We thought we were good friends. Then we joined Hyrox

Rekindling a friendship by training together for five months

"Can you help me?"

“I got it!”

I was doing my share of the sled pull when I felt like it was getting harder and harder to yank 78kg towards me. My race partner Vivien nodded. I dropped the ropes and stepped away.

Viv and I had been friends for about 7 years, having met because I was classmates with her partner. She saw me keeping all five fingers up for a very sexually explicit "Never Have I Ever." She took me out for shisha when my first girlfriend dumped me a few days before Christmas. We supported each other as our therapist (yes, we coincidentally share the same one) encouraged us to have hard conversations with our homophobic parents.

As a group of four with our respective girlfriends, we had fun going out for picnics, camping, water sports, barbecues. We shared inside jokes and watched the last season of The L Word: Generation Q together. We got each other gag gifts (like a jersey that has “69” on it) and actual birthday gifts (like a camping chair).

But then work got in the way. Over the years, we moved on from the jobs we got fresh out of university. She started working in a bank first, then I did nearly 2 years later. The corporate timetable drained all of our free time, and we hardly saw each other even though our offices were a ten-minute walk apart. We started missing birthday dinners, stayed out of the loop of work gossip, and would go months before seeing each other.

Until this March, she dropped the question: Do you wanna do Hyrox with me in November?

Hyrox is intense. It's eight station exercises interspersed with 1km runs in between. The exercises in order are:

1. 1km SkiErgs

2. 50m x 102kg sled push

3. 50m x 78kg sled pull

4. 80m burpee broad jumps

5. 1km rowing

6. 200m of carrying 16kg kettlebells on each side

7. 100m of lunges with 10kg on our back

8. Throwing a 4kg ball 100 times to a high target

Since we’re entering as a duo, we get to split the exercise stations in a you-go-I-go fashion (for the 4 lanes of sled push, we can split it as Viv-Becky-Viv-Becky, for example) but we both still have to run the 8km together.

Viv and I both exercise moderately frequently. At that point in March, we were exercising about three times a week. She’s a runner (she has done marathons) and frequented the gym for weight sessions. I mainly stick to weights-based BODYPUMP and pilates. I asked if we could start training in July because I needed to work on my cardio endurance in the meantime.

She said yes. I could barely do a burpee, so I enrolled myself into HIIT classes. I first started doing it once a week and then slowly increased it to twice a week. I was able to do about five burpees in a row, with my instructor yelling “Becky, you’re doing Hyrox! Add a jump after every burpee!” By June, I told Viv I was ready.

We searched up a Hyrox-partner gym near our office and found one called BFT. Instead of letting people use their equipment, they instead conduct classes with time-based movements. We signed up for their trial package, not knowing the intense sessions we were getting ourselves into. Think HIIT-style cardio, but with equipment such as assault bikes, box jumps, and battle ropes. By the end of our first cardio-based class, we each had burned 400+ cals in that hour (a 1-hour pilates class would burn about 160cals).

“What is going on?” I asked Viv in the 20-second breaks we got before having to smash another 40 seconds on the rowing machine.

“Dude, this is intense,” she replied.

We started going to BFT more often, sending each other our class schedules to try and align. We picked times that worked better for each of us, since going alone is better than not going at all. Still, seeing Viv’s head bop out of the elevator and onto the gym floor always made me feel a lot more comfortable.

We don’t talk a lot during these practice sessions. We’re often just side by side, gasping for breath as we each tried to put in max effort into whatever workout we were assigned for those 40 seconds, be it burpees or kettlebell swings.

But sometimes we do get to chat, albeit just for three minutes while warming up.

“Dude, I bought tickets to see my parents,” I said once.

Her eyes widened, “Omigosh actually?!”.

Sometimes the updates would be about work.

“I can’t go to any lunch classes this week. Big boss is visiting from headquarters,” she told me.

“No stress. I’ll see you on Saturday,” I said.

Sometimes we didn’t have any updates.

“What did you do this weekend?”

“Nothing, just ate and slept. You?”

“Same. I’m so tired.”

A month leading up to the race, Viv started taking me out on runs before our Hyrox-focused training sessions that BFT held every Saturday. Half of the race was running, after all. I struggled to keep up with her trained lungs. She tried to tell me stories about her work week to distract me from the pain. I tried to laugh at her jokes but kept prodding, “Can we go slower, please?”

In the coffees we would have between running and dying at the gyms, we would discuss Hyrox strategy: Let’s split the 1km rows into 250-250-250-250. I should start at every station while you catch your breath after the runs. I’ll do more burpees if you do more wall balls.

“I’m really glad I’m doing this race with you,” I told her at our last coffee session before the race. By training for this race, we were able to spend dozens of hours together. It was not a dinner where we were both relaxed, it was not drinks where we had the evenings stretched out before us. But it was enough time spent together that we were able to encourage each other to keep going, push each other to do one more rep, and care for each other when we’re feeling burnt out.

“I talk to you more than I talk to my mom,” I joked. The updates we shared in those three-minute warm up sessions may not seem like much, but we knew exactly what was going on in each other’s lives. Working out together became a low-touch way to stay engaged in our friendship. We still don’t have time to grab meals together, but we made training together work.

The race day came, and we ran at the pace we agreed on (7:30/km), counted the laps we had left, and pointed out the exercise stations we headed towards next. Our partners were there to support us and we smiled at their enthusiastic cheering. Throughout the race, we kept checking in with each other: “Hey, can you help me?” and “I can take over”.

The first half of the race felt hard. I groaned when we had to run another lap. “Viv, I need to go slower,” I’d gasp at the start of every run. I also started negotiating with her: “How about for rowing, you do 400, I do 500, and you do the last 100?”

Constantly communicating helped us progress through the stations smoothly without any penalties. “I got it!” we’d say after grabbing the sandbags for our lunges. There was a penalty for each time the sandbag dropped to the ground. We agreed beforehand that overcommunicating would be better than undercommunicating.

“One more run and one more exercise and we’re done!” we’d keep encouraging each other. The rest of the race flew by.

We finished the race at 1 hour and 41 minutes, putting us at the bottom quarter of our age group (16-29) but well enough for our first Hyrox run. At the stage where we ran past the finish line, we embraced each other with pride, love, and a whole lot of sweat. We unlocked a new level of friendship, one that was deepened with many months of chasing a singular goal together.

“If we shave off just 20 minutes, we could be in the top 25 in our age group. Time for me to run more I guess,” I texted her.

“Okay!! We got this! Hyrox 2025!!”

I shudder at the thought of doing more burpees, but I look forward to another year doing them alongside Viv.

Thank you to friends who helped get this essay past the finish line: Randall Bennington, Aayush Naik, and Lavinia Iosub.

---

Update log:

• 📽️ My 10-minute video update for December touching on rest, Bite-Sized Creativity, paint drought, job, and fitness.

• ✍🏼 I finished my first draft of Bite-Sized Creativity! Have sent it out to friends who offered to comment, love, and rip to shreds.

• 📖 Reading Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal (14% completed).

• 📕 Finished Ken Liu's translation of Laozi’s Dao De Jing. Can’t say I understand it but may revisit it.

• ☕️ Starting every morning at my parents’ place with my dad’s coffee. The way my heart is so warm and full.

• 🏃‍♀️ Ran a 5K in a park near my parents’ place. I never understood why people run while travelling but realized it’s a good way to explore because it's intimate (because it's on foot) and fast (because I'm running and not walking).

Some links are affiliate links, meaning that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase through the links at no cost to you.