The HYROX Diaries #2:What Are You Willing to Suffer For?

No more pre-workout.

Coffee and two dates, thirty minutes before I start. A couple more dates mid-session. That’s it. In the last essay, I told you the pre-workout would stop — and somewhere between then and now, without announcement, it did. What I found on the other side was something I hadn’t expected: steadier energy, a more honest read of what I actually have. Some things you think you need turn out to be noise you were paying to hear.

Eleven days to Barcelona. This is what the training looks like from the inside now.

There was a morning this week I simply could not run.

Not low energy. Absent energy. The distinction matters — one is a warning, the other is a bill arriving after months of spending. I lay there long enough to know the morning was gone, took a nap in the afternoon, ran in the afternoon, and somewhere in between overslept through a call with my business coach.

Twenty minutes late. I owned it the moment I picked up. But the embarrassment settled into me slowly — not because I’d missed the call, but because I understood what it meant. The training had taken the wheel. I hadn’t noticed until we were already moving.

Friday nights are gone too, in their old form. No dinners out, no late evenings. I learned that lesson from a single ruined Saturday and never needed to learn it again. When an invitation comes in on a Friday now, I decline. Not with resentment — with something closer to relief. Knowing what you’re protecting has a quietness to it.

This week’s simulation was the hardest yet. Seventy minutes completed; the race will demand closer to a hundred. I wore new shoes — a decision I paid for in unfamiliar knee pain by the final run. The old shoes go back on. Some experiments belong in training. This one was a reminder that race day is not the place for them.

Am I ready? I genuinely don’t know.

A friend in our group hurt his back on the first day of training, nearly quit weeks later, but he kept going through every rational argument to stop. Today, eleven days out, his back is not 100%, but he’s soldiering on. That single fact has done more for my own resolve than anything I’ve read.

Which brings me to what I’ve really been thinking about.

Not the race. Not the result. The question underneath all of it, the one this kind of undertaking has a way of surfacing, whether you want it to or not: what are you actually willing to suffer for?

It costs nothing to want things. To imagine the finish line, the transformation, the version of yourself that exists somewhere on the other side of the hard work. Everyone wants that. The wanting is free.

What separates people — what has always separated people — is not the size of the dream but the willingness to sustain the daily, invisible, unrewarded grind of getting there.

Khabib Nurmagomedov put it with the bluntness only he can get away with: “Every man addicted to something. Some smoke, some drink, some waste time. But real man, he addicted to discipline. Discipline no need motivation. Discipline move without feeling. I go anyway — even when tired, even when lonely.”

I’ve been turning that over for weeks. We are all addicted to something. The question is whether it’s comfort or the struggle that produces what we actually want. Most of us, if we’re honest, have spent more time worshipping at the altar of ease than we’d care to admit. I know I have.

“The voice in your head will always make its case for quitting. Every week, sometimes every day. The work is not silencing it — it’s learning to move while it talks.”

Coach Sommer, who trained some of the world’s finest gymnasts, wrote something I wish I’d read twenty years ago: make one decision — a real one, to a long-term goal — and then simply refuse to budge. Not a thousand small daily decisions. Not constant motivation checks. One commitment, protected like something you cannot afford to lose.

Because here is the truth about motivation: it is not a reliable fuel. It shows up when things are going well and disappears precisely when you need it most. What carries you through the disappeared motivation is the decision you made before it left — the one that doesn’t require renegotiation every morning when your body is aching and the alarm goes off in the dark.

I made that decision in December. On a whim, technically — but the commitment that followed was not a whim. And what I’ve understood, somewhere in the middle of these months, is that the decision was never really about a race. It was about finding out what I’m made of when the conditions are unfavourable and nobody is watching, and stopping would be completely reasonable.

There’s a line I’ve kept coming back to on the harder mornings: don’t look at the whole staircase. Just the next step.

I have been doing this since January without calling it anything. Week one, I didn’t think about May. I thought about week one. This session, not the race. This kilometre, not the finish. It is the only way something like this works — the full picture, absorbed at once, is designed to make you quit before you begin.

What nobody tells you when you sign up for something like this is what comes included in the price. The rearranged Fridays. The missed calls. The mornings when the energy simply isn’t there. The new pains appearing in places you didn’t know could hurt. The slow and humbling discovery of exactly where your limits are, and what it costs — in sleep, in sacrifice, in the quiet daily choosing — to move them even slightly.

My legs are stronger than they have ever been. That’s real. But it’s not the thing I’ll carry out of this. What I’ll carry is something harder to measure — the knowledge that I made a decision in December and honoured it through every week that tried to talk me out of it.

Goals, I’ve come to understand, are not destinations. They are mirrors. What matters is who looks back.

The race will tell me what I can do in a hundred minutes.

The training has already told me who I am.

—Final Part after the race on 14th May.