How Hyrox took CrossFit into next-gen fitness racing

As the race continues, the music fades out while the clapping and cheering gets louder. The participants, now glistening with sweat, need all the encouragement they can get. When you scan the room, you’ll see all kinds of people—newbies to Hyrox to cool athletes, Gen Z to baby boomers.

Cheering crowds in the grand arena make the race equal parts “cool” and serious business.

Hyrox’s ingredients may sound familiar to any other fitness fad: endurance and physical endurance tests lasting hours, a ticking clock, and a clear finish line.

Racing is nothing new to sports—think Spartan Race and Tough Mudder, which have been around for a long time. Hyrox differentiates itself as a separate fitness race from its arch-enemy, CrossFit, a more technical and sophisticated form of training with Olympic weightlifting and gym equipment.

But, more importantly, it sets itself apart from marathoners and world sports champions by asking a simple enough question: If going to the gym is a sport, how can we do more with it?

“There were gaps in the sports world,” Moritz Fürste, founder of Hyrox and a three-time German Olympian in field hockey, told me. Good luck in the conversation. “It’s like this missing piece of the fitness world where people, for whatever reason, go to the gym every day, but never compete.”

Seven years on, Hyrox’s reputation is global. While its first iteration in 2017 had a handful of 618 participants, the race has grown significantly since then, closing the 2023/24 season with more than 210,000 in 30 cities. That’s despite a little blip called COVID-19 that kept people confined to their homes for nearly two years.

Hyrox continues to grow. Fürste thinks that what the race has achieved so far is just the tip of the iceberg as it continues to attract regular runners, elite athletes, and CrossFit enthusiasts alike, whether in Miami, Milan, or Melbourne.

Jumping over the backs

Hyrox started off stumbling.

It was about 10 years ago that Fürste and his business partner and Hyrox CEO Christian Toetzke met for the first time. They played a major role in Germany’s bid to host the 2024 Olympics and Paralympic Games.

Despite the persuasive rhetoric, the citizens of Hamburg voted against hosting the games in a 2015 referendum.

“We went from opening champagne bottles to literally closing them and returning them to the store,” Fürste said the day they learned about the survey.

Dean Mouhtaropoulos—Getty Images

But if sports teach you one thing, it’s that you don’t give up when you first stumble. Fürste and Toetze, a veteran of sports events, continued to discuss ways to collaborate.

While searching for ideas, they found a shocking statistic that many people identified working out in the gym as their “sport”. That left the duo with some lingering questions—and the seed of an idea for what would later become the Hyrox race we see today.

“We were like, ‘Okay, that’s interesting, but what’s your game?'” Fürste said. “If you think [of] all the people who are not legitimate members of the gym, I think we are talking about the biggest organized sport in the world.”

Hyrox was born.

Rising high

Having perfected the Hyrox model, the next challenge was to convince people that, unlike other sporting events, it was truly accessible. It offers different “categories” based on age and fitness level to encourage more participants.

With a few hundred runners in the first year and single-digit thousands the following year, selling the idea of ​​mass participation was not easy. Soon after, the epidemic struck, quickly reducing the number of people seeking such events.

But Fürste and others on the Hyrox team were determined to keep the breed in people’s minds—so they organized a race in Hamburg with several rounds of daily COVID-19 testing.

“I think we have spent $100,000 on this epidemic in the middle, without any kind of global hope that it will get better,” Fürste said.

Although rare, those efforts paid off. In 2022, when the world started to open up, people seemed to be motivated and willing to try new things, which Hyrox still felt like it was, back then.

Its participants and race venues began to grow slowly before surpassing the number of athletes of the New York and London Marathons, which were around 50,000.

THROUGH Sportograf and HYROX

To increase the knowledge of the race

Helena Sharpe, a 44-year-old recruiting director at JP Morgan, has been on a life-changing journey for five years. In this program, you participate in strength training, high-intensity cardio exercises, and more.

Last year, he set himself the goal of completing the London Hyrox race in May 2024 to motivate himself to get back in shape after shoulder surgery. And now, having seen the race once, Sharpe says he’s sure he’ll do it again.

“I think the atmosphere is encouraging,” Sharpe said good luck, he added that it was like nothing he had done before. “Something about it… I didn’t feel so scared.”

WITH SPORTOGRAF AND HYROX BASES

Because Hyrox races take place in indoor arenas, the team has more freedom with the atmosphere it creates for its participants—be it with its starting lanes, colorful lights, or motivational speeches.

“We are trying to create a setup that makes real athletes out of the participants,” said Fürste. He compared this race to famous marathons like the one in New York, which is equal in location to the race itself. And like CrossFit, Hyrox also emphasizes a sense of community to improve people’s motivation.

While it’s similar to many things people have heard of or experienced before, Hyrox is also unlike them in critical ways. For example, Fürste argues that many people try to run marathons as a bucket list item, while only a few repeat runners.

But you want Hyrox to be something that people feel they can always improve on, just like any other game. He also highlighted that, unlike other games, Hyrox tries not to just keep its events to the creme de la creme.

The race structure also helps prevent injuries—a common concern with CrossFit—as it aims to use different body parts and muscle groups, Fürste says. But he thinks there is room to teach people to practice and be aware of their abilities when they enter the Hyrox race.

As Toetze says The New York Times in April, the established models of marathons and CrossFit are still good symbols of success. The latter is specifically aimed at building total body fitness rather than lifting a single domain, such as running or rowing. The Hyrox pulls from some of these exercises while still staying true to form, which is why Fürste is confident that the Hyrox will stand up for itself.

The excitement of the race is clear—in Birmingham, 16,000 tickets were sold in just four minutes. The event is targeting more than 450,000 participants in its upcoming season, more than double its participants this year, over multiple days of racing.

While this growth rate may not last forever, Hyrox is undoubtedly here to stay, Fürste said.

“I am 100% sure that the whole sport of endurance running, in 10 years, will be as big as running in the world,” said Fürste.