Connecticut Mom of Five Amy Bevilacqua Set a Hyrox World Record at 52

• Amy Bevilacqua tore both proximal hamstrings late in her triathlon career and thought her competitive racing was finished.
• Instead she found Hyrox, and now holds the 50-54 age-group world record after competing as the sport’s oldest-ever Elite athlete at 50.
• When her daughter’s hospital stay in Connecticut cut off her gym access last year, the strength base she had built kept her healthy through weeks of daily running instead.

A Torn Hamstring Was Supposed to End Her Racing Career

Amy Bevilacqua thought she was done. Late in her competitive triathlon career, she tore both proximal hamstrings, an injury that ends a lot of endurance careers outright. Instead, in 2017, she found Hyrox, the race format built around eight 1-kilometer runs broken up by eight functional stations, and she has barely slowed down.

“I didn’t have to stop being an endurance athlete,” Bevilacqua said. “I just became a stronger one.”

Bevilacqua lives in Connecticut, works as an endurance coach, and is a mother of five. She still competes as one of the sport’s most decorated masters athletes anywhere in the country, all while running a coaching practice and raising five kids around a training schedule that would exhaust most people half her age.

Racing to 52 and Still Adding Records

Bevilacqua holds the women’s 50-54 age-group world record, a time of 1:01:09 set in Toronto in October 2024. Two years earlier, at 50, she qualified for and raced the Elite field at Hyrox Stockholm, the top tier of the sport reserved for its fastest competitors regardless of age, making her the oldest Elite athlete Hyrox had ever seen.

“It just makes you more durable,” Bevilacqua said of the strength training Hyrox demands. “It won’t hurt your performance in triathlon. It could really help.”

She came to the sport with a background most Hyrox racers don’t have: years of professional-level triathlon and road cycling before the hamstring tears that pushed her toward a different kind of racing altogether. The transition asked her to build muscle and movement patterns her endurance career had never required, from sled pushes to farmer’s carries to a finishing set of wall balls thrown from a deep squat.

When the Gym Wasn’t an Option

Last year, Bevilacqua’s youngest daughter was hospitalized near their home in Connecticut for a lengthy stay. With no access to a gym for weeks, Bevilacqua ran nearly every day instead, using the miles to cope.

Years earlier, a sudden jump in running volume with no strength work behind it would likely have broken her down. This time, running nearly daily while her daughter recovered, she stayed healthy through the whole stretch.

“I even wound up hopping into a half-marathon and I ran not too far off my PR without specifically training for it,” Bevilacqua said. “I attribute that directly to all of the functional strength work I’ve done for so long.”

What Carries Over From a Life of Endurance Racing

Bevilacqua hasn’t given up the sports that built her. She still races 5Ks and half marathons on top of her Hyrox schedule.

“The bulk of my training is still engine-building,” she said. “Then I sprinkle in the station work.”

For readers new to the sport, that station work is the part that separates Hyrox from a standard road race. Athletes run 1 kilometer, complete a strength or conditioning station, then run another kilometer, repeating the cycle eight times for a combined 8 kilometers of running and eight stations that include sled pushes, sled pulls, a rowing machine, a SkiErg, farmer’s carries, lunges under load and burpee broad jumps, ending with the wall ball throws that decide plenty of close finishes. An Open division built for a real but non-elite fitness level sits alongside the Elite races Bevilacqua has run, which is part of why the sport has drawn so many masters athletes into its start corrals.

“You don’t have to give up biking, running, or swimming,” Bevilacqua said. “You can just dial them back a little and add strength.”

Bevilacqua is racing into a field that keeps getting more crowded behind her. Hyrox’s U.S. events now regularly draw more than 5,000 competitors in a single weekend, and organizers added new Pro divisions for the 60-64 and 65-69 age brackets this season alone. Roughly two-thirds of entrants at many races are already over 30, and racers 60 and older make up one of the fastest-growing groups on the start line. Every age-group division from 50-54 up through 85-89 still uses the same course, the same stations and the same 8 kilometers of running as the Open field, which is part of why a record like Bevilacqua’s stacks up against the whole sport rather than a smaller, softer version of it.

Setting the Bar for Every Age Group to Come

Physical therapist Dr. Josh Funk, founder of the Washington, D.C.-area practice Rehab2Perform, treats endurance athletes who put off strength work for years and pay for it later with overuse injuries. He points to competitors like Bevilacqua as proof of what changes when they don’t.

“The Masters athletes still racing well at 55 aren’t the ones who ran the most,” Funk said. “They’re the ones who never stopped lifting.”

Bevilacqua isn’t finished. She has said her goal is to set the world record in every age group she ages into, one five-year bracket at a time, turning what could have been a career-ending hamstring injury into a decades-long streak instead. The next bracket opens when she turns 55, and on current form there is little reason to bet against her getting there with the record still intact from the one before it.

“I didn’t have to stop being an endurance athlete,” she said again, the closest thing she has to a personal motto at this point. “I just became a stronger one.”