Pushing a sled across the turf at my friend Jessa Zinn’s CrossFit gym in Brooklyn, two weeks before Hyrox arrives in New York City, I feel competitive in a way I haven’t in years. Not “marathon competitive”, which I ran in my 20s and 30s and, for me, was always internal and anchored by personal pacing goals during solo long runs. This is different…fiercer and louder. My training partner—a close friend in her 50s—finishes her 250 meters on the ski erg faster than I do, and we both smirk while we high-five. I immediately want another round to best her.

I’m 47 years old with three kids and a career that requires a lot of travel, and somewhere in my 40s fitness became a practical thing: stress relief, physical health, staying strong enough for work and motherhood and the rest of my big, chaotic life. Hyrox—a global fitness race that features running segments in between functional fitness stations like sled pushes, ski ergs, rowing, lunges, and wall balls—made me feel competitive again. I’m not very good at any of those activities. I want to learn how to dominate them anyway. Stronger sled pushes. Longer burpee broad jumps. Fewer breaks at the wall balls. I want to kick some ass.

It is not an unusual desire among women my age. Hyrox has grown from a 650-person event in Hamburg in 2017 into a global fixture with more than half a million competitors across 80-plus races worldwide. Women now make up half of participants, up from 24 percent in 2020, according to the company, and one of the fastest-growing demographics is women in their 40s and 50s.

Part of the appeal is structural. Competing in a Hyrox does not require childhood specialization, elite technical skill, or years of experience. The movements are difficult but learnable. Almost anyone can improve. And unlike most endurance events, Hyrox is built around multiple ways of competing: solo, doubles, and four-person teams. You can chase a personal best alone or gut it out with somebody else.

Endurance runners might train with a friend and finish every mile side by side on marathon day, but it is still two separate races. At mile 20, when one of you hits the wall, the other cannot run the final miles for you. Hyrox “doubles” produces one result from two people. If your partner’s grip gives out on the farmer’s carries, you step in for the kettlebells. If your legs are fried during sandbag lunges, she takes over. The final finish time belongs to both of you.

For women who stopped playing sports decades ago, or never felt athletic enough to start, it can feel less like taking something up than getting something back. That’s true for Caroline Chow, who found the sport during the hardest chapter of her life. In 2024, the 49-year-old merchandising and planning consultant was diagnosed with breast cancer. 

During treatment, her teenage daughter sent her an article about Hyrox. Chow remembers her saying, “you need something to focus on.” Training became a bright spot in a period otherwise defined by fear and waiting. She did her first Hyrox with her daughter last spring, and is now preparing for her fourth. At this year’s Hyrox NYC, she will compete in multiple divisions: a relay with friends and doubles with her trainer. Her husband and children are already signed up for a race in Boston. 

Jordyn Taylor (left) and Caroline Chow (right). Courtesy. 

The format rewards that well-rounded fitness, and for Taylor it unlocked a competitiveness she hadn’t known she was missing. She’s addicted to that feeling—and to the camaraderie she’s built with her training partners. When she recently moved to Miami, she chose her apartment partly for its proximity to a Hyrox gym. The people she trains with there have become her people. “Hyrox gave me an opportunity to feel like I really had potential,” she says. “As somebody who, growing up, never saw themselves as an athlete, then to have this platform to feel competitive—there’s an amazing sense of accomplishment there.”

She sees a parallel to her career. As the former executive digital director of Men’s Health, she spent years leading one of the most historically male brands in media. “People don’t expect women to do things like that,” she says. “There’s something that feels so empowering about defying people’s expectations about what women can do.”

In Hyrox, women do not have to pretend they are there just for the vibes. And, to buck corporate culture that taught women that there was only ever one seat at the table—and that they had to compete with each other to get it—also reverses the narrative. In Hyrox, women succeed together. 

There are sound physiological reasons women in midlife benefit from strength training: muscle mass supports bone density, metabolic health, mobility, and longevity. Elizabeth Comen, MD, a 47-year-old medical oncologist at NYU Langone Health is direct about it. Muscle, she says, matters “for decreasing osteoporosis and risk-reducing so many other diseases we don’t want.”

Comen is preparing for her first Hyrox this year, solo. Comen spends her workdays focused on what goes wrong with women’s bodies over time; she wrote a book, titled All in Her Head, about how medicine has failed them. Training for Hyrox is the same expertise pointed the other way—she is training to be hard to break, where her patients can see it done. 

With the race close, she is thinking about what she’ll wear—raspberry biker shorts with a matching sports bra, maybe, or hot pink to match her shoes. “The race-day outfit is not everything,” said the divorced mom of three, who grew up dancing. “But it’s almost everything.” 

Courtesy Hyrox

As a longtime health editor at legacy media brands, I’ve watched the fitness space for decades. For so many years, women’s fitness culture revolved around shrinking ourselves: smaller waistlines, flatter stomachs, lower numbers on scales. Even the language emphasized deprivation. Hyrox is the opposite. Women talk about adding weight to the sled. Improving splits. Building strength. The goal is not to become smaller. It is to become even more capable.

Girls leave sport at roughly twice the rate of boys by age 14, the Women’s Sports Foundation has found, and Hyrox hands back what the team once gave—the connection, the competitiveness, the strength. Even those who didn’t grow up playing sports can tap into those benefits later in life: a 2023 systematic review found that adults who play team sports report better well-being and lower rates of anxiety, depression, and stress than those who train alone.

At many races, doubles partners arrive in matching kits. The sameness is the point: after months of shared workouts, early alarms, and text check-ins, the race is where you publicly claim another woman as your team. It’s a refreshing shift from the “who wore it best” narratives that dominated media headlines in the early Aughts and 2010s, when celebrities were pitted against each other and turning up to an event wearing the same outfit as another woman became something to be embarrassed by. At Hyrox, it’s a public declaration of togetherness. 

Jessa and I have been so busy this year that before our Hyrox adventure began this spring, we had fallen into a pattern of mostly trading texts. Now we train together two or three times a week, catching up on the big stuff and the tiny stuff between sled pushes and rowing intervals.

Train with someone long enough and you learn who gets anxious before a hard effort, who talks trash during sled pushes, who panics, who powers through, who cracks jokes when everyone else is cooked. You spend a lot of time cheering for other women.

At Hyrox NYC I do not expect to finish fast. I do expect to feel like a badass. So will every woman who decides to show up. We already made the team.