eight stations:

Station 1: 1,000m SkiErg

Station 2: 50m Sled Push

Station 3: 50m Sled Pull

Station 4: 80m Burpee Broad Jumps

Station 5: 1,000m Rowing

Station 6: 200m Farmer’s Carry w/ Two kettlebells

Station 7: 100m Sandbag Lunges

Station 8: 100 Wall Balls

The Roxzone is the massive, centralized transition area inside the running loop where all the functional workout stations, hydration points, and gear areas live.

Time does not stop when you enter the Roxzone; your transition time spent walking between a run and a machine, or grabbing water, is factored entirely into your final race time. Like a triathlon transition, this is a place where efficiency can be a big game-changer.

I knew people liked functional fitness, but I didn’t realize they were fanatics. The energy inside the venue was electric, a subculture completely distinct from the traditional running or CrossFit worlds—though those lines are rapidly blurring. Unlike major marathons where spectators need to be on the sidelines completely, HYROX allows supporters to buy tickets to be super close to the action. As in, on the competition floor. I was literally a foot from a friend as he was doing the rowing portion of his race.

When I sat down with Mintra Tilly, the former Director of Sports for HYROX, she admitted that even she couldn’t have predicted this level of obsession. As she put it:

“I guess the level, the scale, how big it became ... I would have never imagined in a million years. To me, I thought, you know, it’s going to be an annual thing, once a year.”

Fun fact: Tilly actually is responsible for the format of HYROX as we see it today, as she originally designed the flow. It’s fascinating to me how the sport’s pulling in people from entirely different training backgrounds—i.e., standard runners are suddenly looking at heavy sleds and rethinking entire training blocks.

So, there isn’t a lot of extra clothing at HYROX. AKA, most of the women are running in shorts and a sports bra; men in just shorts. So how do athletes showcase the brands supporting them when fabric is at a premium?

Temporary tattoos.

Super interesting and innovative to see, tbh. Wonder if this will start to bleed into the running world. There was branded ink everywhere, from shoulders and calves to forearms. A genius act of sports marketing and identity.

There’s a massive misconception that HYROX is just a lifting competition with a bit of cardio thrown in. Let’s bust that myth right now: You have to be an endurance athlete to survive.

Depending on the design and layout of each course, athletes tackle over 8 kilometers of pure running interleaved between stations. If you’re not ready for sustained aerobic output, the stations will swallow you whole. Even Horvath—arguably one of the strongest women on the planet—told me that when it comes to preparing for a HYROX, the running’s the real hurdle you have to respect. She shared her own training shift with me:

“We’ve been doing a lot more running, and I think we got it much faster, so that’s going to be the limiting factor for us ... With running, it’s not easy to get better, but I think if you do it more, you’re inevitably going to get better.”

In other words: A lifting legend’s clocking three dedicated running and interval sessions a week just to prep for the track segments. So, take that for what you will.

The pain cave’s a lot less intimidating when you aren’t digging through it alone. Watching the doubles and team divisions solidified a major truth for me: With the right partner, this format shifts from a grueling test of individual survival to an incredibly fun, shared strategic game.

Horvath echoed this sentiment beautifully. When I asked her how her mental state shifted going into an event like this compared to the high-stakes pressure of the CrossFit Games, she lit up talking about racing alongside her partner and brother, Kristof:

“This is—we’re doing this more for ourselves. We’re doing it to have a good time. Competing with Kristof, like we haven’t competed together since 2018. The two of us. So I think it’s going to be very cool to like, you know, just soak in the experience and have a good time and push our limits.”

Of course, I couldn’t just watch. I hopped onto a simulator put together by Output Sports to test my own metrics, and the data gave me a very clear, very humbling reality check.

While my running baseline is solid, my power output and efficiency on burpee broad jumps and wall balls need some serious love. They require a specific type of explosive, repetitive power that fades quickly when your heart rate is redlined (hi, this is hard). I don’t think a HYROX is on my bucket list until 2027—but! At least now, I have a solid understanding of what I can expect once I shift my training to get after that specific goal.

HYROX isn’t just a trend; it’s a massive, community-driven movement that forces you to look at your fitness holistically. You can make out of it what you want. You can race it. You can do it for fun. You can do it to find a partner. But whatever you decide—if you’re going to do it—make sure you enjoy the training journey that gets you there. Because trust me, it’s a demanding one.

Have more questions? I’m an open book. Comment below and share your experiences/thoughts.

Keep hurdling,

A Peak Inside The HYROX World Championships

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