Beth Skwarecki lifts heavy things. I run long distances. Put us together, and you get one barely competent Hyrox athlete—and in less than a month, we'll discover if that's enough to survive a race.
On May 29, Beth and I will tackle a Hyrox doubles competition together. This is our joint experiment: just how little training can you get away with before showing up? We're banking on our individual strengths covering each other's weaknesses. We'll see if that gamble pays off.
Hyrox is the hottest fitness-race-sport hybrid since CrossFit swept the world. But unlike CrossFit's chaos of random events, Hyrox follows a brutally standardized format—and that predictability is part of its appeal.
Here's the recipe: Run eight total kilometers, broken into eight one-kilometer segments. Between each run, complete one functional fitness station in a fixed order—SkiErg, sled push, sled pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, farmer's carry, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. The clock never stops. You're racing against yourself, your friends, and thousands of others who've done the exact same workout under the exact same conditions.
In doubles, both athletes run every kilometer side by side. But the eight strength stations? We can split the work any way we want. Right away, I know I'm the lucky one here. I get a weightlifter to help with the heavy stuff. Beth still has to run every single kilometer, no matter what.
My cardio engine is sitting comfortably at half-marathon fitness. For a race built around eight kilometers of running, that's my superpower. I'm also banking on something less tangible: the psychological toolkit that marathon training builds. You learn to hurt for a long time and keep moving anyway. You negotiate with your own suffering and push through walls. That mental grit will matter when Hyrox tries to break me.
But I know exactly what will break me first: strength. My resistance training is, generously speaking, inconsistent. The stations that demand moving heavy things—the sled push and sled pull—terrify me. They come at stations two and three, right in the first quarter of the race. If I blow up my legs fighting those, everything after—the running, the lunges, the wall balls—will hurt in a completely foreign way. Marathon pain is a slow burn. Functional station pain hits fast and never leaves.
Beyond raw strength, I worry about technique and efficiency—and the injury risk that comes with poor form under fatigue. I've taken exactly one Hyrox class so far. I'll squeeze in three more before race day. Right now, I know enough to know that I don't know nearly enough.
Wall balls normally don't scare me. But after eight rounds of running and seven other stations, repeatedly squatting and launching a weighted ball overhead sounds like a nightmare. Beth and I have a lot to figure out about strategy and conserving strength.
With less than a month to race day, I can't build meaningful strength in that window. So I'm prioritizing technique over everything else. I can't transform my power output, but I can learn to move efficiently, avoid compensatory patterns that cause injury, and conserve energy by not fighting the movements.
That means more time with a sandbag and a sled than I'm used to—focused purely on form, not load. I'll train at classes with Hyrox-specific station sequences, but those classes skip the running portions. So I still have no idea what it feels like to transition from a run into a strength station on tired legs. I'm also exploring official Hyrox training modes for my watch, along with some unofficial apps that have popped up for race-specific prep.
Having Beth as my partner makes me feel significantly better about all this. My only worry for her is the cardio. Eight kilometers of running interspersed with eight stations might be a lot for someone who doesn't regularly train for endurance. In doubles, you can tag in and out, but there's a limit to how much you can cover for each other. My biggest fear is burning out and leaving her with way too much of the heavy lifting—literally.
We'll find out on May 29. Either we'll discover you need surprisingly little prep to survive a Hyrox doubles race, or we'll discover exactly what happens when a marathon runner and a weightlifter underestimate a fitness competition. Either way, it makes for one hell of a story.
