APEX PWR | Endurance Extras + Nutrition Nook
Hyrox had a big week. On October 28, World Triathlon and HYROX announced a partnership that makes Hybrid Racing an official discipline within the World Triathlon family. HYROX will run the official World, Continental and National Championships for elite athletes, and World Triathlon will sanction three formats: Ultimate, which mirrors the race you already know, plus a shorter, faster version and a longer, endurance-based one.
Both organizations say the shared ambition is inclusion in the Olympic and Paralympic Games. To be clear about where that stands: this is a signed term sheet, with a full agreement still to come, and Olympic inclusion is still a goal that needs approval. It is still the clearest signal yet that hybrid racing is becoming a sport with real governance, real championships and a real pathway.
Closer to home, HYROX Portland lands at the Oregon Convention Center on May 21 to 23, 2027, the first Hyrox race ever held in Portland, with Vancouver coming up in December. If you have been thinking about signing up, a lot of people in Tigard and Beaverton are about to be thinking the same thing.
Which brings up the question we hear most from people starting out.
Look at the front of any elite wave and you will see athletes who look like they were carved for the job. It is natural to assume the race format built that body.
Dr. Michael Ormsbee recently made the case that it probably did not. He is the Executive Director of the Florida State University Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine and has spent 25 years studying physique change and body composition, so he is worth listening to on this one.
"Hyrox training is great. It gets you a lot of different adaptations. But what you see on race day is the end result of a lot of work behind the scenes."
Dr. Michael OrmsbeeExecutive Director, FSU Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine
We agree, and we would add something from our own floor. Most people who look like that on a start line have been training seriously for years, often in other sports first. Hyrox gave them a race. It did not give them the base.
Ormsbee breaks the physique down into four kinds of training. Here is each one, and how we think about it when we coach adults for a race.
Lifting with a plan: progressive loads, enough volume to grow muscle, and enough recovery to keep growing it. This is where lean mass comes from, and lean mass is what makes the sled push and the sandbag lunges feel manageable at the back half of a race. For racers over 35, it also protects muscle and bone that would otherwise slowly slide. Our adult strength training is built around exactly this.
Easy, repeatable, often boring work that builds the engine. Ormsbee puts running at about half of your race. The Hyrox sports science report we covered in April put it closer to 59 percent of race time for the athletes it measured. Either way, the runs are the biggest single block of the event, and the aerobic base decides how much you have left when you get to them. VO2 max and lactate testing let us set those easy zones from your numbers instead of an age formula.
Intervals with a purpose, near and above threshold, with planned rest. This is the work that raises the pace you can hold before everything starts to burn. The word that matters is structured. A random hard workout every day feels productive and mostly produces fatigue.
The stations, the transitions, and running on legs that just pushed a sled. This is where Hyrox classes earn their place, and it is the one most people already do plenty of. On its own, it is one leg of a four-legged table.
Hyrox classes are the dress rehearsal. Strength, aerobic and interval work build the athlete who shows up for it.
Ormsbee's line on nutrition, from his interview with Men's Health, sums it up better than we could:
"Forgetting nutrition is like planting grass and never watering it."
Dr. Michael OrmsbeeAs quoted in Men's Health, "How to Eat to Crush Hyrox," May 2026
And his framing of what the race actually is:
"Hyrox is a performance event, not a fat-loss challenge. About half your race is running. The rest is stations that need a lot of strength endurance."
Dr. Michael OrmsbeeExecutive Director, FSU Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine
Carbohydrate you eat gets stored in muscle as glycogen, the fast fuel you burn through on the runs and the sleds. Cut it hard and those are the first places you feel it. Ormsbee's list is simple: potatoes, rice, oats, fruit and whole grains.
How much depends on how much you train. The joint sports nutrition position from the American College of Sports Medicine scales daily carbohydrate to training load:
| Training day | Carbs per kg body weight | For a 170 lb (77 kg) athlete |
|---|---|---|
| Light or skill-based | 3 to 5 g | about 230 to 385 g |
| Moderate, about 1 hour a day | 5 to 7 g | about 385 to 540 g |
| Endurance, 1 to 3 hours a day | 6 to 10 g | about 460 to 770 g |
Most adults training for their first Hyrox live in the top two rows on hard days and the first row on easy days. Those numbers surprise people. They are also the reason many recreational racers feel flat in week six of a prep block.
Ormsbee told Men's Health to aim for about 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. He was also upfront that the target is high. Most people miss it, and where they land, around 0.7 to 0.75 grams per pound, is where he actually wants them.
That lines up neatly with the research. A 2018 meta-analysis of 49 trials in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that, on average, protein intakes above about 1.6 grams per kilogram per day added little further lean mass gain from resistance training. 1.6 g/kg works out to about 0.73 grams per pound.
The practical version: get a real protein source at every meal, and use a shake to close the gap on busy days. If you go the shake route, use a third-party tested one. Thorne Whey Protein Isolate and Thorne Plant Protein both carry NSF Certified for Sport status, and both are 25% off for life through our Thorne link, along with Thorne's electrolytes for the long sessions.
"Nutrition should support performance without becoming overly complicated. You need meals you can realistically repeat day after day."
Dr. Michael OrmsbeeExecutive Director, FSU Institute of Sports Sciences and Medicine
This is the same thing our nutrition coach, Jennie Carolan, MS, tells nearly every athlete she works with. Three or four go-to breakfasts and lunches you actually like will beat a perfect plan you abandon by Thursday.
Nothing in Ormsbee's thread is wrong. There are two places where we would add a layer for the adults we see.
Wanting the physique and the finish time at the same time is a sequencing problem. Most people who sign up for Hyrox also want to lose some body fat. That is a fine goal, and an aggressive calorie deficit during the hardest weeks of a race build is a reliable way to stall both. Lean out in a base phase, then fuel the build. A DEXA scan at each end tells you whether you lost fat or lost the muscle you were trying to build.
Numbers per pound get strange at the extremes. Protein targets based on total body weight run high for someone carrying a lot of body fat, and carb ranges assume a training load you may or may not be hitting. That is the case for individual numbers. Jennie's One-Time Macro Breakdown sets carbs and protein around your body composition and your actual training week.
Lift. Build the aerobic engine. Do structured intervals. Practice the stations. Eat enough carbohydrate to train and enough protein to rebuild, in meals you can repeat. That is how the body on the start line gets built.
All four of Ormsbee's pieces live under one roof here, which is not the usual setup:
We are building out more Hyrox training heading into the Vancouver and Portland races. The Hyrox interest list is where new sessions and simulation dates go first.
Join the APEX Hyrox interest list and be first to hear about new Hyrox training and race simulations in Tigard, minutes from Beaverton off Highway 217.
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