After some hard sessions during the week, stack some easy miles. I found jogging with my-worst-ever-pram-to-jog-with much easier!
7 Weeks Hyrox Build: Week 2 Tuesday
1. Chase fitness, touch hard pace — build strength and speed by flirting with the edge, not living there. 2. Focus on specificity — train for purpose, not exhaustion; 3. Loss of motivation is a signal 🧠 5K Race Pace vs Threshold — Finding the Compromise I’ve been looking for a balance between my 5K goal and my Hyrox goal in interval training. For the 5K, I’ve been experimenting with running intervals at threshold pace instead of race pace. In last week’s race, I still struggled to hold the pace and exploded too early — but I also noticed progress. Running those same paces now feels easier. Fitness improved; pacing is still catching up. For Hyrox, everything revolves around threshold work. (Highly recommended to checkout Rich Ryan's Running Guide https://www.rmr.training/running-for-hyrox-guide) So, I’m trying to bridge the two worlds. In my interval workouts, I progressively increase speed within each set — adding 0.1–0.2 km/h every minute, then starting the next set slightly faster. In the final two sets, I stay at my sub-19 5K goal pace. The session feels hard but controlled. No explosion, just steady effort inside that “controlled hard” zone. 🎯 Focus on Specificity After the run, it was dreadful even thinking about my planned evening EMOM with burpees. I prefer steady, mid-to-heavy kettlebell work — clean and jerk–style movements that feel productive, not chaotic. I debated pushing through the EMOM or adjusting the workout. In the end, I replaced it with a heavier kettlebell clean and press session. The reason: specificity. The goal of the PM session is to build strength, not to prove I can suffer. The EMOM would’ve been more about chasing fatigue than building anything meaningful. Looking back at the week, I already have two compromised running sessions that train that “suffer” element. I don’t need a third. Consistency > everything. This was my body sending a signal — adjust, don’t overreach. For everyday athletes, overtraining is the real killer of progress — not laziness. It shows up as injuries, burnout, or loss of motivation. Sometimes the hardest thing is to trust the process, overcome the insecurity, and remember the goal of each session.
7 Weeks Hyrox Build: Week 1 Sunday
This week already had plenty of new stimuli — an extra Hyrox session, longer EMOMs, more time near threshold — so I capped my running volume at around 55 km to stay on top of recovery. I’d been listening to the RoxLyfe podcast with Charlie Botterill, and he mentioned that at his size — around 80 kg — he keeps his weekly running volume in the 50–60 km range. I was glad to hear that — it helped me justify holding back instead of chasing higher mileage. In the morning, I ran about 6 km with the baby in the pram, it has been my secret weapon for stacking volume while shifting into a more Hyrox-focused phase instead of pure running, and hey, the baby got a bumpy nap too! The evening run doubled as my jog to my wife’s parents’ place for dinner — about 8 km away. Normally I’d stretch it to around 14 km, but this time I only added a kilometre or so to keep total volume down. I’ve started experimenting with higher-quality long runs, where you pick up the pace after some easy running — something I picked up from a podcast about Kenyan training, and also from Conor Mantz / Clayton Young. The pickup felt okay, though my heart rate spiked to 5 K levels even though I was only running at threshold pace. After that, I couldn’t quite settle back into Zone 2 — jogging pace sat around 160 bpm. Fatigue, warmth, and lack of sleep all hit at once, mostly the warmth. Got it done. Consistency above all. I will need to be more careful about my sleep too!