Boise Coach Greyson Kilgore Trains for HYROX by Listening to Static

• Boise, Idaho coach Greyson Kilgore placed third in the Pro men’s race at HYROX Washington D.C. this month, holding a clean line through a field decided by fourteen seconds.
• Kilgore trains for the hardest parts of hybrid racing by piping static from his daughter’s baby monitor into his headphones for ninety minutes at a stretch, a drill built to recreate the exact moment a racer wants to stop.
• A former college decathlete, Kilgore now runs a coaching business out of Boise built around hybrid and outdoor athletes, and says some of his biggest breakthroughs come from clients in their forties and fifties.

The Static in His Headphones Is the Hardest Part of His Training

Greyson Kilgore turns the music off before the hardest sessions of his week. He plugs his daughter’s baby monitor into his phone, presses the earbuds in, and listens to nothing but static for an hour and a half straight in his garage gym in Boise, Idaho. “It’s mental torture to sit and listen to static in my ears for an hour and a half,” he said. “There have been some hard nights. I’ll be honest, some nights I don’t want to do this, but I put the static in my ears and I tell myself, ‘It’s time to rumble.'”

The drill sounds strange coming from an athlete who just finished third in the Pro men’s race at HYROX Washington D.C. this month, crossing the line in 54 minutes and 13 seconds, fourteen seconds behind winner Frederic Dube and three seconds off runner-up Stephen Pelkofer. Kilgore built the habit on purpose. Every hybrid race reaches a point where a competitor wants to quit, he says, and he would rather meet that feeling for the first time on a Tuesday night in his garage than on a race floor in Washington in front of a timing clock.

HYROX itself is built to manufacture that moment. Racers alternate eight one-kilometer runs with eight functional stations: a ski erg, a sled push, a sled pull, burpee broad jumps, a farmer’s carry, sandbag lunges, a rowing machine and a wall ball finish. There is no hiding a weak link. Kilgore’s third-place run in Washington came from pacing the early stations conservatively and staying clean through every transition rather than trying to out-sprint a field that included several of the fastest Americans in the sport.

From Decathlon to Two Different Finish Lines

Kilgore grew up in Boise, the son of a coach who spent more than three decades on the sideline before Kilgore ever picked up a whistle of his own. He wrestled, ran cross country and competed in track and field through middle and high school, then became a decathlete in college, with the pole vault, discus and 1500 meters as his strongest events. That mix of raw power, technical skill and an engine built to hold up across a full day of competition ended up mapping almost exactly onto the sport he would spend his adult life racing.

A year out of college, without a training plan or much direction, Kilgore watched a Spartan Race broadcast at his parents’ house. His father told him that was his next thing. He raced Spartan’s pro series from 2017 through 2021, cutting down to 165 to 170 pounds to move fast over obstacle courses, then watched a new discipline called DEKA lean into the decathlon connection in its marketing right as COVID reshaped the racing calendar. A former decathlete and Spartan racer, Kilgore saw the fit before most people had heard of the sport.

A Podium in Washington, Built on a Rebuilt Body

The switch cost him physically. HYROX demands an aerobic base built to sustain hard effort past the hour mark, and Kilgore had to rebuild the strength and mass he had cut for Spartan racing, climbing back toward the 185 to 190 pounds he carried as a college decathlete. The rebuild paid off in 2024, when he ran under an hour at HYROX Chicago and HYROX Anaheim and finished runner-up in both the DEKA Fit and DEKA Mile formats at that year’s DEKA World Championships, then teamed with fellow Boise athlete Katie Duke to set a world record in the DEKA Fit co-ed relay.

His third-place finish in Washington puts him back in podium contention on one of the sport’s biggest American stages, in a field that included reigning HYROX Washington D.C. champion Frederic Dube. Scouting notes from RoxRadar’s Elite 15 coverage describe Kilgore’s style in blunt terms: a “coach’s athlete” who wins by making fewer mistakes than the field around him, pacing early and staying clean through transitions rather than leaning on a late sprint.

Coaching Athletes Who Think Their Best Years Are Behind Them

Kilgore runs a full-time coaching business out of Boise, training hybrid and outdoor athletes alongside ultra-runners, skiers and long-distance backpackers pulled toward the Pacific Northwest’s outdoor culture. He built the business the way he describes his own athletic life: as a form of service, something he traces directly to growing up around his father’s coaching.

The part of the job that gets him talking fastest is coaching people well outside their twenties. He has watched age-group team races at DEKA World Championships where competitors in their forties and fifties fought for a podium spot with the same intensity as the elite heats, and it changed how he talks to new clients. “There’s a misconception that peak performance ends in your thirties, but that’s not true,” he said. “If you train smart and build your engine, you can be competitive for a long time. I want to help athletes redefine what’s possible at any age.”

That message matches what he tells his own body, printed on the back of his training shirts next to a mountain range: “Not there yet.”

What Comes Next

Kilgore’s goals for the rest of the season sit on two different clocks. In HYROX, he wants Elite 15 status, the tier reserved for roughly the fifteen fastest athletes at each race distance worldwide, a mark his Washington result puts within reach. In DEKA, he wants to bring a hundred of his own athletes to a future World Championship and watch his training group take a podium as a group instead of one racer at a time.

HYROX says its 2025/26 season drew more than 1.5 million athletes worldwide, with next season’s calendar targeting roughly 2 million across more than 100 race weekends, most of them ordinary competitors rather than sponsored professionals. Kilgore, a full-time coach with a garage gym and a baby monitor, has built a career out of arguing that strength and endurance are not opposing skills a person has to pick between, but two ends of the same training problem. Static in his headphones on a hard Tuesday night in Boise is how he keeps proving it to himself before he has to prove it on a race floor.