Utah’s Matt Russell Left Pro Triathlon and Found a Second Wind in Hyrox

• Matt Russell retired from professional triathlon in 2023 and picked up a sport that pairs eight 1-kilometer runs with eight strength stations.
• The Utah runner qualified for the Hyrox World Championships and races this month when the sport holds its first-ever event in his home state.
• Physical therapists say the strength work Russell skipped for seventeen years as a triathlete is exactly what keeps endurance athletes racing well past 40.

A Decade of Racing Never Taught Him to Squat

Matt Russell spent seventeen years training as a professional triathlete and never learned to do a proper squat. He swam, biked and ran thousands of miles a year. He rarely lifted anything heavier than a water bottle.

“I’ve been in sports my whole life, but until recently, I didn’t even know how to do a proper squat,” Russell said. “I was concerned about being leaner, not stronger, but I’ve put on 15 pounds of muscle, and I’m still pretty fast.”

Russell, a former Division I cross-country and track runner at the University of New Hampshire, retired from professional triathlon in 2023. Not long after, he found Hyrox, a race format that alternates eight 1-kilometer runs with eight functional stations: sled pushes, sled pulls, rowing, farmer’s carries, lunges, burpees and a closing set of wall balls. He now lives in Utah, has qualified for the Hyrox World Championships, and races this month when the sport holds its first-ever event in his home state.

“I am a bigger guy by nature, and I was always concerned about being leaner, not stronger,” Russell said of his triathlon years. “I didn’t do much strength work at all.”

That gap showed up fast once he started training for his new sport. “I realized how weak my glutes and hamstrings actually were,” he said. “I could swim, bike and run all day, but I really struggled with things like wall balls.” At the elite level, the final Hyrox station asks men to throw a 13-pound medicine ball to a 10-foot target 100 times from a deep squat, a movement most triathletes rarely practice on the road or in the pool.

For a newcomer, the format is more approachable than the stations sound. Every race covers 8 kilometers of running split into eight segments, and an Open division lets first-timers race the same floor as Elite athletes without needing a competitive running or lifting background first.

Building the Body a Triathlete Never Needed

Russell’s story is a familiar one to Dr. Josh Funk, a physical therapist and founder of Rehab2Perform, a practice based in the Washington, D.C. area that treats a steady stream of endurance athletes.

“Typically, triathletes have huge aerobic engines and underbuilt everything else,” Funk said. “These are people who trained conditioning for a decade and treated strength and their movement foundation as optional. Eventually something gives, because the load outruns the capacity built to handle it.”

Funk regularly sees gluteal, Achilles and patellar tendinopathy, tibial stress reactions from running, low back and front-of-knee pain from years of cycling, and shoulder trouble from swimming. Compound strength training, he said, builds the tolerance that one-directional endurance work never touches, and the gap only widens with age.

“The thing that fades with age is strength, and no amount of mileage protects it,” Funk said. “Past your mid-thirties, you lose muscle, bone and fast-twitch fiber every year. Heavy compound lifting is the best tool we have to hold onto all three.”

A Home Race at the World Championship Level

Hyrox arrives in Utah for the first time from Sept. 18 to 20, when InBody Hyrox Salt Lake City opens the sport’s fall season at 90 South West Temple in downtown Salt Lake City. The debut is drawing competitors from Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Portland and Seattle, along with racers from Canada and Mexico. Boise physical therapist and elite racer Katie Duke is among the athletes treating the debut as a proving ground, and Russell will line up in the same city with a World Championship qualification already in hand.

For Russell, racing in Salt Lake City means competing close to home in a state that has never hosted the sport before. He never expected a second act like this one.

“When I retired from triathlon in 2023, I didn’t see myself competing at another World Championships,” Russell said. “But now I’ve found this new outlet where I can still set PRs, and I can still be competitive and at the top of the game at 43. That’s been fun and surprising.”

What Hyrox Borrows From Triathlon, and What It Leaves Behind

Russell estimates his new sport runs roughly 65 percent endurance and 35 percent strength, a split that let his triathlon background carry over more than he expected. At Hyrox Ottawa, he posted the fastest SkiErg split in his group and the second-fastest rowing split, with almost no training on either machine beforehand.

“Generally, Hyrox is a running event with transitions, which we’re used to,” Russell said. “The feeling of going from something like weighted walking lunges to running is very similar to that jelly leg feeling you get running off the bike.”

He isn’t the only professional triathlete making the switch. Other former pros now racing Hyrox include 2014 Ironman world champion Sebastian Kienle, British Ironman standout Joe Skipper, Ironman champions Luke and Beth McKenzie, and multiple-time Ironman 70.3 podium finisher Lauren Barnett. Kienle, 42, put it plainly: “Hyrox is for everybody. I’ve never been healthier in the last ten years.”

Racing Into His 40s, Not Away From Them

Hyrox has grown to roughly 1.5 million participants worldwide each year, and most of them never raced professionally at anything. Race weekends mix first-timers working through their first sled push with Elite 15 athletes chasing world titles, all on the same convention-center floor.

Russell’s approach for anyone eyeing a similar switch late in an athletic career doesn’t involve giving much up. He kept running. He kept his aerobic base intact. He added squats, sleds and wall balls on top of it rather than instead of it.

“I’ve put on 15 pounds of muscle, and I’m still pretty fast,” he said. Fourteen years after his college running career ended in New Hampshire, and three years after his professional triathlon career ended, Russell steps onto a Hyrox floor in his own state this month trying to prove both of those things can hold up at once.