Huntersville Army Veteran Turned Gym Owner Races Hyrox While Raising Twin Daughters

• Janelle Teal, a former US Army paratrooper who owns Teal Fitness in Huntersville, North Carolina, raced Pro Doubles at HYROX Washington D.C. this month, finishing eighth with partner Bree Forrester in 59 minutes 37 seconds.
• Teal also competes at an elite level in DEKA, placing third in the first ever DEKA FIT Ultra and finishing top 10 in four events at the 2024 DEKA World Championships.
• She and her husband Quinton, a former NFL player, built their gym around the same hybrid training that now drives both of their competitive careers, and they bring members from Teal Fitness along to races.

From Airborne Jumps to the Roxzone

Janelle Teal spent four years jumping out of airplanes and rappelling from helicopters with the 82nd Airborne Division before she pushed her first sled. These days she owns a gym in Huntersville, North Carolina, races Hyrox and DEKA at the elite level, and just finished eighth in the Pro Doubles field at HYROX Washington D.C. with a time of 59 minutes 37 seconds alongside partner Bree Forrester.

“I fully immersed myself in training to see how far I could go,” Teal told The Hybrid Letter, describing her mindset once she joined the Army. That mindset has not changed. It just found a new outlet.

Teal’s unit wanted her to become one of the first women admitted to Ranger School. She was engaged at the time, her unit was preparing to deploy, and she chose to leave the Army instead. She still remembers Air Assault School at Fort Bragg, an hour of physical training followed by an obstacle course that started with a rope climb on arms already worn out. Eight hundred people started her class. Two hundred finished. She was the only woman among them.

A Gym Built on Two Kinds of Conditioning

Teal has lived in Huntersville for almost 10 years, dating back to when she left the Army. She and her husband, Quinton, a former NFL player, own a gym called Teal Fitness. Long before hybrid training had a name, the two of them were already blending his football conditioning with her Army conditioning into workouts anyone at the gym could follow.

That blend is now what Hyrox and DEKA test on race day. Hyrox pairs 8 kilometers of running with eight functional stations, including a sled push, a sled pull, wall balls, and a farmers carry, alternating between a running segment and a station the whole way through. DEKA FIT strips out the long runs and replaces them with a short lap between each of 10 stations, so the emphasis sits more on strength and short bursts of work than on pure distance. Teal races both, at a level few age group athletes reach.

Her results back that up. She has logged 18 Hyrox races and 13 podium finishes as a Pro athlete over the past three years, racing everywhere from New York and Houston to Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Boston, plus the 2026 HYROX World Championships in Stockholm. At the 2024 DEKA World Championships she finished top 10 in four separate events, including second in the DEKA Elite Mile. When DEKA introduced its first ever Ultra format, five consecutive DEKA FITs back to back, she placed third in 3 hours 31 minutes and 14 seconds.

Her most recent race sat inside the same HYROX Washington D.C. weekend that carried Vivian Tafuto to an American Elite 15 push earlier this month. Teal’s race told a different story: a 39 year old mother of twins, working full days at her own gym, still lining up in the Pro field against athletes half her training age.

Twin Daughters, Seven Years in the Making

Teal and Quinton spent seven years and multiple rounds of IVF trying to have children. When their twin girls arrived, they came 11 weeks early, at 29 weeks and six days, at three pounds two ounces each. The family spent weeks in the NICU before they could bring the girls home. The twins are four now, just started pre-K, and have been at Teal Fitness from infancy onward. Every member of the gym knows them by name.

Teal says she wants her daughters to see effort matter more than outcome. Most of the time, when they ask if she won, the answer is no. She wants them to see her stay happy anyway. Running a gym, training for two demanding sports, and raising four year old twins leaves little room for anything unplanned, so Teal works backward from her daughters’ 9 p.m. bedtime every day, mapping out training, cooking, and coaching hours around it.

Racing in Small Pieces

Teal’s approach to a race as long as the DEKA Ultra is to stop thinking about the whole thing. She breaks it into two laps at a time instead of the full five rounds, a trick she leans on whenever a workout starts to feel too big to finish. Her first Hyrox race ended with a podium finish off a 1 hour 8 minute open division time, built almost entirely on the strength base from years of Army style training. In the years after, she has spent real time closing her weakest gap: running. She used to log just 10 miles a week and still clock 35 minute run splits inside a Hyrox. Speed work is still her least favorite part of training. She does it anyway.

What keeps Teal coming back to both sports is less about the clock and more about who she brings with her. She regularly takes Teal Fitness members to Hyrox and DEKA races, and watching a first timer from her own gym cross a finish line, then immediately want to chase a faster time, is what she points to when asked why she still competes at all after over a decade of racing. HYROX has grown past 15,000 affiliated gyms worldwide as the sport’s US race calendar has expanded through cities like Washington, D.C., Phoenix, and Dallas, and Teal’s own gym is a small, direct example of how that growth reaches ordinary members rather than staying with the athletes at the front of the pack.

Her next target is a better running split, not a new event. For an athlete who once measured herself against the fastest runners and strongest soldiers in her Army unit just to avoid being seen as the weak one in the room, that kind of steady, unglamorous goal fits the pattern of everything that came before it.