I finished my last Hyrox event six minutes slower than I wanted to. I know exactly where the time went: the sled push in the second half, where my hips protested more than I’d anticipated and I had to reduce push pace to manage the load. I walked out of the event genuinely frustrated.
Then I drove home, showered, and sat with it for a while. And what settled was something more interesting than frustration.
I had just completed a competitive fitness event — eight running kilometres interspersed with eight functional workout stations, under race conditions, with other competitors, on a timed result — at 51. I had trained for it over four months. I had shown up. I had finished.
The frustration was real. But it was sitting on top of something that I think is worth examining.
The invented limit
When I tell people outside the fitness world that I compete in Hyrox, the response divides fairly cleanly into two categories. The first is interest and curiosity. The second is a version of “at your age?” — delivered with varying degrees of concealment but always present.
The assumption behind “at your age” is that 51 is beyond the window for meaningful athletic aspiration. That the appropriate relationship with one’s body in the sixth decade is maintenance — perhaps some light exercise, maybe swimming, maybe yoga. That the competitive instinct has a natural expiry and I am past mine.
I find this limit interesting because it is so clearly invented. Not just by the people expressing it, but by me — in the years before I started training seriously, when I accepted without examination the cultural premise that a certain kind of physical investment stopped being appropriate at some implied age that I never identified precisely.
The limit was a story. Most limits are.
What physiology actually says about competitive fitness at 51
The physiological reality of ageing and athletic performance is genuinely constraining in some ways. I don’t have the VO2 max I had at 35. My recovery requires more time. My tendons and ligaments need more deliberate management than they did a decade ago. These are real changes with real consequences.
What is often less discussed is the physiological and adaptation capacity that remains. Muscle hypertrophy in response to resistance training continues throughout the seventh decade and beyond — the rate is slower, but the mechanism is intact. VO2 max can be trained and improved at any age; the ceiling lowers, but the trainability does not disappear. Tendon collagen remodelling responds to appropriate loading; the rate is slower, but the response is present.
Research specifically examining masters athletes — competitive athletes over 40 — shows that regular high-intensity training maintains cardiovascular and metabolic function at levels significantly above age-matched sedentary peers, and that the rate of performance decline with training is substantially lower than the general age-related decline curve [1]. The gap between trained and untrained physiological age widens with time.
What Hyrox specifically required me to address
This is where the personal thread becomes clinically specific.
To train for Hyrox at 51 with a perimenopausal hormonal environment, I had to confront several physiological realities directly.
Recovery was the primary management challenge. I could not train with the frequency or consecutive-day intensity that my younger training partners used. My programme was four days a week with mandatory active recovery, not five or six. When I deviated from this — during the period before an earlier event when I overtrained — the consequences were visible in my HRV data before I felt them subjectively.
Hormonal optimisation mattered concretely to training performance. When my testosterone was in the lower range — which I monitored — my performance and recovery degraded in ways that were measurable. This is not speculation; it’s the result of having tracked training data alongside blood markers for long enough to see the correlations.
Protein intake had to be deliberately high. Muscle protein synthesis in response to training stimulus is blunted in the perimenopausal state without adequate protein provision. I ate 40g of protein in the meal directly following training, consistently. The difference in recovery was noticeable.
The mental limit that was harder than the physical one
There was a point in the training block where I was significantly behind where I’d expected to be on the sled push — the movement that had troubled me in the event. It was heavy, and my hips were limiting me in a way that felt, briefly, like a ceiling.
I spent about two weeks believing the ceiling was the problem. Then I changed the training approach — specifically addressing hip mobility and glute activation — and the sled push improved substantially. The ceiling had been a technical deficit, not an age limit.
This happened twice more in the training cycle. A limitation appeared, felt absolute, and turned out to be addressable.
I have started treating this pattern as information rather than diagnosis. When something feels like a limit, the first question is: is this a true biological constraint, or is it a technical problem wearing a biological mask?
Most of the time, in my experience, it is the latter.
The thing it revealed about my patients
Training for and competing in this event changed how I talk to patients about physical capacity in their 40s and 50s.
I used to discuss exercise in general terms — “resistance training is beneficial,” “aim for 150 minutes of moderate activity weekly.” Now I discuss it with a specificity that comes from having navigated the particular challenges of training in this body, at this age, under these hormonal conditions. I can distinguish between the discomfort that is appropriate training stimulus and the signal that indicates something is genuinely wrong. I understand the recovery demands in a way that reading about them doesn’t fully transmit.
My patients who are training seriously and are in the perimenopausal window benefit from a physician who has been in that situation. I know which things the textbooks underemphasise (hormonal impact on recovery). I know which things the fitness industry overclaims (fasted training for perimenopausal women). I know what it actually feels like to train through the fluctuations — not catastrophically, but with sustained intentionality.
What you can actually do
The principle behind Hyrox training is not Hyrox-specific. It is: find something that makes demands of your body that require sustained preparation, that has a measurable outcome, and that requires you to show up on days when you don’t feel like it.
Competitive structure helps people who need external accountability — which is most people. The specific sport matters less than the quality of engagement. Hyrox for some people, BJJ for others, a running event, a powerlifting competition, a dragon boat race. Something with a date, a performance metric, and other people watching.
The body responds to being asked to do things. Ask it.
I will do the next Hyrox six minutes faster. I have a specific programme for the sled push. I know what I’m addressing.
That sentence would have seemed like a fantasy at 35. At 51, it is just a training plan.
References
[1] Tanaka, H., & Seals, D. R. (2003). Dynamic exercise performance in masters athletes: Insight into the effects of primary human aging on physiological functional capacity. Journal of Applied Physiology, 95(5), 2152–2162. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00320.2003 [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]
[2] Trappe, S. (2007). Marathon runners: How do they age? Sports Medicine, 37(4–5), 302–305. https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-200737040-00010 [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]
[3] Hawley, J. A., & Holloszy, J. O. (2009). Exercise: It’s the real thing! Nutrition Reviews, 67(3), 172–178. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-4887.2009.00185.x [VERIFY — confirm before publishing]
