It is Saturday morning at a convention centre in Manchester and hundreds of amateur athletes are racing around a track, one eye on the huge time board hanging from the ceiling, the other on the gruelling exercise station waiting at their next pit stop.
Some have just started their heat and seem reasonably fresh-faced. Others are seven kilometres in and the prospect of another lap has them locked in a mental battle with themselves. Their legs are leaden, lungs pumping overtime and, at some stage, they are going to have to do a torturous exercise known as burpee broad jumps around an 80-metre track.
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What’s more, the majority of them are doing this for fun.
They are all shapes, sizes and ages. There are middle-aged mothers-of-two, Instagram influencers in their thirties, accountants, more than a few spry retirees and then, among the throng, is a 6ft 4in (193cm) Frenchman who once lifted the FA Cup, made over 500 Premier League appearances and is trying to remember how this seemed like a good idea when he signed up.
The event is Hyrox, the hybrid race craze slowly taking over the fitness world, and Sylvain Distin is one of many retired professional athletes who have taken part aiming to reignite their love of competition.
In the UK, participants range from former Great Britain rugby league international Jamie Peacock to ex-footballers such as Distin and Brighton striker Glenn Murray. Hyrox is attracting more star names at every event.
Former Chelsea and England captain John Terry is training for a race later this year. In the United States, former NFL punter Steve Weatherford has pounded the Hyrox track along with ex-Indianapolis Colt Curt Maggitt, while controversial Tour de France cycling legend Lance Armstrong is also preparing to compete.
Co-founded by German former Olympic field hockey player Moritz Furste in 2017, the sport is branded a “mass-participation fitness event”, which consists of eight one-kilometre laps of a track with a different functional exercise station between each.
The stations feature those eye-popping burpee jumps along with others, such as pushing and pulling weighted sleds, 1,000 metres on a rowing machine and an event borrowed from Hyrox’s distant cousin, CrossFit, which sees competitors squat down to throw a weighted medicine ball at a target 100 times.
Starting from a few early events around Europe, there are now Hyrox races everywhere from Doha to Sydney, right across the U.S., South Africa, Singapore and Hong Kong. As well as attracting thousands of amateurs, there is a growing band of professional competitors who will slug it out at June’s World Championships in Nice, where awards will go to the fastest elite times for solo men and women as well as same-sex double teams, mixed doubles and relays.
Lee Tuck is an English-born former Malaysian football international who has qualified for the men’s finals, having won the second Hyrox event he took part in after only hanging up his boots last summer.
His playing career took him from hometown club Halifax Town in England’s fifth tier to clubs in Thailand, Bangladesh and Malaysia, where he became a naturalized citizen and was selected to make eight appearances for the national team.
“Coming away from a sport is mentally and physically difficult,” says Tuck, 35, who played in front of 80,000 fans in one club game in Malaysia. “You still need an outlet for that energy and adrenaline. When I got back to England I started going to a gym run by one of my friends and some of the members were entering a race and had a spare ticket.
“I didn’t know anything about it and had never done most of the stations. I think I’d maybe sat on a rower once in my life, but the foundations were there from football fitness and I thought: ‘Why not?’.
“I wanted to be part of a community and do active things with my friends back home. I did it, struggled on some of the stations but got a decent time and I was hooked: the challenge of it, the stamina required. I was just buzzing on the day.
“We went out that night and had a few beers and then I thought: ‘Right, when can I do it again?’”
The former midfielder flew to Barcelona to compete next and surprised himself by winning overall with a time of 57 minutes and five seconds.
“All my career has been about having to perform and train as hard as possible,” he says. “Hyrox is hard but, although I want to do well, I enjoy it. It’s fun. I like the social side and I’m not doing it for the money.
“Obviously, the better I get, I’m wondering how far I can take it. I’m learning what my strengths are and where to go hard in a race or when to take a bit off. At the end of the day, it’s a battle against yourself and you can only go as fast as you can go.”
Tuck would not be surprised if more ex-footballers follow his example. “We need to fill a gap after football,” he says. “You get a community with this. A great way to train and a good day out at the end.”
His next aim is to make the sport’s ‘Elite 15’ showdown next season, but for others, the participation is enough.
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Distin, who has done three doubles events, wants to do another with his 21-year-old son before focusing on something he would have thought unlikely a few years ago — a solo race.
The fact he is happy to consider running the required eight kilometres is because, last year, he did something he had previously imagined totally beyond him. Having daydreamed of it for years, the former Manchester City, Portsmouth and Everton centre-half completed the New York marathon.
