The Hyrox journey

When Martin, my coach, said in March that I should train for Hyrox, I said yes immediately.

I knew very little about what Hyrox actually was. I knew even less about my own capacity to compete in one. But I trusted Martin when he described it: fun, well-organised, and humbling all at once. Three words that turned out to be exactly right, in ways I could not have anticipated when I said yes in a gym in Taiwan in early spring.

It started, like most things this year, in Hualien.

We were halfway through our time with the Traveling Village — the nomadic community we had been living alongside for months — and the children were thriving, surrounded by friends, happy in the slow rhythm of a small Taiwanese town. Which meant, for the first time in years if not decades, I had something I had forgotten existed: spare time.

I found myself going to the gym more than once a day. Something in me was hungry for structure, for purpose, for a goal that had a shape to it. At the end of March, Martin and I did a full Hyrox simulation. It was wildly hard. I couldn't walk down stairs properly for days afterward. But we had a baseline, and I had a direction, and something had been set in motion.

The original plan was Chiba, Japan, in August. I trained toward it through everything that followed.

Seoul came first.

I was waking before sunrise and making my way through the winding streets to find a gym before the city properly woke up. Twice a day, most days. Running in Seoul became its own education — not the tourist Seoul of must-see landmarks, but the city at its quietest and most itself. Cherry blossom petals still falling on the Gangnam river banks. The strange serenity of a stream cutting through the middle of bustling Myeongdong. The city revealed itself differently at that hour, to someone who was there for the running rather than the sightseeing, and I loved it for that.

Then five weeks in Busan, in a setup that turned out to be more complicated than we had imagined. The standard gym there wasn't sufficient for what I needed, so I walked into a CrossFit gym for the first time in my life and made it work. Six workout days a week. Double sessions four times a week. Running in Busan was easy — everyone in Busan seems to run, and the city makes it accessible in a way that is difficult to explain but immediately felt.

And then, on an ordinary Saturday morning, I went out for a run and my knee started clicking.

Not pain at first — just sound. But with every step, every click, the joint became more and more restricted until I couldn't walk on it properly. The injury didn't arrive with any drama. No bold moment in a competition or a heavy workout. It simply crept up, quietly and without warning, and announced itself at the worst possible moment.

The months that followed required a particular kind of patience I am still learning to give myself.

Many things became a struggle. In Kyoto, the knee pain was constant — present not just during workouts but all the time, persistent and wearing. I went to a physiotherapist. I found a remarkable body worker in Niseko who introduced me to acupuncture in ways that left me with more needles in my body than I had ever managed to thread into fabric doing sashiko embroidery. I gave up on Ashtanga for a season. I stopped running.

I also missed the Chiba tickets entirely — they sold out while I wasn't watching, and that particular train left without me.

In Niseko, something finally shifted. The knee began to heal. I could run again, cautiously and with attention, and the gym there was everything I had needed through the difficult weeks. By the end of August, in one hot afternoon in Sapporo, I made a decision: I bought Hyrox tickets for Rome instead.

It turned out to be the best decision of the whole journey.

Rome was just right.

Not just as a race venue — though running outdoors through the September heat, being sprayed with water between stations, competing in a city that old and that alive, was an experience entirely its own. But as a destination, as a chapter, as a gift. We brought our oldest daughter. We had days in the city together — the three of us, Tommy and Laila and I — moving through Rome with no particular agenda beyond eating and looking and being somewhere extraordinary together.

The carb loading alone deserves its own mention. I ate pasta and pizza and bread and gelato in quantities that would under normal circumstances have concerned me. Now, having recently discovered some gut issues and knowing I am moving away from gluten for the foreseeable future, I am even more grateful for every single bite. Rome in September, before I knew what I now know, was the most perfectly timed farewell to a category of food I loved without quite realising it until it was over.

And then there was the race itself.

Loud. Pumped. Wild. On the train to the venue I met a wonderful woman from Canada — we had never seen each other before and immediately fell into the particular easy warmth of two people who are about to do something slightly terrifying together for the first time. We got fake tattoos. We cheered for other athletes before our start time arrived. We laughed a lot.

The running was outdoors and the heat was real — many athletes struggled with overheating, and running through sprinklers to cool down before re-entering the hall for the next station became one of those details that makes an experience feel completely alive and specific and unlike anything else. The kind of detail you cannot plan for and cannot forget.

I loved every moment of it.

But the best moment — the one I keep returning to, the one that landed somewhere deeper than the finish line — was seeing Laila's face when I came through. Pride and admiration, entirely unperformed, on the face of my daughter who had watched her mother train through an injury across half of Asia and a month of intense preparation in Zagreb and show up anyway.

I felt proud too. For all of it — the hard work and the setbacks and the coming back after the knee and the pivoting from Chiba to Oslo to Rome and the double sessions in Seoul and the needles in Niseko and every single person who cheered for me along the way.

What I did not expect was the crash that came after.

The emotional and mental low that followed the high was as deep as the high had been tall. For a few days I didn't quite know what to do with myself. Hyrox and the entire process of getting there had occupied so much of my life for six months — every destination, every spare hour, every decision about training had been organised around it. And then it was done, and the question what now? arrived louder than I had anticipated.

Time rolls you on, though. New openings appear. I found my way back to steady workouts, back to Ashtanga — this time with a new understanding of my body and its needs and its limits, which the injury gave me whether I wanted it or not. My knee is healing. I am still working toward running without pain, which feels close now in a way it didn't for months.

I need to say this clearly, because it matters to me: I have never been as strong as I am in this season of my life.

Forty-two years old. Mother of three. A perimenopausal woman in a world that tends to suggest women at this stage should be winding down rather than beginning. And yet here I am — stronger, more capable, more intentional in my training than I have ever been. This year showed me what my body can do when I give it structure and purpose and the stubborn refusal to stop.

Hyrox or no Hyrox, I have every plan in the world to keep going.

Looking back, this was never really a recap of a race.

It was a journey that happened to have a race at the end of it — from a gym in Taiwan to the streets of Seoul to a CrossFit box in Busan to acupuncture in Niseko to pasta in Rome to a finish line I crossed with my daughter watching.

Hell of a journey is the only phrase that fits.

And I would do every single step of it again.