Fort Worth Navy Veteran Turned a Heart Diagnosis Into a Hyrox Powerhouse

• Fort Worth Navy veteran Talon Smith built FTX Hybrid Athletics into one of the largest Hyrox training programs in the country after a heart condition the military never caught forced him to stop heavy lifting.
• FTX has produced 20 Hyrox World Championship qualifiers and 54 podium finishes out of a single Camp Bowie Boulevard address, ranking it among the top five Hyrox training clubs in the United States.
• Smith has raced Hyrox more than 44 times and is closing in on 50 for the year, while Fort Worth itself prepares to host the DEKA World Championship this December.

A Diagnosis the Military Never Caught

Talon Smith signed up for his first Hyrox race in Dallas in 2021 and got destroyed. He was strong from years of CrossFit and Olympic lifting, but the eight kilometers of running between stations wrecked him. Most people would have chalked it up to a bad day and gone back to the barbell. Smith went the other direction. He fell for the running, and four years later he owns FTX Hybrid Athletics, a gym on Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth that has sent 20 athletes to the Hyrox World Championships and produced 54 podium finishes, numbers that put it among the top five Hyrox clubs in the country by the gym’s own count.

Smith ran track in high school before joining the military at 19. He wanted to keep pace with the Marine units he trained alongside, and his fastest three mile time as a young service member was 15 minutes 45 seconds, fast enough to hang near the front of the pack but not fast enough, in his telling, to be the fastest guy in the room. He spent 17 years in uniform, five and a half of them on active duty, working as a Fleet Marine Force hospital corpsman before eventually opening a CrossFit gym while he finished nursing school on the side.

Two Bouts of Rhabdo Led to a Cardiologist’s Office

The switch from CrossFit competitor to Hyrox coach did not start as a business decision. It started with Smith’s own body breaking down. He landed in the hospital with rhabdomyolysis twice, once after the CrossFit benchmark workout Murph and once in a 100 mile ultramarathon he pushed through amid vomiting and cramping over the final ten miles. Around the same stretch, his legs started feeling heavy on easy runs that used to feel effortless. A vascular surgeon found valve problems and sent him to a cardiologist, who delivered the real news in March 2024: Smith has a bicuspid aortic valve, a congenital defect that let blood regurgitate back into his heart instead of pumping cleanly out, along with mitral and tricuspid valve regurgitation and an aortic aneurysm that had gone undetected through nearly two decades of military physicals.

The cardiologist laid out terms. Heavy lifting was off the table, as it spiked his blood pressure against an already strained valve. Running and other cardio work could continue, but only with an echocardiogram every three to six months and a promise to head straight to the emergency room at the first sign of chest pain. Surgery becomes mandatory once the aneurysm reaches five centimeters, as the rupture risk climbs sharply past that point. Smith was medically retired from the military in March 2025, closing out 17 years of service.

Building Two Programs Under One Roof

Rather than step back from training, Smith rebuilt his gym around the sport his doctor could still let him chase. He unified his original CrossFit L3 affiliate, founded in 2015, with a growing Hyrox membership under one name, FTX Hybrid Athletics, and split the daily schedule into two tracks that run side by side in the same room. Members can choose a strength and conditioning path that mirrors CrossFit’s high intensity functional movements, or a Hyrox specific path built around compromised running, station efficiency and pacing. Many members do both, lifting one day and running Hyrox intervals the next.

For readers who have never seen a Hyrox race, the format is simple to describe and brutal to finish. Athletes run eight separate one kilometer legs, and after each one they stop at a station: a ski erg, a sled push, a sled pull, burpee broad jumps, a rowing machine, a farmers carry, sandbag lunges and, to finish, 100 wall balls. There are no barbells and no Olympic lifts, which is part of why Smith thinks the sport has grown so fast among people who like CrossFit’s community but not its technical lifting. “It’s that perfect combination,” Smith has said of the format, describing how it blends the running mileage people already enjoy with strength work that stays approachable rather than technical.

Racing Toward Fifty

Smith has now raced Hyrox more than 44 times, a total he expects to push past 50 before the year is out, which he believes makes him the most raced male Hyrox athlete in the country. This year he added his first standard marathon to that list, running the Marine Corps Marathon in 3 hours 30 minutes to raise money for the Marine Corps Recon Foundation, which supports the Gold Star families of his former unit. He trained through it using the same aerobic base work he programs for his Hyrox athletes, three foundational strength days a week paired with a track session and an easy recovery run, adjusted around his cardiac monitoring rather than around a typical marathon build.

He is candid about why he keeps racing instead of settling into a safer routine. He has said he does not want his daughter to watch him become a different person after a diagnosis, and that sitting at home avoiding surgery for a few extra years is not who he wants to be for her. He tells his own athletes to “stay dangerous,” a phrase he uses to mean racing within your training but never backing down once a race turns into a race. He still sees his cardiologist every three months and knows the plan the moment his numbers hit the surgical threshold. Until then, he is coaching, training and, by his own admission, still chasing the next start line.

A Bigger Season Ahead for Fort Worth Fitness

FTX is expanding rather than slowing down. The gym is building a second location a few minutes up Camp Bowie Boulevard in Benbrook and developing an online coaching app it plans to launch internationally, aimed at the growing number of hybrid athletes who want Smith’s programming without living in Tarrant County. The timing lines up with a bigger moment for the city’s functional fitness scene: Fort Worth was named host of the DEKA World Championship this December, bringing a second major fitness racing brand to the same metro area where Smith has spent a decade building his own following, one podium finish and one echocardiogram at a time.