I’m a Marathon Runner, and Here’s What Surprised Me Most About Participating in the Hyrox Competition.
Is the Hyrox harder than a marathon? This is the question I’ve been asked most often since last Friday, when I ran my first Hyrox event. Here’s the short answer: the marathon is harder. However, I believe this question (and answer) deserves a more detailed examination, because comparing the two events is like comparing apples to oranges, except everyone keeps asking me to do that.
First, a little context: my Lifehacker colleague, Beth Skwarecki, is a weightlifter. I’m a marathoner (my eighth marathon will be this October). A few weeks ago, we decided we could create a single, competent Hyrox athlete. We tested this theory at the New York City race on May 29th, competing in the women’s pairs event.
If you haven’t heard of Hyrox, it’s a running race that combines functional training stations, repeated eight times: you run 1 km, reach one station, run another 1 km, reach the next station, and so on. Stations include the SkiErg, sled pushes, sled pulls, long jumps with burpees, rowing, weight carries, sandbag lunges, and wall ball throws. Each station seems manageable on its own, but after a few runs, they become progressively more challenging.
Results of our race at Hyrox
We finished in 1:36:48, placing us in the top 65.6%. These screenshots show how the Roxfit app displays our results:
Our running time was 1:00:03, completing the functional stations took 29:42, and the time spent transitioning to and from the Roxzone added another 7:12. Our average pace was 7:43/km, and our average run time was 7:30. Looking at these numbers, it’s clear how different Hyrox is from Crossfit—the majority of the event consists of running. With that in mind, I’d like to toast to the fact that we maintained fairly consistent times, at least on segments two through seven. Station times naturally varied more.
The Roxfit chart showing our results across all stations demonstrates our relative strengths: sled pushes and long jumps with burpees were our best stations, while rowing and sandbag lunges forced us to tighten our muscles. I’d say neither of our two stations was catastrophically weak. However, I see two athletes here who are significantly better at some things than others, which is exactly what you’d expect from a runner-weightlifter team.
How We Hacked Our Hyrox Race
We ran a little slower than usual, which gave me a slight advantage at the stations I dreaded most. Before the start, I dreaded the strength and coordination exercises; Beth dreaded the running. By running slowly enough that neither of us would tire out during the kilometer-long loops, we arrived at each station with energy to spare.
In my race preparation, Beth helped me rethink an approach I think is greatly underestimated: the difference between “training mode” and “race mode.” In training, you want to eliminate momentum. That’s why you pause at the top of a rep and control the descent. You force your muscles to work harder to get a more effective workout. But in a race, you want to “hack” your body, using every available momentum, because the goal is speed, not hypertrophy.
Take the farmer’s ball carry, for example. In training, you’d walk steadily, keeping your shoulders level and your core engaged with each step, avoiding unnecessary movement. In competition, you find a rhythm that allows your body to swing slightly with each step, using this natural pendulum motion to transfer some of the load. It’s the difference between fighting the weight (to get stronger) and working with it (to move faster). Similarly, with wall ball throws, instead of catching the ball at chest level and returning to the starting position, you let it sink into a smooth squat, using the ball’s descent to set up the next rep. I have to say, Beth seemed to know all this intuitively; I had to learn it in real time.
What surprised me most about Hyrox as a runner?
In the women’s doubles open division, the weight requirements weren’t as daunting as I’d feared. The sled push is 102 kg (about 225 lbs), including the sled itself. The sled pull is 78 kg (about 172 lbs), including the sled. The farmer’s carry uses 2 x 16 kg (about 35.2 lbs) kettlebells for 200 meters. Sandbag lunges are performed with a 10 kg (22 lbs) bag for 100 meters. And wall ball throws are performed using a 4 kg (8.8 kg) ball thrown at a target 2.70 m away, with 100 repetitions.
I expected to be much more overwhelmed by the weights than they actually were. Again, Hyrox isn’t CrossFit. You don’t need to be able to “lift heavy weights” to finish. What caught me off guard were my own deficiencies in technique and coordination. Some of the exercises were still unfamiliar to me, and doing them on tired legs made everything more awkward than the weights themselves probably justified. The dedicated Hyrox classes I took at F45 studio before the race were absolutely essential—without them, I would have been figuring out basic mechanics during the race. And I still do that on some exercises. Every time this happened, I began to appreciate the lower barrier to entry that road racing offers. I’d argue that more people know how to run than how to use a ski trainer. A marathon may be challenging, but at least you can turn off your brain and run.
So, is Hyrox harder than a marathon?
A marathon tests your mind in a way that Hyrox, at least in its dual format, simply can’t. For me, that’s the crux of the whole comparison, even if, from a physical fitness perspective, it’s a comparison of incomparable things.
At the same time, I must consider what Beth and I saw in other athletes even before our race began. At the wall ball drill—the last station, just steps from the finish line, with 100 reps remaining—I watched as the solo athletes completely lost their energy. Utterly exhausted, in need of rest, motionless, their progress stalled. I witnessed a kind of frustration that was very reminiscent of the “exhaustion” or “the wall” that marathon runners complain about. In the paired format, where the burden was shared between us, Beth and I had never encountered such a level of mental resilience.
A marathon gives you hours of monotonous routine, but it’s precisely this suffering that makes a marathon a marathon. In Hyrox, the constant volatility means you’re never alone long enough to bargain with a higher power. I wondered what it would be like to be alone with myself, alone with my thoughts, for a full hour and a half. This element is perhaps closer to the mental games that accompany running a full marathon. But in paired runs, Hyrox feels almost psychologically easy compared to a marathon. The stations break up the running, which I found to be very helpful.
But when I say “relief,” I mean it purely in the psychological sense. During Hyrox, my heart rate nearly peaked (around 193 beats per minute), something I would never have achieved in a marathon, where reaching that ceiling would have meant the end of the race. They tax different body systems in fundamentally different ways. I think a fairer comparison, both physically and psychologically, would be Hyrox versus a half marathon. For me, after completing both events, the comparison boils down to this: is running the most terrifying aspect of Hyrox for you? If so, then of course, a half marathon will be even worse. Personally, I’d rather run another marathon tomorrow than ever do burpees and long jumps again.
What would I do differently next time I try Hyrox?
From the connection with fellow participants to the sense of accomplishment, from the physical challenge to the mental toughness, I think road racing offers a more profound experience than Hyrox. I understand the appeal of the controlled chaos that accompanies the nine different fitness tests at Hyrox, and I want to be careful not to frame my conclusion as “Hyrox was too easy,” because it wasn’t . We ran a smart race, had a strong partnership dynamic, and yet we still felt the strain. And again, I must emphasize that my form, by my own assessment, was more “less graceful than an athlete’s” than “like an inflatable man outside a car dealership.” However, that was after four to five weeks of intense, focused training. Who knows how I would have felt with a proper 12-week training program, or if we had run at a less conservative pace, without Beth by my side, doing most of the literal heavy lifting.
My personal victory right now is a newfound appreciation for running. Competing is a privilege, and it’s easy to take it for granted when you’ve done it enough. Hyrox reminded me why I love the sport I’ve chosen. I know that the monotony that would cause some people to give up on a marathon at mile 18 is exactly what I find so meditative and fulfilling about running.
If I were to run the Hyrox again, I’d need more time to prepare for specific stages and learn all the special techniques available. The most important thing I have in common between Hyrox and marathons is that after finishing one, I immediately want to sign up for the next one.