Timer for HYROX training

Eight times 1 km of running, eight times a station, alternating. The same eight stations, always in the same order, in Paris as in Hamburg or Chicago — a race you know by heart before you ever run it.

Eight rounds of 5 min running then 4 min of station work. Nothing to install.

The format of a HYROX race

How many stations are there in a HYROX race? Eight, and each one is preceded by 1 km of running: eight kilometres in total, cut into eight separate thousand-metre laps. The order never changes.

1. SkiErg — the ski ergometer, double-arm pull.
2. Sled push — pushing a loaded sled.
3. Sled pull — hauling it back in on a rope.
4. Burpee broad jump — a burpee followed by a long jump.
5. Rowing — the only time you sit down all race.
6. Farmers carry — a loaded walk, one weight in each hand.
7. Sandbag lunges — lunges with a sandbag across the shoulders.
8. Wall balls — squat, then throw a weighted ball at a high target.

The layout of the venue fits in one sentence: the stations sit in the centre, and the running laps circle around them. You never really leave the hall — you run laps around what is left to do, and you watch the other competitors on the stations as you go past.

Because the format is fixed, so is the training. There is no surprise session to discover in the morning, unlike a CrossFit box WOD. The whole preparation consists of repeating that alternation until it stops surprising you.

The roxzone, the one everyone forgets

What is the roxzone? It is the transition area between the run and the station: the corridor you take coming in off a lap, and the one you take heading back out. It is timed and it counts towards your final result. The clock never stops between a station and the next run.

This is where the minutes nobody sees coming get lost. Nobody trains at walking down a corridor, and yet you cross it at every switch between run and station: the seconds spent catching your breath before taking on the sled, hunting for the right weight, pulling the gloves back on, all add up without ever appearing in a training log. It is the first thing a beginner underestimates.

The practical consequence for timing: adding up your station times and your run times does not give you your finish time. The difference is the roxzone, and the only way to shrink it is to treat it as part of the race — which means letting the clock run in training, exactly as it will on the day.

What you actually time in training

Three uses cover more or less everything you do in preparation, and they do not call for the same settings.

• One station on its own Work then rest, repeated: you are looking for a sustainable pace, not a total.
• A run and station pairing The real gesture of the race: you chain them, and you time it to the finish.
• The whole race, simulated Eight rounds running one after another, phone flat on the floor.

The first is the most useful and the most neglected. A station is either endured or paced: 4 minutes of wall balls at a chosen pace, repeated eight times with a minute of recovery, teach you more about the race than one all-out effort ever will.

4 minutes on, 1 minute off, eight times. Two taps to change it.

Simulating the race without the equipment

How do you train for HYROX without the race equipment? By reproducing the alternation rather than the stations. What hurts in this event is not one particular sled or sandbag: it is the back and forth between a continuous effort on your legs and a segmented one that asks for your arms at the precise moment your heart rate is already high.

That alternation can be reproduced anywhere. A multi-block session of eight rounds chaining 5 minutes of running and 4 minutes of station work — roughly 72 minutes — imposes the same rhythm with whatever you have to hand. Rower, skipping rope, kettlebell, bodyweight: the station is replaceable, the structure is not.

One rule to hold: do not stop as one round hands over to the next. That is the roxzone, and it is precisely what you came to work on. The timer runs straight through with no dead time — there is nothing to touch for 72 minutes.

The durations are yours: 6 + 5 to stretch it, 4 + 3 for a short format.

What this timer does not do

Better said now than discovered mid-session. Round & Rest is a clock and nothing more: it measures no distance, uses no GPS and reads no heart rate. It does not count your repetitions either.

For your actual kilometres, keep the watch. What this timer adds is the part a watch makes painful: a long alternation, cut up in advance, that runs itself and reads from two metres away with the phone flat on the floor, in full sun. The two complement each other far more than they replace each other.

Three cues punctuate the session and no more: a beep on each of the last three seconds of the countdown, one cue at the start of every round, one cue at the end. Enough to look up at the right moment without ever watching the screen.

The other pages

• CrossFit The four formats of a box, and why readability wins.
• Benchmark WODs Fran, Cindy, Helen, Chelsea, Murph.
• Intervals Work then rest, both imposed.