Upstate New York’s Meg Jacoby Returns From Two Injury Years With Back-to-Back Hyrox Wins

• Meg Jacoby, the 2024 Hyrox World Champion from upstate New York, won the Women’s Pro races in Athens and Izmir this month after two years of recurring injuries.
• Her 57:30 in Athens and 58:24 in Izmir put her back among the fastest women in the sport, and she now works with coach Tiago Lousa toward one target: a return to the Elite 15.
• Four Hyrox races remain on the US fall calendar, from Boston in October to Dallas in November, for anyone curious about the format Jacoby helped put on the map.

The Runner From Endwell Went Overseas to Win Her Way Back

On September 19, inside the Fuar İzmir exhibition halls on Türkiye’s Aegean coast, Meg Jacoby stopped the clock at 58:24. The next woman across the line, Austria’s Tanja Stroschneider, finished 2 minutes and 37 seconds later. Finland’s Elli Stenfors took third in 1:03:26. Two weeks earlier, at the Metropolitan Expo beside Athens International Airport, Jacoby had won the Women’s Pro race in 57:30, holding off Germany’s Stefanie Oswald by 40 seconds.

Two wins in two weeks would read as routine for most former world champions. For Jacoby, they close a long gap. Recurring injuries held the upstate New York athlete to the odd doubles or singles start across the previous two seasons, according to Rox Lyfe, the specialist site that tracks elite Hyrox racing. Athens marked her return to top-flight competition. Izmir confirmed it.

Rox Lyfe reported that Jacoby has one goal for the 2026/27 season: earning back her place in the Elite 15, the invitation-only field of the fastest 15 men and women who race the sport’s four Major events. She now trains with coach Tiago Lousa.

From a Binghamton Track to the Hyrox Record Book

Jacoby grew up in Endwell, New York, a town west of Binghamton, and she still lives and trains in upstate New York. She ran NCAA Division I middle distance and cross-country at the University of Connecticut and Binghamton University. She is a mother to a daughter, and her brother competes as a professional bodybuilder.

She first heard of Hyrox in 2022. In her second race, at Hyrox Chicago that November, she set a women’s pro world record of 1:01:56. The following spring she went further. On April 22, 2023, in Anaheim, California, she finished in 58:58 and became the first woman to complete a Hyrox pro race in under an hour. She turned full-time that same year.

Silver followed at the 2023 World Championships in 1:00:23. In 2024 she won the world title in 59:59, leading the women’s race from the third station, the sled pull, to the finish. For a sport that began as a small German project in 2017, an American world champion with a college running pedigree became one of its clearest selling points in the United States.

Two Lost Seasons and a Clear Target

The Elite 15 sits at the top of the Hyrox pyramid. Athletes reach it through ranking points earned at regular-season pro races around the world, and Rox Lyfe reported that Scotland’s Graham Halliday picked up 105 points for his men’s win in Athens alone. A top-three finish at any of the four Majors brings automatic qualification for the World Championships, which Hong Kong hosts in 2027. The first Major of the new season takes place in Hamburg.

The money has grown too. Hyrox announced more than $2.5 million in Elite prize money for the 2026/27 season, Hybrid Fitness Media reported on September 25. For a full-time athlete who spent two years on the sidelines, a place back in that field carries financial stakes on top of competitive ones.

Jacoby’s September times also stack up against the current generation. Australia’s Joanna Wietrzyk holds the women’s world record at 54:25, and fellow American Alyssa McElheny, a 2:34 marathoner from Grand Rapids, Michigan, won the Elite 15 world title in Stockholm in June. A 57:30 does not put Jacoby at the front of that group yet. It does put her back inside it.

What a 58-Minute Hyrox Looks Like to a First-Timer

Hyrox uses the same course in every city, which lets a beginner in Boston compare a result with a pro in Izmir. Each race alternates eight 1-kilometer runs with eight workout stations:

• 1,000 meters on a ski erg
• 50-meter sled push
• 50-meter sled pull
• 80 meters of burpee broad jumps
• 1,000 meters on a rowing machine
• 200-meter farmer’s carry with kettlebells
• 100 meters of sandbag lunges
• 100 wall balls

Newcomers race the Open division, with lighter loads than Pro, or split the work in Doubles or four-person Relay teams. Canadian Running put the average women’s finishing time at 1:54:00, with anything under 75 minutes counted as elite. Jacoby’s Athens result came in at about half the average.

Her background also shows why so many former collegiate runners take to the format. Eight kilometers of running make up the backbone of every race, and athletes who arrive with an aerobic base tend to spend their early months learning the stations. McElheny described the same pattern this spring, telling Canadian Running that Hyrox training left her feeling “stronger and more energetic” on her runs.

Where Americans Can Race This Fall

Jacoby found her comeback in Greece and Türkiye, but US athletes have four chances to race at home before the year ends:

• Boston: October 8 to 11
• Tampa: October 22 to 25 at the Tampa Convention Center, the city’s first Hyrox
• Denver: November 12 to 15 at the Stockyards Event Center, with race tickets from $185
• Dallas: November 18 to 22

Each of those events now runs across four or five days, a sign of how far demand has climbed. As of August, Hyrox was approaching 1.5 million participants for the year across more than 100 cities. More coverage of US races and training clubs sits in our Hyrox section.

For Jacoby, the next test comes against a deeper field. Her two September wins earned her ranking points and a reminder of what her body can still do after two hard years. The runner who once broke the hour barrier in Anaheim has put her name back on the list of women who could win the whole thing.