THE HYROX Diaries #3-The Finish Line Was Never the Point

I’m tired.

My blood is boiling.

I’m at the final station, and my watch says one hour thirty-eight minutes.

Every time I bend down to launch the six-kilogram wall ball, I feel my heart racing. The ball is hitting the frame and not being marked. I throw it again. Not marked. Again. The rep counter barely moves. Several minutes pass, and we cross the one-forty mark with only seventeen reps on the board.

I have completely lost my head.

Everything before this — the running, the sleds, the burpees that took my breath, the rowing, the lunges, the farmers carry— all of it done comfortably, and all of it behind us. We were on course for one hour and forty. I had told my partner we could do it, and I believed it. Eight minutes on a single station.

We cross the finish line at one hour forty-five.

I am so angry that I didn’t get a good picture at the line.

I’m telling you this first because it’s the most honest place to start. And because that anger — petty, specific, completely disproportionate — is actually the point. It means I wanted this more than I’d ever quite admitted to myself.

Nine days before the race, the flu arrived.

Not a cold. The kind of flu that puts you horizontal and keeps you there — feverish, wrung out, the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch.

I had just completed my best simulation. Seventy minutes, strong throughout, the finish line finally felt real. I went to bed satisfied in a way I hadn’t felt in months. I woke up unable to lift my head.

The training was over — nothing left to do but wait and worry. For the first time since December, the thought that I might not finish this race crossed my mind. What if I couldn’t even start? I’d started to build my identity around those Saturday mornings. Take the race away, and what’s left? The existential weight of that question, lying in Accra with a fever, was its own kind of education.

Barcelona arrived anyway.

Seventeen degrees, a light breeze, the kind of air that reminds you your lungs exist. We walked before the hotel room was ready. Later in the evening, we had dinner by the sea — red wine, a cigar, the flu still faintly present but ignorable for an evening. Not smart.

The next morning’s run, my last activity before the race, confirmed it: four and a half kilometres, hard going, heart rate climbing in ways that worried me. I stood there afterwards more afraid than I’d been all week.

For the two days before the race, we kept walking — Barcelona keeps offering the next beautiful street, the next good restaurant, the next reason to stay out. Wednesday night was dinner with the whole group, which I called the last supper. Warm, full of laughter.

By the end of it, I was ready, if anything, to get the race over and done with.

Race morning. One-thirty pm start — a piece of luck, peak condition time. Mild panic about logistics at the venue, then the music hit, the atmosphere hit, and something shifted. Hundreds of people in various states of anxiety and determination, all of them having made some version of the same decision we made — to choose something hard and show up for it. You cannot stand in that and feel alone in what you’re doing.

We paced ourselves well from the start. The key rule we’d learned: two and a half times round the circuit before each station, no more, no less — get it wrong and you earn a penalty. The early stations were manageable. A small hack helped: brief rest at each station, water, a quarter glass of Red Bull. It cost us time in the end, those micro-pauses, but it kept us functional when functional was all we needed.

Station four — the burpees — was where I came slightly undone. Lost my breath completely, but recovered over the next kilometre of running. At station five, the rowing, I took an energy gel, and something in my legs woke up.

I felt something I hadn’t expected: a surge. Not adrenaline exactly — something deeper, something that had been building through all those Saturday mornings in the Accra heat. The training arrived, finally, exactly when it was needed. I told my partner we could break one hour and forty. I believed it.

“The farmers carry felt easy. I was running with the kettlebells. Five months earlier, I couldn’t run a kilometre without stopping.”

Then the wall balls. You already know how that went.

What I remember most is not my own race.

It’s watching R finish the women’s doubles with a composure that made the rest of us look like we’d been making a fuss — every station handled cleanly, effortlessly, as if the months of training had been entirely obvious preparation for exactly this.

It’s N&N who spent the whole day being the energy for everyone else — cheering, lifting, pushing us — before crossing their own finish line later on in the evening.

It’s the moment we rushed back to the venue — barely showered, barely fed — to reach B&L just before their start, to stand at the barrier and give back a fraction of what had been given to us all day.

It’s N, J, M and R supporting us selflessly, even though they were not competing.

Somewhere in five months of training, something had happened that the training plan hadn’t scheduled. We had become, without meaning to, the kind of people who show up for each other. Not just on race day. On all the days before it.

In the first essay I asked a question I didn’t have an answer to: not can we still do this, but what does it mean that we want to?

I think I know now. It means we are not finished. The part of us that chooses hard things is still alive, still restless, still looking for the next staircase. Because the choosing is itself the point. The discipline, the rearranged Fridays, the Saturday mornings in the heat — none of that was preparation for living.

It was living.

James Hollis, the Jungian analyst whose work has become something close to a compass for me, argues that the real measure of a life is not whether it made you happy, but whether it made you larger. His question — does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me? — is the only test that matters.

I signed up on a whim in December. I don’t think it was a whim. I think some part of me already knew the answer — that the five months ahead would make me larger. Not faster. Not fitter, though that too.

Larger: more alive to what I’m capable of, more honest about what it costs, more certain that the cost is worth paying.

The whispering contentment of finishing and feeling enlarged has stayed with me.