My gym sits fairly innocuously on an ever-expanding Industrial Estate just outside Didcot. Park Club is run as a not-for-profit organisation and charity, the proceeds from which are used to fund educational community projects across Oxfordshire. Most days you can catch a glimpse of employees from the Ironman UK offices next door wander across for a workout.
Relatively recently, the club introduced a brand-new CrossFit, Hyrox, and Functional Fitness area. The marketing blurb says it was ‘designed with the modern fitness enthusiast in mind’‘.
So who is this ‘modern fitness enthusiast’? A peak inside the gym shows it’s not defined along traditional demographic lines. On any given day, you could be training next to Charlie, one of the best Hyrox male athletes in the world, or Kerry, challenging herself to run/walk 3k after a recent operation. Youth footballers from Didcot Town come in mid-morning. Trainers support newbies who have been prescribed exercise to ward off diabetes. Everyone does their best, cleans up after themselves and hits the coffee station afterwards.
Hyrox has been my target, initially competing with my son, Conor, as a way for me to recover from a bad back injury and for us to stay in touch during training as he played a successful season of grade cricket in Australia during his gap year. We both trained in 35 degrees, Fahrenheit in my case and Celsius in his. We’ve now competed in two men’s doubles – London and Warsaw.
Conor’s 18, 5 inches taller than me and fitter than he’s ever been. I’m 51….and not!
In preparation for my Hyrox debut, I took a trip to the London event at the Excel Centre. I felt the same conflicting emotions as at the first time I went to register for London Marathon in the very same hall. Not only, ‘this is incredible’, but also ‘have I bitten off more than I can chew?’
Why so incredible? Firstly, spectators are packed throughout venue, from the Red Bull start tent to the DJ at a finish line playing tunes to accompany a constant stream of finishers for 10 hours straight each event day. The logistics have more in common with an arena music tour than an endurance event. Each event is operated through a set of 9 trucks that drive from city to city, with 10 of these setups globally. It takes only 36-48 hours to get an event set up in a new town.
This makes for a pretty special business model. Revenue flowsfrom up to 10,000 finishers a day…..all in the vicinity of a thriving retail and catering operation, and with paid entry tickets for spectators, too. They are able to cheer up close rather than hoping for a fleeting glance on a marathon roadside. To that point, event delivery does not require any significant policing or road closure costs.
Founded by Christian Toetzke and double Olympic gold medal winning hockey star Moritz Furste in 2017, Hyrox was acquired by sports marketing agency Infront in 2022 and is now the star in their mass participation portfolio including Shanghai, Sydney and Cape Town Marathons. According to SBO Financial, the event will have generated in the region of $140m in 2025 from 175 revenue generating days – all at exceptional margins and with positive cash flow from entries months ahead of the event itself. Most of the global sports business would kill for a model like that.
There’s plenty of headroom in the elite business, too. Elite-level ‘pro’ races may take place across the four days, but even the top races pay out less in total than you’d pay to book a support band onto a European arena tour. The very best athletes are digitally native storytellers. Events are streamed on @Youtube – perfect for a growing sport with a younger demographic when sponsor-related content marketing (and cookies to use for retargeting high margin event entries) must be priorities. New Director of Elite Racing Tim Stemp is a great hire to push things on still further.
There’s a very healthy ecosystem building up around the event, too. Business is booming for those who are a credible part of the hybrid fitness community. I’ve recently become an Independent Non Exec Director of sports backpack and performance brand Built for Athletes. We hosted a customer meet-up, 5k run and coffee station around the Manchester Hyrox event a few weeks ago as a bit of a test. What shone through was the same community feel as I felt competing in Ironman nearly twenty years ago, parkrun over the years and at the Park Club 20 years later – people from wildly different walks of life enjoying each others’ easy company. We’ve another in meet-up Cardiff this coming weekend as I write – all welcome!
In eight short years, Hyrox has built an excellent product. While the next leg of the journey will undoubtedly have some ups and downs, a loyal customer following and a business model-to-die-for is a very promising start.
There’s gold in them, there, wall balls (perhaps why they feel so heavy….!)