“I used to love sprinting when I played, but long-distance running was never really my thing,” says the 46-year-old, who finished his playing career at Bournemouth in 2016. “But one day after I’d retired, I realised I wasn’t running much at all and it was Hyrox that got me going again.
“Everyone says, ‘You used to be an athlete, you’ll be fine’, but it’s like anything — if you don’t maintain it and train it, you lose it. It was a shock going for a 5km run at first.
“I’d always loved the idea of doing the New York marathon but thought I was way too big to do it. I’d been there when it was on and the atmosphere was unreal: like London carnival. Parties in the street from the first mile to the last. It gave me goosebumps just watching it.
“My friend offered to do it with me and then, straight away, I said: ‘OK, but I don’t want to just run a marathon. I want to do it in under four hours’. That’s my problem — I’m competitive and I’m going to want to do something in a decent time.”
Three months later he had completed the London Landmarks half-marathon in under two hours but had mixed feelings at the end.
“I thought, ‘Right now (in a marathon) you need to do a U-turn and run the same way back’. If you asked me to do that, then the likelihood would have been one per cent. I panicked a bit. But we did it and made it in 3 hours 59 minutes and 15 seconds.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve done in my whole life. The last 10km were just horrible. It’s a constant fight with yourself, every step I thought I’d cramp. But it was an amazing experience.
“Your body is capable of almost anything. If you aim for something that is doable, then you just need to be consistent and you’ll get there. I’ll never limit myself anymore. I’m 108kg now, heavier then when I played, and how many 100kg-plus guys who are 6ft 4ins are running a marathon in under four hours? You see people of all ages and abilities doing it and it’s humbling.
“To finish a marathon, you’ve got my respect.”
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Distin also loves to train and compete for his local CrossFit gym on the south coast, another discipline that took him way out of his comfort zone.
“I like it because you need to be good at everything: powerful, strong, agile, technically good and have a good endurance base,” he says. “Whatever your weakness is, it’ll get found out quickly. There was so much to learn, from Olympic lifting to gymnastics. My size has always been a big challenge, but I loved being a newbie.
“Four years later, I still have a lot to learn: going through the doubts and realising how far I’m behind other guys and that there’s a good margin for progress.”
His advice for other would-be competitors is not to be daunted by trying something. “Everything I did: muscle-ups (a form of gymnastic bar work), handstand walks and (weighted bar) snatches were miles off what I was doing in football.
“But I didn’t want to be dictated by my age. CrossFit taught me to aim for anything and try. The secret is not to stop because, if you do, when you get a bit older it’s harder to get back into it.”
Perhaps it’s a centre-back thing. Chelsea legend Terry has been posting videos of his Hyrox workouts on Instagram and was due to compete in London alongside his trainer Kate Davey, the 2023 women’s pro world champion.
Davey, 39, manages to train four hours every day alongside her day job as a fitness instructor at a golf performance centre, and raising two children, aged six and seven, with her husband.
“Whether you’re an ex-pro footballer, golfer or whatever, most of your day would have been on the training ground or course,” she says.
“Your nutrition and sleep will have been the same way for years and you’ve conditioned yourself to be like that. Once you stop, I guess it’s a bit disconcerting. It’s been a huge passion and drive, thriving off that dedication and competition. So without it, they might feel a bit lost.
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“If you have a goal to work towards like a Hyrox, a competitive event that challenges and pushes you to have the dedication to train, that will give you some of that enjoyment you used to get from matchdays to big competitions.
“And there’ll be crowds there and an amazing atmosphere, too.
“In football, you’re on a pitch for 90 minutes or longer, so they have the endurance and the stamina. At the same time, they’ll have done a lot of leg work in the gym for power and being able to leap and head a ball.
“They can adapt to Hyrox with their conditioning. Some of that will transfer across, but some of it will still be a challenge: like doing 80 metres of burpee broad jumps or 100 wall balls.”
Davey, who also trains Terry’s wife, Toni, says another appeal of Hyrox is doubles, offering the chance for people in a relationship to compete together.
“It’s lovely because if John and Toni are doing a joint workout, they’ll encourage each other and they gel really well in training,” she says. “Some couples can train together and some definitely can’t, but they enjoy it and it’s nice.”
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Like Tuck, Davey is heading to the World Championships to defend her title in June and says she has also taken motivation from Terry, who won five Premier League titles and a Champions League with Chelsea.
“Sometimes we chat about mindset,” she adds. “He’s arguably the best captain and defender the Premier League has ever seen, so there are lots of things I can learn from him. When we discussed nutrition, he’d nailed it.
“That dedication is still there and that’s inspiring in itself.”
(Top photos: Used with permission from Sylvain Distin/Instagram; Tony Marshall/Getty Images)
