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Former New Yorker-turned Miami resident Jordyn Taylor was so wiped out after her first HYROX race that her planned celebratory dinner turned into a night on the couch with electrolyte drinks.
“I think I puked at some point,” she confessed to The Post.
Within days, she had signed up for another event.
“I was so electrified by the adrenaline of that first experience,” Taylor, 34, an author and former Men’s Health executive editor, told The Post — admitting that after a short recovery period, she was once again raring to go.
What hooked her in, she said, was the rush of feeling powerful — while submitting to something objectively absurd.
Welcome to the strange world of HYROX, the grueling global fitness race that has become NYC’s loudest, most look-at-me, cult-iest workout obsession — where fanatics pay hundreds of dollars to run, row, ski, push sleds, pull sleds, carry weights, lunge with sandbags, and throw wall balls — then, once they’re done, they do it all over again.
Even if it made them puke.
HYROX has had the strange velocity of a trend that seems to arrive fully formed.
One month, it was the fitness challenge only gymheads were participating in. Then suddenly, it was all over social media and group chats, with weekend training plans squeezed in between bottomless brunches.
The race has become a kind of social shorthand — not just for working out, but for working out hard enough that everyone is supposed to know about it.
Even some regular participants seem startled by the speed of it.
On Reddit, users described going from being the lone HYROX obsessive at their gym to watching races sell out the day tickets drop, with workout facilities all over carving out dedicated HYROX training areas.
What was once a niche pursuit has now become an official craze, with 2 million athletes expected to participate across 107 race weekends and six continents in the 2026-2027 season.
It’s the new Barry’s, the new IRONMAN and, depending on your swiping radius, maybe the newest dating app personality trait.
During the race, brave participants must complete a 1-kilometer run immediately followed by a functional workout station — for eight rounds as fast as they can.
The whole thing has gotten big enough that even celebrities are signing up to suffer.
“The Conjuring” star Patrick Wilson has become one of HYROX’s most famous competitors, racing in events around the world, his most recent being June’s New York HYROX race at Pier 76.
It’s hot, there’s money in it, and private equity has taken notice — founded in fitness-mad Germany in 2017, the brand is now majority-owned by Infront Sports & Media — and LVMH-backed private equity firm L Catterton was reported in mid-June to be in exclusive talks to buy a stake.
All that visibility has made the backlash easier to find.
As HYROX has spread across social feeds, people have called out the scene for being performative and status-obsessed, with one content creator aiming what he described as athletes “cheating” and the “weird ego” around some competitors with a newfound superiority complex over those hitting up regular gyms.
The criticism is less about the workout itself than the lifestyle around it — and that lifestyle comes with a hefty bill.
Race registration alone can run into the hundreds, while training at a popular gym like The Training Lab NYC on W. 39th St., an official HYROX partner, will run you $50 a session, or $425 a month for a three-month HYROX prep regimen.
And don’t forget new shoes, pricey supplements — and the all-important photo packages.
For all the muscle and buzz now behind the brand, HYROX was built around a simple idea — to create a race for people who were already serious about gym training but wanted a clear, standardized way to test that work.
And leave it to NYC to become one of the brand’s biggest stages.
A representative for the company told The Post that the first Big Apple event in 2024 drew 5,000 athletes and major social attention. This season, those numbers more than tripled – with entries selling out “in mere seconds.”
An 11-day NYC takeover around the event drew more than 50,000 participants. The Empire State Building even glowed in HYROX yellow at one point.
Constantine Mouzakitis, the brand’s former national community events manager, first connected with HYROX as a fan in 2023, when the New York-area event was still being held at the Meadowlands in Secaucus. At the time, he said, the sport was still building recognition in the region, but local gyms quickly became its entry point.
He began bringing HYROX’s Physical Fitness Test, known as the PFT, to gyms across the Northeast. Soon, he said, gyms started reaching out to him.
“That first year, I recorded over 200 events in 10 months up and down the Northeast,” Mouzakitis said, adding that those events helped fuel HYROX’s first sold-out North American race.
These days, he said, “finding out about HYROX isn’t hard.”
By the time HYROX started to feel unavoidable, there were already people building their weeks — and their friendships — around it.
That’s definitely been the case for Taylor, who said she has now completed four races — both solos and doubles, or races with a partner. She leans towards the latter.
“There’s no feeling like giving your partner the world’s sweatiest, most adrenaline-filled hug on the HYROX finisher’s stage at the end of the race,” she explained.
As a full-time author, the 34-year-old said HYROX training also gives her a break from the solitude of writing and HYROX-focused classes have become opportunities for community building.
The chance to form new bonds in our isolating modern era is part of what makes these types of extreme group fitness formats so alluring, according to Dr. Justin Anderson, founder and CEO of Premier Sport Psychology and Premier Performance Advising.
Anderson said HYROX taps into several powerful psychological pulls at once — measurable progress, public performance, and shared physical strain. A finish time, he said, gives people something concrete to chase.
And while that can be motivating, it can also start to get complicated real fast, he said.
Chris Ruhl, 32, an engineering consultant in thermal sciences from Phoenix, AZ, discovered the sport in early 2022 after years of Spartan races, DEKA events, and CrossFit.
His first race was at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in the fall of 2022. Upon walking in on race day, he felt like he had entered “a convention for the fittest people on earth.”
During a race cycle, Ruhl follows a grueling workout schedule, sometimes enduring two-a-day workouts three to five times a week, which he admitted to The Post can sometimes “flirt with obsession.”
Those flirtations, Dr. Anderson said, should give athletes pause.
“When a finish time directs attention toward controllable improvement — it is a powerful motivational tool,” he said.
“When it directs attention toward fixed self-evaluation, it activates a more negative phenomenon where achievement never produces lasting satisfaction,” he warned.
Anderson said that level of discipline can start to look compulsive when skipping a workout creates anxiety about identity, not just fitness.
“You are not training to perform,” Anderson said. “You are training to quiet a threat.”
That’s the darker side of fitness movements built on discipline, community, and visible progress.
And HYROX is hardly the first fitness world to navigate that tension.
It has naturally drawn comparisons to CrossFit, another culture built around difficult workouts and a fierce community — an overlap that its CEO Bruce Edwards views as a good thing for functional fitness.
“HYROX gives people another great way to test that fitness, and many of its movements have long been part of our methodology,” Edwards told The Post.
For Edwards, the difference between healthy intensity and a community that becomes too exclusionary comes down to “inclusion without lowering the bar.”
For some, like Hamilton Heights-based actor Ben Salus, 32, one HYROX may have been enough.
“My first HYROX was a true test of my own physical fitness and ability — versus a more socially focused event, or something to do for fun with friends,” Salus, who lost 20 pounds during training, told The Post.
“At some points I wanted to kill anyone cheering for me, but I’m thankful for a crowd of friends cheering me on — I guess,” Salus laughed.
Once it was over, though, the suffering came with souvenirs. He bought the race photos and posted them quickly, even if he was less eager to broadcast his actual time.
Unlike others, he didn’t walk away desperate to repeat the event – admitting that the burpee broad jumps nearly did him in.
What would lure him back, he said, would be the chance to do it with a pal — someone to share the pain with.
“I am very grateful that I got to do one solo though,” he said. “I feel like I impressed myself.”
