LET’S CALL A spade, a spade, Hyrox is a hugely physical sport. The fittest people rise to the top, and no amount of mental preparation can replace the time invested in getting physically prepared. If you haven’t put the training in, race day is going to be a long day regardless of what’s happening in your head.
However, when you’ve put in the work, your mindset on game day is everything.
What I’ve noticed, both as an athlete and working with people as a counsellor and coach is that so often people who’ve done the training still leave something on the table on race day. Their fitness was there. What was missing were tools for managing what was happening between their ears when things got uncomfortable.
The physical side of Hyrox gets a lot of attention. The programming, the movement practice, the pacing strategy. This article is about the layer that sits alongside all of that. The stuff most people don’t think about until they’re already in the race wishing they had: mindset.
Your nerves before the race are probably working in your favour
Most people treat pre-race anxiety as a sign something is wrong. The elevated heart rate, the dry mouth, the restless sleep the night before. But that’s your nervous system activating for something it knows matters. The physiology is doing its job. The story you put on top of it is where things tend to come unstuck.
There’s solid research behind this. Psychologist Alison Wood Brooks ran a series of studies showing that people who reframed pre-performance anxiety as excitement, rather than trying to calm themselves down, actually performed better. The physiological state is nearly identical in both cases, however what changed was the interpretation.
Reframing may not work if it’s done as a one off in the moment, like the physical, it takes reps to improve so you need to catch anytime you start to feel anxious in the lead up and tell yourself that signals “I’m excited.” Say it as a genuine reframe of what’s actually happening in your body. You might feel a bit ridiculous the first time but keep going.
Think about why you actually signed up
Most people come into Hyrox with a time goal or a placing in mind. That’s completely fine, and having a target matters. But a time goal alone tends not to hold up under serious physical pressure. When you’re at station five and your legs are heavy and your lungs are working hard, a number on a clock isn’t always enough to keep you moving the way you want to.
Before race day, spend five minutes with a piece of paper and answer one honest question: why does this actually matter to me? The real answer, the one underneath the version you’d give in a gym conversation. Write it down. Know it. Because at some point in that race your brain is going to run a very compelling argument for easing off, and having something meaningful underneath the goal gives you something real to come back to.
For me personally at the very base of my hierarchy of meaning (to put a name to it) is that I see value in doing hard things. Regardless of placing. Regardless of outcome, that is what motivates me to keep going.
Stay with what’s actually in front of you
One of the most common patterns I see in athletes preparing for Hyrox is spending a lot of mental energy on the result and not enough on the process available to them right now. The finish line is not something you can control in the moment. What you can control is this station, this movement, this breath.
Research on attentional focus, particularly the work of Gabriele Wulf out of the University of Nevada, consistently shows that athletes who focus externally on the task in front of them outperform athletes who focus internally on how they’re feeling. In practical terms: when it gets hard, ask yourself what needs to happen in the next ten seconds rather than checking in on how you feel.
Pick something specific to anchor to. Your arm drive on the runs. Your breathing rhythm on the rower. A simple cue word that brings you back. Build it in training so it’s there automatically when you actually need it.
Control the controllables. Let go of the rest.
Be ready for it to feel hard
This probably sounds obvious, but it’s worth acknowledging to yourself beforehand out loud. I have a variety of mantras I tell myself before any event and one of them is “this is allowed to be hard.” It reduces the mental friction that can occur when things start to get more difficult.
Discomfort in a Hyrox race is a sign the race has started properly. The athletes who are prepared for that moment, who aren’t surprised by it, are the ones who stay composed and keep moving when it arrives.
In your hardest training sessions, practise acknowledging the discomfort without immediately reacting to it. Notice it, name it, keep going. Something as simple as: “This is hard. I’m doing it anyway.” Practising it in training means it’s available to you on race day, when your brain is too tired to be clever.
Hyrox rewards the well-prepared athlete. The physical preparation is what it is, and you already know how to do that. Adding thirty minutes of honest thinking about what you’re there for, and what you’ll do when it gets uncomfortable, is a pretty reasonable return on investment.
Khan Porter is a True Protein Athlete, 9x CrossFit Games Athlete and Founder of Inner Forge
