Work out how fast to run on race day and in training, calibrated against more than 250,000 race results from the 2025/26 HYROX season.
This is the average pace to hold across all eight runs — not a target for any single lap. Aim for the same number every time you leave a station and let the clock take care of itself.
| Where the time goes | Target | Most people | Share |
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| Type | Pace / km | 1200 m | 800 m | 400 m | What it's for |
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Race courses are full of 180° turns that cost a few seconds every kilometre. On a track or treadmill there are none, so aim a touch quicker there — otherwise you'd be training too easy.
| Method | Estimate | What it does |
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Threshold is the anchor for everything below it because our own laboratory testing found it explains roughly 62% of the variation in HYROX finishing time. See "Why we start from threshold".
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Because we tested it. In a laboratory pilot of our own, threshold pace alone explained around 62% of the variation in HYROX finishing time between athletes. For a race with eight strength stations in it, that is a striking amount of work being done by a single running measurement — and it is why this calculator is built on threshold rather than on a VO₂max figure, a recent parkrun, or a guess.
It comes from a small pilot, with a larger study underway, so treat 62% as the reason for the approach rather than a precise figure. What it establishes is the direction of travel: most of what separates one HYROX athlete from another, they carry in their running.
Every HYROX course is a slightly different shape. Across 106 events we found the middle run legs are remarkably consistent — they vary by about 3% from venue to venue. The first and last legs vary by 17% and 11%, because the start and finish chutes are laid out differently in every arena.
So a target for "run 1" is close to meaningless: at some venues it's a short sprint, at others it's long. You can't know which until you're standing on the start line. The average across all eight is the only number that travels with you.
Threshold is the pace you could hold for about an hour if you did nothing else. In HYROX you're running off a sled push, a set of lunges, a hundred wall balls. Your legs never get a clean start.
What we can measure is how much people fade inside a race. Comparing the middle run legs against an athlete's freshest leg, those finishing around 60 minutes fade about 5%. Those finishing around two hours fade about 9%. That gradient is solid — it comes from a quarter of a million races.
What we can't measure is anyone's threshold, because race results don't record running fitness. So the step from your threshold pace to your race pace is a reasoned model built on that fade, not a number the data confirms. Your goal time decides where in the range you land, and the range is deliberately a range.
More than 250,000 finishes from the 2025/26 season, filtered to your division, sex and age group, then narrowed to athletes who finished within a couple of minutes of your goal. We take the middle of that group for each station and scale it so the parts add up to your goal exactly.
Races with penalties are excluded, so these are clean targets rather than averages quietly carrying a two-minute no-rep tax. Everything is aggregated — no individual results are stored or shown.
The race plans describe what athletes at your goal time actually did. That isn't the same as what's optimal for you, and it isn't the only route to the time — plenty of people get there with slower running and faster stations.
The bigger caveat: race results don't record anyone's running fitness, so we can measure how much athletes fade during a race but we can't confirm from this data alone how race pace maps onto a lab threshold. That part is a well-reasoned model, not a measurement, and we'd rather say so.