What HYROX taught me about business, belief, and being enough.

How HYROX became the ultimate mirror for my mindset (and business growth).

I almost burst into tears as we entered the arena. Loud music, results board flashing, DJ on the mic counting wall-balls with sweaty competitors, and participants everywhere in their Lycra, sports bras and shorts.

What the hell was I doing?

I was about to race in a HYROX doubles competition. In Rome. That’s what I was doing.

And it turns out, racing HYROX wasn’t just a physical challenge. It was one of the biggest self-trust experiment I’ve ever undertaken in real-time.

For those who don’t know what a HYROX is (totally normal, don’t worry), it’s an indoor fitness race that combines 8 functional fitness exercises done between 1km runs.

The exercises vary from skiing on a ski machine for 1km, to pushing a weighted sled, to carrying 16kg kettle bells to throwing a 4kg ball at a target. 8 runs. 8 exercises.

You can compete solo or in pairs. I was there, stood in an arena on the outskirts of Italy’s capital, to try it out for the first time, in the female doubles competition with my friend Georgy.

And the whole experience, from the training to the actual day, was a big mirror to self-doubt and where trust can waiver so easily when we’re doing something challenging, sometimes for the first time. Whether that’s in a fitness context, or in business and life too – that protective voice of “can I really do this?” shows up.

The Build Up

For context I am a nearly 40 year old woman who at the time of competing in this first HYROX was around 20 months postpartum after my second child.

Georgy who I did the race in a doubles pair with is a mum of 3 and 2 years postpartum as we entered too.

We are the classic “we don’t have time” genre of people to go into training for something like a HYROX.

Plenty of excuses – real and made up – to not fit exercising and running into our week, when we already pack lunches, do school runs, host play dates, do washing, calm tantrums and deal with broken sleep on the regular around work and you know, just, life.

Much like running a business, you don’t have to do a HYROX.

There are a million other things you can do to challenge yourself and get fit and healthy. This was just our poison of choice – something stretchy and uncomfortable enough to keep us at the tiller, showing up to the classes and staying accountable to our running training plans.

The positives of the build-up were the structured training and the accountability for me.

Exactly as in business when you have someone give you a guide, turning up to a class specifically tailored to those entering HYROX meant I didn’t have to plan my own exercise routines and mentally knew I was covering all bases with professionals doing the scheduling.

I also signed up for the Runna app and told it my goal so it could map out an improvement plan to get me running faster. Again, this was infinitely more helpful than just forcing myself out for a 5k or 8k every week with no particular pace or plan in mind other than the sheer will to be faster.

Having a clear goal, getting expert advice and plans and trusting that someone else knew the science to increasing my pace meant I could just show up and follow the instructions and trust the process.

The accountability of doing a doubles is also incredibly helpful when training.

Georgy and I screen-shot and shared our weekly runs and when we couldn’t train together in the same class I’d send her the workout plan to replicate in her own time so we were matching our training as much as possible.

BUT.

All this accountability and structure could only go so far.

The mind, when doing something challenging and inherently full of ‘risk’ has an incredible way of finding every possible angle to convince you that you need to stop. That it’s not possible, that you’re not cut out, that the safest and best thing to do is withdraw or pull back.

Constant thoughts to tackle throughout training were whether I was doing enough, whether I was pushing myself enough and the guilt that I was letting Georgy down hugely as my running pace was so much slower than hers.

And let’s not even get into the comparison because that was next level.

I train in a gym with people of all ages. I do not inhabit the smallest body and I am by far and away one of the slowest, if not the slowest runners in our regular HYROX training group.

It was great to see other people sharing their training runs but I was there on social media often zooming in and scrutinizing their pace and finding myself coming up short time and time again.

How I looked and the clothes I chose to wear to train (and the agony of deciding what to wear for the race too) also took the comparison to another place that was wholly unhealthy on many occasions.

It was a job every week to keep my mind in check. To remind myself that I was doing the best with the resources (and body!) I had. That mine and Georgy’s goal was simply to get round and tick the race off, not smash out a pro-level time, and that ultimately it didn’t matter what anyone else looked like or was doing in their training or in their race either.

My focus was on me, my pace, my form and the positive things I needed to say to myself.

Just like in business.

The Race: Lessons in Real Time

The day of the race dawned – after a dinner of Roman pasta and an early night – and we carb loaded again with pancakes.

Side note, it’s incredibly hard to find anywhere serving anything more than a croissant and coffee on a Sunday morning in Rome, brunch seems a lost concept in this part of the Med.

At your start time everyone in the same wave is ushered into a warm up pen and then a small holding space before you are released together to start your first run.

The music builds, the booming voice over tells you “this is everything you’ve trained for” and it’s all you can do but hold back the tears and let the emotion (enforced and also internal!) get the better of you.

