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Stat of The Week

Over 40,000 athletes competed last week at HYROX Birmingham and HYROX Paris.

Both were 5 day events!

We were curious how many people raced multiple times (solo or doubles).

Excluding the relay, 1,491 people raced at least twice… that’s more than the entire field at my first HYROX race.

131 raced at least 3 times!

Megan Jacoby Returns

2024 World Champion Megan Jacoby is racing Women’s Pro this weekend at HYROX Stuttgart, her first singles race since the first HYROX Major of last season (Oct 2024) in Amsterdam where she dropped a 0:58:44.

She’s battled back from injury and we’re excited to see her back in action.

Here’s what RoxOpt is predicting for her:

Course Evaluation - Fast, Normal, Slow

While Birmingham delivered some quick performances, the course itself measured up as fair and within the normal range.

Paris, on the other hand, ranked as the 5th slowest course of the past 365 days (out of 78 races) and the athlete chatter on IG backed up exactly what the data showed.

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.

We look at the median rather than the average, since averages can get skewed by outliers.

What made Paris slow?

We took our course evaluation metric a step further, breaking down the median % difference vs pre-race personal bests for each station. On IG, most of the chatter centered around the runs, sleds, and wall ball judging as possible culprits.

The data backed that up: both the run + roxzone and sleds came in well outside the normal range, suggesting tougher-than-usual conditions.

Wall balls appeared fair overall. That’s not to say some athletes didn’t have tough judging experience… it just didn’t appear to be a pervasive issue.

In the visual below, one thing stood out, over the past year, the median sled push was 8.3% slower than athletes’ pre-race personal bests. In other words, pro division athletes typically perform their sled push 8.3% below their PB on race day.

However, considering how variable sleds can be and how race strategy evolves with experience, we think it makes sense. All it takes is one race with perfect sled conditions (or an overly aggressive effort) to set a personal best that’s tough to replicate.

RoxOpt Origin Story - Entry #3

My wife and I signed up for our second HYROX race and were headed all the way to Barcelona in March 2023. We had even purchased tickets just weeks before. What a time!

At this point, I was still unsure what direction to take with all of this data but I figured as I raced and trained more and met more HYROX athletes, it would become more clear.

Anyways, I finished HYROX Barcelona with a 9 min personal best… but was bummed out and frustrated. For some reason, I came into the race with a goal of sub 70. It wasn’t based on any data. Just hope and desire.

Pretty soon I came to my senses and realized how absurd this situation was.

How realistic was sub 70 in the first place based on what I did in my first race just 3 months back? Was that goal feasible? Was it near impossible? Was this 9 min PB expected? Was it actually an incredible improvement I should be proud of?

I realized how clueless I was in terms of goal-setting.

Suddenly I had my first use-case for RoxOpt (still an unnamed project).