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Hyrox, a fast-growing fitness race headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, will bring its most coveted event to the United States next year for the second time since its founding in 2017.
The company recently announced Chicago will host the 2024/25 World Championships at Navy Pier from June 12-15, 2025. The first (and most-recent) time Hyrox held that event in the United States was in 2022, in Las Vegas. After spending two years in Europe, the competition will return to the country where Hyrox popularity has skyrocketed in recent years, with many U.S. races selling out this year, according to officials.
“The decision to bring the World Championships back to the U.S. reflects the growing demand for the sport across the country,” Moritz Furste, Hyrox’s co-founder, told AthletechNews.com. “Chicago is not only a key operational hub for Hyrox in the U.S., but it also offers a world-class venue to match the scale of this event.”
According to Hyrox officials, it is “the world’s fastest-growing fitness sport, with over 550,000 participants expected to race globally this year, including more than 80,000 from the United States alone. The Hyrox race format tests endurance and strength through a challenging combination of 8 x 1 km runs, each followed by a functional workout.”
Those eight workouts require a blend of strength, power and endurance that involve pushing, pulling, running, throwing and carrying. Many races are held indoors in expansive exhibition halls, creating an immersive race experience for both competitors and spectators.
“Hyrox started as an idealistic concept: an event in which everyday exercisers could share the same space as top athletes and where anyone could conceivably tackle every aspect of the course,” writes Men’s Health senior editor Brett Williams, who participated in a Hyrox competition at Manhattan’s Pier 76 with 5,300 other competitors. “This dynamic exists in CrossFit’s annual Open event and in road and trail running races, but Hyrox cofounder and CEO Christian Toetzke, an endurance-racing junkie who organized events for years, believed he could create a fitnessy sport with broader appeal. He set out to engineer a contest that could bring mass participation to the gym and running space and teamed up with Moritz Furste, a former German Olympic field-hockey champion.”
As proof Hyrox is aiming for CrossFit’s popularity, Williams points out that David Magida, Hyrox 2023 North American Champion and Hyrox 365 Global Programming Director, “says the company is currently developing educational materials for coaches and is working with affiliate gyms to provide programming, not unlike CrossFit’s top-down organizational structure. According to the company, 2,000 gyms and trainers globally are already part of its affiliate network. But there’s more in the pipeline that could make Hyrox more standardized than CrossFit, which typically allows gym owners to determine what their spaces look like. Magida says the company plans to open Performance Centers, with floor plans specific to Hyrox training, and will also help gym owners understand how to retrofit their spaces for ideal use to train for the race.”
Hyrox officials also partnered earlier this year with sports travel specialist Destination Sports Experiences to create Hyrox Tours that offer exclusive, athlete-focused travel and lodging packages for competitors. Tickets also are available for family and friends who tag along as spectators.
Hyrox’s surge coincides with the highly publicized death of a CrossFit competitor in August at a CrossFit Games in Texas. Serbia native Lazar Dukic, 28, was participating in the 800-meter swimming portion of an event after completing a 3.5-mile run. He “was last seen in the water … and did not resurface,” according to reports.
While it’s unclear what long-term impacts Dukic’s death might have on CrossFit, there has been discussion of concerns within the sport.
“Some top CrossFit athletes have said that the Games often push competitors too far, exceeding what’s necessary to test fitness,” according to The New York Times. “Some people took issue with the decision to hold an outdoor run and swim in Texas in August, when the water temperatures were allegedly unsafe; others wondered whether enough lifeguards and safety personnel had been on the scene. The morning after Mr. Dukic died, Dave Castro, CrossFit’s director of sport and the programmer of the Games, said in an interview that safety ‘is always taken into consideration.’ Mr. Castro declined repeated requests for a follow-up interview.”
Hyrox promotes itself as “the sport for everybody” and strives to accommodate “both professional athletes and everyday fitness enthusiasts looking to take their training to the next level.”
Many comparisons and point/counterpoint articles have been written about CrossFit and Hyrox; here is just one of those. (Plenty of others are available.)
When Toetzke and Furste were developing Hyrox, they “chose exercises that could be assessed quickly by officials on the course, since the idea was to hold events with large waves of competitors,” Williams noted in Men’s Health. “The moves needed to be (relatively) safe to do under fatigue and couldn’t be more difficult for women than men. (Box jumps were nixed for the former reason, monkey bars for the latter.)”
Also: It’s worth noting that Hyrox was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential Companies of 2024.”
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