But 5…4….3…2…1 came and…. we were off.

My three biggest learnings on the track for nearly an hour and a half were:

1. Pacing yourself – I think the word ‘pace’ has been sent to haunt me – or teach me a lesson – in this last quarter of the year. HYROX is nothing if not a lesson in pacing yourself physically and mentally.
   
   You simply cannot go too fast out of the traps in the first run and ski exercise, because otherwise you are exhausted for everything after.
   
   Yet this has to be carefully balanced with checking in with yourself – could you push a bit harder? Is there another gear there to access? Do you have a bit more in the tank to go faster on this one?
   
   It’s a lesson in tuning in so deeply to what you are feeling and thinking. The tightrope walk of wanting to max out your effort, but not collapse in a heap. The dance between going all out, or wishing afterwards you’d pushed that little bit harder.
   
   This is something I hear a lot in solopreneurs. The desire to achieve their goals and not look back at their business and feel they could/should have done more, that they somehow got in their own way.

   

2. Handling setbacks – As with business and life, not everything goes to plan in the race. I’ve practiced most of the exercises over and over to the point where I do them without thinking, in great volume and for lengths of time way more than required on the day.
   
   However the sled push and pull aren’t often part of the programming in our gym as it’s hard to make sure everyone gets a turn, and the sled itself we train with is also narrower than the competition size one. This meant both the sled push and pull – exercises 2 & 3 of 8, were harder than I anticipated and my technique went out of the window just to keep it moving.
   
   Again, this part of HYROX was an exercise in proving that even imperfect will do and the trust that I could adapt my push technique for example from what I’m used to, and still get results in these circumstances.

   

3. Focusing on your lane – the beauty and relative democratisation of HYROX is that, apart from the people you step out onto the first race with, it’s very hard within a few minutes of taking part, to tell how fast anyone else is going. When you run, you are in waves and laps, and it’s impossible to tell if someone is on their first or eight kilometre run. This means HYROX is well set up for staying in your lane and only competing with yourself.
   
   That being said, it’s still really hard not to compare. Naturally there are constantly people lapping you as you run, pulling or pushing their sled faster than you, jumping further in their burpees or taking less breaks and walking pauses to grab a drink.
   
   You can’t not see what they are doing, and also what they look like in their matching cherry print lycra shorts or Lulu Lemon two-pieces as they stride past you without a hair out of place as I struggled not to crumple into a hunched over snotty mess as I move around the circuits.
   
   But focus on yourself you must. It’s all you have, it’s the only way you can get to the end.

Crossing the finishing line – the final lessons

Crossing that finish line felt less like triumph and more like release. The tears I’d been holding back all day finally came out somewhere between the final wall balls and sprint to the finish line and collapsing into Georgy’s arms.

I didn’t feel heroic or like a new woman. I just felt proud — proud that I had done what I said I would do, and that I had trusted myself to handle whatever came up.

On reflection, I didn’t necessarily feel ready to run my first HYROX. But I trusted that I would be able to handle whatever it threw at me – physically and mentally.

Because I had practiced the moves, worked through a plan and been in near constant dialogue with my mind about being able to complete it.

The result itself didn’t matter. What mattered was that I now had evidence that I could trust myself. I could trust my body to show up, my brain to adapt, and my heart to keep going. And just like in business, that’s the real win — not the medal or the time, but the growing conviction that you can do hard things, even when you don’t feel ready.

If you’ve got to the end of this, thanks for sticking with me and reading my reflections.

Here are three things you can take from my HYROX experience:

1. Run your own race.
Comparison is the fastest route to losing trust in yourself. Whether you’re on a start line or launching an offer, the moment you focus on what everyone else is doing, you lose touch with your own rhythm. The only way to finish — in HYROX or business — is to keep your eyes on your lane.

2. Break it down.
No one finishes eight kilometres and eight exercises (or a business launch) in one breath. You get there by focusing on the next step, the next rep, the next conversation, the next post. Trust is built in micro-moments, not milestones.

3. Celebrate finishing.
It’s easy to look at the clock or the spreadsheet and see what you didn’t do. But self-trust grows every time you honour a commitment, however small. Every finish line — literal or metaphorical — is proof you can show up and see something through.

HYROX taught me that self-trust isn’t about feeling confident before you start. It’s about starting before you feel confident — and learning, rep by rep, that you can rely on yourself when it matters.

Whether you’re running a race, raising a child, or building a business, the process is the same: you prepare as best you can, you show up, and you let the experience teach you what you’re capable of.

That’s exactly what I help solopreneurs do. You don’t need to wait to feel ready to launch, sell or scale. You just need to trust that, like in HYROX, you can handle whatever comes up — and that the only way to build that trust is to start moving.

You can find out more about working with me here.