Welcome to The Extra Lap! Each week, we’ll be sharing HYROX insights and analysis, product updates, stories, community shoutouts and much more.

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Stat of the Week

Can you race too much at the expense of performance?

We analyzed all HYROX athletes who already had a Pro Division personal best before the 2024–2025 season.

For each athlete, we counted how many times they raced during the 2024–2025 season and then compared their fastest time that season to the personal best they held going into it (as of June 2024).

Here’s what we found.

When looking at the median, pro division athletes who raced more tended to improve their personal best vs the previous season by a higher percentage with a slight dip after 5 races.

Now, it’s important to call out that correlation doesn’t mean causation.

Athletes who race more are often the ones who train more, work with a coach, or stay focused on HYROX year-round. So the improvement may be driven more by consistent training and commitment, with frequent racing being a signal of that dedication rather than the cause of the improvement.

However, it is interesting to see a dip after 5 races. Our hypothesis was that there is a certain point where racing too much can hinder one’s full potential. We’d love to dig deeper on this topic (e.g. account for time between races).

Stay tuned…

A Star Is Born

Charlie Botterill has been on an absolute heater this season.

How’s this for four straight weekends of racing…

• HYROX Hamburg

5th place Elite 15 Doubles finish with Ollie Russell with a time of 0:50:37 which included a very questionable 30 second BBJ penalty.

• HYROX Gdansk

0:54:49 Men’s Pro personal best (beating his RoxOpt predicted peak by 54 seconds!)

• HYROX Valencia

0:56:24 Men’s Pro to put himself into the Elite 15 solo for the first time and on one of the slowest courses in the past year. By the way, he also raced 24 hours later and dropped a 0:58:56 for good measure.

• HYROX Birmingham

Teamed up with Jake Williamson in Pro Doubles to drop a 0:49:17, the third fastest of all time and 19 seconds faster than their RoxOpt predicted peak potential.

Course Speed Review

Coming out of Valencia, there was a lot of chatter about crowded runs and tough sleds.

After analyzing the data, it ranked as one of the slowest courses of the past year.

Our Methodology

We calculate the median % vs pre-race personal best for every HYROX race in the past 365 days (men’s and women’s pro only). The establishes a normal range using the median of all races and adding and subtracting 1 standard deviation in both directions. Any race outside of this range, we’d consider unusually fast or slow based on the rate and size of new PBs.

RoxOpt Origin Story - Entry #2

Shortly after that first race in Los Angeles December 2022, I couldn’t wait to start messing around with HYROX data and experimenting on what would become RoxOpt.

However, before I could do any of that, I needed data first.

Webscraping was definitely not my strong suit… and I couldn’t even leverage ChatGPT or any AI coding tools to help (didn’t exist yet!).

After a week, I was stumped, discouraged and didn’t make much progress.

Miraculously, two months later in February 2023, I saw someone posted code and instructions on how to webscrape HYROX data on a popular data science website.

HERE. WE. GO.

It wasn’t perfect but it was a great start for what I needed.

I have no idea who this person was but I am forever grateful, especially at a time when no one knew what HYROX was.

Just as I was about to move on from the idea, I was completely rejuvenated and ready to build.