Local Racers Take On HYROX’s First Utah Race in Salt Lake City

• HYROX held its first-ever Utah race this weekend, bringing roughly 16,000 competitors to the Salt Palace Convention Center in downtown Salt Lake City.
• Local athletes including Kynzie Atkinson and married couple Barry and Alyssa Beveridge raced alongside elite competitors on the same eight-run, eight-station course.
• The weekend also marked the first United States running of HYROX Youngstars, a youth race for athletes 8 to 15, and organizers expect the event to add $9 million to $11 million to the local economy.

A Convention Center Turns Into Utah’s Biggest Gym For a Weekend

Barry and Alyssa Beveridge found out about HYROX the same place a lot of their fellow competitors did: a video on their phone. This weekend, that video turned into eight one-kilometer runs, eight stations of sleds and wall balls, and a finish line inside the Salt Palace Convention Center, where the married couple joined roughly 16,000 other athletes for the fitness race’s first stop in Utah.

“It’s meant to be something that anybody can try,” Alyssa Beveridge said after crossing the line.

From Friday, September 18 through Sunday, September 20, the Salt Palace turned into what one spectator called a giant obstacle course, with runners lunging, pushing sleds and powering through burpees under the convention center’s fluorescent lights. HYROX started in Hamburg, Germany, in 2017 with 650 entrants. This weekend it landed in Utah for the first time, part of a schedule that will put on more than 100 races worldwide this year.

Eight Runs, Eight Stations, One Shared Course

For anyone who has never watched a HYROX race, the format is simple to describe and hard to finish. Every athlete runs eight separate one-kilometer laps. After each lap, they hit a station: a ski erg, a sled push, a sled pull, a rowing machine, a farmer’s carry, sandbag lunges, burpee broad jumps and, to close things out, 100 wall balls.

There is no gymnastics and no barbell work, which organizers say is the point.

“Lunges, burpees, we have a sled that you push and pull, and there’s not a lot of technique in these movements,” said a racer identified only as Muscat. “That makes it accessible to a lot more people.”

Salt Lake City’s course offered divisions for elite pros, first-timers, doubles pairs and relay teams, all moving through the same convention hall over the same three days. Kynzie Atkinson signed up for the Women’s Doubles Pro category with a friend.

“I’m competing tomorrow,” Atkinson said the day before her race. “I’m doing the Women’s Doubles Pro. Me and my friend will both do the full runs, but we’ll split the stations.” She added that she was racing mostly for the challenge: “I’m just here for fun, and I like a good challenge.”

In HYROX’s doubles format, both partners run the full eight kilometers together, then divide the eight stations however they choose, a rule that lets teammates play to their strengths.

For someone trying to decide whether to sign up for a future race, the entry points are wider than the finish-line photos suggest. Open singles divisions welcome first-timers who just want to finish, Pro divisions draw the fastest athletes in the country, and relay and doubles formats let friends split the work. Registration typically runs a few months ahead of race day, and most local gyms, CrossFit boxes included, now build a HYROX-style workout into their weekly schedule so members can train for the format without hiring a separate coach.

Local Racers Behind the Numbers

Sixteen thousand is a big number, but the race weekend came down to a lot of small ones: split times, sled distances, wall ball counts. Brooke Knudson described the scene on the convention floor as the biggest draw. “The energy is unmatched,” she said.

For the Beveridges, the pull was less about competing at the front of the field and more about trying something new together. Alyssa said the race demanded pacing as much as strength. “It’s all endurance and just trying to pace yourself and do the best that you can,” she said.

Salt Lake City sits at about 4,200 feet, and racers coming in from lower elevations found the first one-kilometer lap harder than they expected. Longtime HYROX watchers say altitude catches nearly every debut city off guard, and Utah was no exception.

For the First Time, Kids Got Their Own Start Line

The Salt Palace weekend also carried a first for HYROX in the United States: a race built for kids. HYROX Youngstars, the brand’s youth series for athletes ages 8 to 15, held its American debut in Salt Lake City alongside the adult race, with roughly 900 young athletes signed up to run a shortened course with lighter loads and adjusted station standards, as Hybrid Chronicle reported ahead of the event.

A second Youngstars date is planned for Anaheim, California, in December, giving the format a second US test before organizers decide how far to expand it.

Parents lined the rails around the Youngstars course the way they might at a youth soccer game, cheering kids through sled pushes sized for smaller bodies. For a sport built around adult competitors, the sight of an 8-year-old crossing a HYROX finish line marked new territory.

What the Debut Means for Utah’s Fitness Scene

Race organizers expect the weekend to generate between $9 million and $11 million in economic activity for the Salt Lake area, from hotel rooms to restaurant tables to rental cars, a figure typical of a citywide convention rather than a single fitness class. That kind of spending is part of why cities compete for HYROX dates the way they once competed for marathons, with tourism offices treating a race weekend as a three-day visitor event rather than a single Saturday morning.

The Beveridges and Atkinson are part of a bigger pattern. The number of gyms affiliated with HYROX jumped worldwide by 260 percent from 2023 to 2024, and events in cities like London, New York and Amsterdam now sell out within hours of opening registration. Salt Lake City drew racers from Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Portland and Seattle, along with entrants from Canada and Mexico, turning a debut race into a regional gathering.

CrossFit boxes nationally have leaned into the race rather than away from it this fall, building HYROX-style workouts into regular programming as members sign up for races like this one. Organizers describe HYROX as a cousin to CrossFit rather than a rival: both use functional movements, but HYROX repeats the same eight-station course everywhere it goes, while CrossFit programming changes daily.

By Sunday evening, the Salt Palace crowd had thinned to cleanup crews folding up sleds and coiling rowing machine cables. What started as a video on a phone for the Beveridges, and a shot at a personal best for Atkinson, ended the way most HYROX weekends do: with sore legs, a finisher’s medal and, for a good number of first-timers, plans to sign up again.