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A few months ago, I met a gentleman I will call David at Barry’s Bootcamp in Philadelphia. His first question was not what I did for a living, where I lived or, for that matter, my name.
“How old are you?”
I told him: 55. He promptly informed me that he was 65. It was an unusual introduction, but at Barry’s it somehow made perfect sense. Most of the people at the studio I frequent appear to be in their 20s and 30s, which makes David and me demographic outliers. I occasionally find myself wondering whether the young woman sprinting at 12 miles per hour on the treadmill beside me realizes that I am old enough to be her father. I then increase my speed slightly, which is probably not medically advisable.
As regular readers will know, I have become something of a fitness enthusiast. I did SoulCycle for years and still love it, but over the past year I added Barry’s to the regimen and have been surprised by how much it has changed my body. Barry’s is a different beast: running, lifting, the pump, occasional beasting and the peculiar satisfaction of waking up the next morning with DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) which is essentially the body’s way of confirming that yesterday’s enthusiasm has consequences. It's a workout hangover.
It has also proved useful for waist management. Abs? Not exactly. But the direction of travel has been abs-olutely encouraging.
David, however, operates at another level. He is lean, strong and remarkably fit, and regularly appears at our Philadelphia studio wearing shirts from Barry’s locations elsewhere. New York. Miami. Los Angeles. Paris. Seattle. He is, in effect, a Barry’s tourist. What intrigued me most, though, was not where he had been exercising, but why. Eventually I learned that all this running, lifting and voluntary suffering sums to a purpose.
David is training for HYROX.
If you have not yet encountered HYROX, there is a reasonable chance you soon will. Founded in Hamburg in 2017, it combines eight one-kilometer runs with eight functional workout stations: a ski ergometer, weighted sled push, sled pull, burpee broad jumps, rowing, a farmer’s carry, sandbag lunges and, finally, wall balls. For reasons that remain unclear to me, somebody apparently concluded that running eight kilometers was insufficiently unpleasant on its own.
The inaugural event attracted roughly 650 competitors. HYROX now says more than 1.5m people participated across 105 events in 35 countries during its latest season, with more than 2m expected during 2026-27. September alone includes races from Athens to Mumbai to Washington. There are singles competitions, doubles, relays and elite divisions, but the movements themselves are sufficiently straightforward that ordinary gym-goers can contemplate entering without first mastering Olympic weightlifting or acquiring the gymnastic abilities of a Cirque du Soleil performer.
The phenomenon has already escaped the gym. There are destination races, training holidays, a HYROX dating app and even a four-day European cruise on which enthusiasts can apparently spend several thousand dollars for the privilege of exercising at sea. Puma and other athletic brands have piled in. Private-equity firm L Catterton has reportedly been circling a controlling stake in a transaction that could value HYROX at nearly $700m. What began as an eccentric German fitness race is rapidly becoming a global consumer ecosystem.
Yet the cleverest feature of HYROX may also be the least glamorous. It is standardized.
Every race follows essentially the same sequence. Unlike CrossFit, where variation is part of the philosophy, HYROX competitors know what awaits them. The sled will still need pushing. The sandbag will still require lunging. Those infernal wall balls will still be waiting at the end. Whether someone races in London, New York or Singapore, the basic routine is the same.
That means a time recorded today can be compared with one recorded six months from now. Participants can benchmark themselves against friends, strangers and competitors around the world. HYROX even slices its individual competitors into five-year age bands extending all the way to 85-89. At Barry’s, David and I may be statistical curiosities. At HYROX, we have a cohort.
HYROX gives all that training a number.
There was a time when exercise was remarkably imprecise. You went for a run, lifted some weights, played tennis or shot some hoops. You sweated. Perhaps you got the pump. The next morning your quadriceps hurt. If, after several months, your trousers fitted more comfortably, the program was presumably working.
We now inhabit a rather different world. Watches count our steps, measure heart rate and estimate VO2 max. Rings monitor sleep and recovery. Connected scales chart body composition. Strava records pace and elevation. Smartphones document calories, miles and movement. For most of human history, discovering that one had slept badly required the sophisticated diagnostic instrument known as feeling tired the next day. Today an app can tell us, to the nearest percentage point, precisely how disappointing the night was.
HYROX is almost perfectly adapted to this new psychology. It takes the quantified-self movement out of the wrist and puts it into an arena. Every race produces a number, and because the course is standardized, that number has context. An 87-minute finish can become 84. A disastrous sled push can be isolated, trained and retested. Performance ceases to be a vague sensation of becoming “fitter” and becomes a longitudinal dataset with burpees.
There is another ingredient, however, that may be even more important. David does not go to Barry’s simply because exercise is good for him. He is training for something. HYROX supplies a goal, a destination, to all that measurement. The watch, the workouts and the aching hamstrings become inputs into a project with a date, a starting line and a finish.
That combination of measurement and purpose may help explain why HYROX has become so addictive. Data alone can become tedious. Purpose gives the data meaning.
This is where HYROX becomes interesting for those of us who spend our days in pharma and biotech.
Medicine and health care in general has always been enamored of measurement. We measure LDL, HbA1c, blood pressure, weight, tumor size, pulmonary function, exacerbations and innumerable biomarkers whose names are incomprehensible to everyone except for scientists, doctors and other professionals. Modern medicine could scarcely function without quantification.
But traditionally, measurement has been something healthcare does to people. A patient comes into the system, submits an arm, vein or other anatomical feature to investigation, and receives a number. The physician interprets it. The patient then goes home.
Increasingly, people arrive having already spent the previous six months measuring themselves. They know their resting heart rate. They may know their sleep score, daily steps, running pace, glucose excursions, recovery status or VO2 max. They are accumulating continuous personal datasets between the episodic measurements produced by healthcare.
This changes more than the quantity of information available. It changes the psychology of the person receiving it. A generation of consumers is becoming accustomed not merely to knowing its numbers, but to watching them move. The question is no longer simply, “What is my score?” It is “Am I improving?”
Pharma should pay attention to that distinction. As an industry, we are exceptionally good at demonstrating that a treatment changes a clinical endpoint across a population. But the emerging quantified consumer may increasingly want to understand what improvement looks like for me, whether it is happening now and where it might lead.
There is an intriguing opportunity here for medicines, devices, diagnostics and patient-support programs. Wearables and sensors could make some treatment benefits more visible. Digital apps could translate clinical objectives into milestones patients can follow. Behavioral interventions could borrow from fitness platforms by providing feedback loops, progress markers and goals worth pursuing. The opportunity is not to turn chronic disease into a competition, nor to award a digital medal for lowering one’s HbA1c. It is to recognize that measurement becomes much more powerful when attached to agency and purpose.
I have not competed in HYROX. Yet.
As far as I can determine, the traveling festival of sleds, sandbags and wall balls has not yet reached Philadelphia. This may be good news for my hamstrings, although it is increasingly frustrating for my curiosity. When it does arrive, I expect to be near the front of the registration queue.
David has, perhaps inadvertently, convinced me. Not because I have developed a burning desire to push a weighted sled across an arena after several kilometers of running; I can think of more civilized ways to spend a Saturday. Rather, he has made me think differently about why all this measurement is becoming so compelling.
We increasingly live surrounded by numbers describing our bodies. Some are generated by physicians, some by laboratories, and an ever-growing number by the small computers strapped to our wrists, fingers and chests. But HYROX demonstrates that the number itself is rarely the point. What matters is what the number allows us to do next.
At 65, David knows what he is training for.
Perhaps healthcare should ask the rest of us the same question.
