The HYROX Diaries #1:The Body Doesn't Lie
I’m standing on the side of the road on a Saturday morning in Accra, hands on my knees, the sun already doing its worst at eight in the morning, thirty degrees Celsius and climbing, humidity sitting on my chest like something with weight.
I want to vomit.
I’m breathing like a man who has forgotten how, and I’m thinking: whose idea was this?
Mine. It was mine.
I stay bent over for longer than I’d like to admit. Around me, the group keeps moving — or at least they’re pretending to. Someone calls my name. I wave them off.
I’m somewhere in the middle of a HYROX simulation that felt ambitious when we planned it and feels delusional now. There are still stations left. There is still running left. The heat is not getting better.
I tell myself: just stand. That’s all. Just stand up and start jogging.
Let me back up.
Somewhere in mid-December — on a whim, which is how most of my better decisions arrive — I decided to sign up for a HYROX race.
HYROX is a global fitness race that has taken the athletic world by storm in recent years. The format is deceptively simple: run one kilometre, complete a functional workout station, repeat — eight times over. The stations include the ski erg, sled push and pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, sandbag lunges, and wall balls. It sounds manageable until you’re on station five with legs that stopped cooperating two stations ago.
I didn’t arrive at this through careful research. I arrived at it on a padel court, noticing that my cardio was nowhere near where it used to be. I was fit in the way that a man who lifts weights and plays padel is fit — functional, presentable, but not cardiovascularly fit. Not really.
Maybe I wanted to prove something. Maybe I just wanted a deadline, something with stakes. Either way, I signed up. And then, because I am who I am, I pulled in my brother and his wife, my son Nader, his girlfriend, and a handful of friends I knew would be mad enough to say yes.
The race is May 14th. In Barcelona — which, if you needed a city to make you commit to something hard, is not a bad choice.
What I did not fully appreciate in December was what four months of training would reveal about the gap between who I think I am physically and who I actually am.
I used to be a runner. Real running — double-digit kilometres on the roads of Accra, a couple of half marathons, the kind of mileage that builds quiet confidence in your legs.
That was before the snowmobile accident. Before the fracture, the surgical fixation, the long road back. And after, the injuries accumulated over years of football, of pushing too hard, of a body that gave generously and eventually sent a bill. Between the damage and the years, I had put running down like something I’d pick back up when the time was right.
The time, apparently, is now. And the body has opinions about that.
Going back to running after a break that long is not like riding a bicycle. The stamina is gone. The rhythm is gone. The easy relationship between your lungs and your legs — gone. What’s left is the memory of what it felt like, which is almost worse than having no memory at all. You know exactly what you’ve lost. You feel the gap with every kilometre.
And we are doing this in Ghana. In the hottest month of the year.
This is not uncomfortable heat. This is heat that has intentions. I’d thought training in it would make me stronger — that Barcelona would feel easy by comparison. Probably not, training in this heat doesn’t make you faster. It makes you survive. There is a difference.
Nothing prepared me for the Saturday simulations. Three months with an online coach helped — strength first, then running as the race approached — but the first simulation hit like a reality check I hadn’t asked for. Soul-crushing is not an exaggeration.
I won’t lie to you. I’m trying every trick available to stay the course. I’ve walked when I should have run. I’ve quietly modified exercises when no one was watching. And in a particularly optimistic moment, I added pre-workout — 185mg of stimulant — to manufacture energy for those Saturday mornings.
The logic seemed sound. More energy, more output, better training.
What I discovered is that pre-workout and sustained cardio have a complicated relationship. The stimulant effect that feels like rocket fuel in the first ten minutes becomes something else entirely by kilometre four. Your heart is doing things your legs cannot match. You feel simultaneously wired and completely depleted.
I just want to stay in it — that’s the honest truth. But the pre-workout will stop. The body doesn’t lie.
Each simulation follows the same arc: arrive with a mixture of giddy excitement and cautious optimism, feel reasonable for the first twenty minutes, then enter a sustained negotiation with myself about what I’m actually capable of. Get back home completely knackered — that’s the only word for it — into an ice bath, the whole day gone to recovery.
But here is the thing I did not expect: the satisfaction that stays.
It comes later, quietly, when you’re sitting in the afternoon, and you realise you did something hard this morning. Not hard in the way that difficult emails are hard, or difficult conversations, or running Kimo — the grind of it, the things that drain you without leaving you anything. Hard in the old way. Physical, honest, undeniable. Your body did something, and it remembers.
And doing it with people I love has been the part I didn’t plan for. There’s something that happens when you suffer alongside people you care about. Nobody performs. Nobody pretends. The usual social surface falls away, and what’s left is just people, breathing hard, keeping each other going.
A few days ago, I looked over at Nader. He was on the treadmill next to where I was rowing. His pace read 13.5 kilometres per hour. My runs are usually half that. He wasn’t even training seriously. He was barely out of breath.
Youth. That’s all I will say about that.
There’s something I keep coming back to, harder to admit than anything about the training.
I have a friend who is now semi-retired, riding motorcycles across countries, living by his own compass. I think about him on those Saturday mornings. Not with envy. With recognition. We’re all near the same age, most of us in this group. We’ve all built things, spent decades doing the work.
And somewhere in the decision to sign up for HYROX — to choose something hard and physical and communal — I think we’re all answering the same unspoken question.
Not can we still do this. But what does it mean that we want to?
I don’t have the answer yet. But I’m showing up on Saturday mornings, which is maybe the beginning of one.
Twenty-one days to Barcelona. The running is still my biggest problem. I’m building — slowly, which is not the word I’d choose, but it’s the honest one.
I signed up on a whim in mid-December.
I’m still here in April. Still showing up.
Still getting into ice baths.
Still pulling myself back up from that bent-over position on the side of the road.
That, for now, is enough.
— More to come before May 14th.