This year, there will be almost half a million people competing in Hyrox competitions globally. From that group only a handful are full-time, paid Hyrox athletes. Sure, there may be a few ESN sponsored athletes here and there, but most of us are full time employees who don’t have sixteen hours a day to train, nap, improve their mobility and most importantly, focus.
I for one certainly don’t. My name is Sophia and I’m a former GB distance runner who most recently broke the world record for Hyrox Open Women. During the day however, I’m Sophia the founder of Kanjo Health, a venture backed health-tech business that operates between London and the Middle East. It’s an all-consuming career, constantly having to hire, fire, raise money, pivot your product and make sure you are the expert on all things going on in your industry.
I am also an inherently very social person. Spending time with people I care about is something that comes before anything else, so trying to slot racing into a tightly packed schedule hasn’t been easy.
I started out in competitive sport at ten years old so the whole balance thing isn’t new. It just got a lot harder as I got older, something I’m sure you can relate to. Whether it’s a job, kids, family, weddings or running a household, finding time to slot in training and races is honestly just tough.
However, over the last few months, I’ve found a few things that make this whole training/working thing (real hybrid training I can tell you) that little bit easier.
Top Tips for HYROX
- Running is the easiest to find time to do and the most important: Over 50% of the race is running, 15% is ergs and the rest of the movements have some form of strength element. You do not need to be in the gym lifting every day. Schedule your runs on the days where you won’t have time to make it to the gym.
- Focus on areas to improve the most: If you are early on in your HYROX journey, identify where you can achieve the most improvement, rather than focusing on marginal gains. Where can you get the maximal results from the minimum amount of effort? For me, I focused on wall balls and burpees.
- Use training as a way to socialise: I don’t think I would have turned up to 80% of my workouts if I was training solothe entire time. Me and my friends started a running group and our HYROX gym honestly is just a medium for coffee afterwards. It feels much nicer going to work knowing you had fun beforehand.
- Put it in your work calendar: Block out time. Calendars get filled up quickly and that lunch run you wanted to do quickly gets taken up by a team call. Block it out and honour it.
- Okay but the schedule can be flexible: On the days I know I will be working late or travelling, I frontload training in the morning or move a rest a day earlier. I would rather train well on a different day than train exhausted.
- Recovery is also recovery from work: Be kind to yourself, it’s a lot to take on so if you can afford to, make sure you find time to get a massage or have a bath.
- Don’t do more than you need: You don’t need to be a hero, do the amount that works for you. My coach always said his job is to “reign me in”.
- Your coach should know about your other responsibilities: Make sure, if you do decide to work with a coach, they understand you are not full time. My coach Daniel Lavipour and I have been working together now for over ten years but the entire time, training has been built to work around my schedule.
- Don’t punish yourself: at the end of the day this is a hobby that we all want to do well at. Everyone has bad training days, everyone skips training and everyone will have a bad race. Whenever these things happen to me, I think about all the other hard things I am doing at the same time.
- The race weekend does not have to be all about the race: It’s hard enough to find time off or a weekend free so make sure the weekend isn’t all about the race. Go see some sights, invite some friends and make sure you allow yourself to have fun. My friends and family have come to all four of the races I have entered and we make sure that they are always fun weekends. The day after my first race in Gdansk, my parents and I had a beach day. This time in Vienna, my girlfriends and mum came and we all explored the palaces, museums and restaurants.
Learn from the HYROX CEO.
