A sled scraping across a concrete floor. Wall balls against a wall, until your arms give out. A time on a big clock. That image isn't new anymore in the feeds of amateur athletes.
What's changing is what sits underneath. Next to #hyrox, #styrekx turns up, and a few others. The same sled, the same wall balls, the same athlete training months for it, and a different race number.
From 650 to a million
Hyrox started in Hamburg in 2017 with 650 participants. Co-founder Moritz Fürste worked the microphone himself that day, because everyone did everything. This year the company sold its millionth ticket. It runs in 34 countries. In roughly 16,000 gyms you can train for it. Revenue lands around 270 million dollars this year, Fürste says in a recent interview.
The format has never changed. Eight one-kilometre runs, each followed by one strength station. The same exercises, the same order, anywhere in the world. New York sold 15,000 tickets last year. This year 55,000, in one hour.
There's more than one race in the hall
Styrekx comes from the people behind Strong Viking. Ten times 800 metres, ten stations, categories from Light to Xtreme. They've done Gorinchem and Amsterdam, they're in Mechelen in October and in Ghent in March 2027. Alongside them run Gymrace, Hexafit, ATHX and Hybrid Games. There are calendar sites now that line up the races from every organiser side by side, sign-up links included.
Different distance, different station, different name on the bib. The training beforehand is the same.
The founder draws the line himself
Fürste built Hyrox on one observation: more than half the people in a gym see fitness as their sport, while fitness isn't a sport but a way of training. He wanted to build the sport all those people were already training for.
Hybrid racing is the sport, he says himself. Hyrox is the product.
Who carried the sport
Hyrox grew without paid advertising. Fürste considers it money down the drain: someone who has never heard of the race won't understand an ad anyway. Early on, partners sent him influencer celebrities to post something. According to him, that sold not a single ticket. The owner of a gym with 4,000 followers and 2,000 members posted something and sold a hundred.
So the sport didn't grow through the brand, but through the people doing it. People with a job, a family and a race number four months out. A crossfitter making the switch. A runner starting on their first doubles. They train it and they share it, because they're right in the middle of it. That's exactly the profile of a sportfluencer. How athletes like that share their build-up, we covered earlier behind the scenes with fitfluencers.
To the Games, without the name
Fürste expects the sport at the Olympic Games within ten years. His brand won't be an Olympic discipline, he adds straight away. The sport will, with his race as the qualifying route. There are talks running with World Triathlon and the IOC.
What that sport ends up being called isn't settled. Hybrid racing, says Fürste. Fitness racing, say the organisers who came after him. For most athletes it's simply the name of the race they've signed up for.
At Sunday Squad it sits in the list of sports as fitness racing. If you do it, set it as your main sport.