ATHX Games Brings Its CrossFit HYROX Hybrid Format to Houston This October
- ATHX Games, a hybrid competition blending CrossFit-style strength with HYROX-style endurance, lands in Houston on October 17 and 18, its third stop in the United States after debuting stateside in Miami Beach this past March.
- Unlike most fitness racing formats built around advanced skill work, ATHX keeps its three tests, a strength max, an endurance block and a finishing metcon, fixed all season, so newcomers can train toward a known target rather than a moving one.
- The Houston stop lands as ATHX grows from five UK events in 2023 to a 2026 season spanning ten countries and close to 6,000 athletes worldwide.
A New Kind of Test Rolls Into Texas
Houston’s fitness crowd has spent the past two years watching HYROX events sell out and CrossFit affiliates fill their morning classes. This October, a third option lands in the city with Reliant Park hosting ATHX Games on October 17 and 18, a competition built specifically for people who like the strength standards of CrossFit but want the structure and pacing of a race they can actually train for in advance.
ATHX started in the United Kingdom in 2023 with five events and a simple pitch: take the parts of CrossFit and HYROX that athletes actually like, a real strength test and a real endurance test, and build a season around workouts that stay the same from race to race. That pitch has traveled fast. Nearly 6,000 athletes took part in the 2025 season, and the 2026 calendar now runs to fourteen events across Europe and four in the United States, with Houston as the third American stop after Miami Beach in March and ahead of Long Beach in November.
What Actually Happens on the Floor
An ATHX event runs on a fixed schedule that repeats at every stop on the tour. After a structured warm-up, athletes get twenty minutes for a strength test that, for the 2026 season, asks for a one-rep max strict press, a three-rep max back squat and a five-rep max deadlift, with the score coming from the combined load lifted across all three lifts. A ten-minute reset leads into a thirty-minute endurance block, where athletes rack up maximum distance switching between running and rowing every few hundred meters. After a second recovery window, the event closes with Metcon X, a twenty-five minute finisher pairing ski erg calories with dumbbell ground-to-overhead reps, sandbag carries, box jump-overs and burpee broad jumps.
What separates ATHX from a typical CrossFit competition is that none of this changes race to race within a season. An athlete who competes in Miami in March and Houston in October is training for the exact same three tests, just with months to chase a better number. That is a deliberate design choice, and it is a large part of why the format has pulled in elite names from both CrossFit and HYROX, including CrossFit Games competitors Chandler Smith and James Sprague and HYROX Elite 15 athletes such as Graham Halliday, all racing a format neither sport quite owns.
Built for More Than the Elite Field
ATHX co-founder Ollie Marchon has been direct about who the competition is for. “We’ve seen how strength and conditioning has evolved over the past decade, and ATHX represents a natural next step for anyone progressing on their training journey,” Marchon said, describing the format as a bridge rather than a gatekeeper. “ATHX sets a meaningful challenge that encourages deliberate, focused strength training, while remaining achievable for those willing to commit. It strikes the right balance between aspiration and accessibility.”
That accessibility shows up in the division structure. Alongside the pro field, Houston will run individual, pairs and age-group divisions, and event organizers specifically point new or less experienced athletes toward the pairs option, where a partner can cover a weak spot in the strength test or share the load through the endurance block. A gym goer who has never touched a barbell competition can walk in the door for a strength max they already understand, then find out what twenty-two minutes of running and rowing at their own pace actually feels like against a clock.
Why Houston, and Why Now
Houston’s inclusion follows a familiar playbook for fitness racing brands expanding into the United States: land in a media market with an established CrossFit and endurance base, then let word of mouth from the first event pull in the next city’s crowd. Reliant Park’s Hall B gives ATHX a venue built for spectators and competitors alike, and the venue’s rail access puts the event within reach of anyone downtown or near the Texas Medical Center without needing a car.
The timing also lines up with a broader shift in how gyms think about competition season. Boxes that once pointed their most competitive members toward the CrossFit Open now have a second, and increasingly a third, option to build a training block around. For a Houston box coach, a fixed October date with a known strength and endurance format gives members something concrete to peak for outside the CrossFit calendar, without requiring the specialized skill work that keeps some athletes away from CrossFit competition entirely.
What to Expect if You Sign Up
Registration runs through the ATHX Games website, where team captains handle the roster and waiver process for pairs and age-group teams. Spectator tickets are sold separately for anyone who wants to watch rather than compete. For athletes deciding whether to enter, the honest answer is that ATHX rewards exactly two things: a real strength number and the ability to keep moving through a long aerobic block, neither of which requires years of gymnastics training to build. That is precisely the gap ATHX is betting it can fill, between a CrossFit competition that can feel out of reach and a straight running race that leaves strength training on the table entirely.
Sources:
