I went on the first Hyrox Cruise — this is what it’s like - The Times
This was no longer the pool deck of your standard cruise ship. Not least because it was kitted out like a world-class mega gym. Heavy dumbbells, kettlebells and sandbags lined a freshly laid floor of mats. Row and ski machines were lined up, silhouetted by the sunrise.
What’s more, no one was here to relax. Nearly all of the sunloungers had been hidden away. It was barely 8am and the deck was humming with activity and had been since before dawn. The Hyrox takeover was absolute. From the sheer amount of physical equipment brought in to the branding from fore to aft, it looked and felt as though the 962ft Mein Schiff 4 had always been a floating temple to exercise. It was beautiful. If you’re into that kind of thing, which the 2,100 guests from all over the world — including me — very much were.
At the end of October the Hyrox Cruise — the inaugural Hyrox Experience — was in the Med for a “four-day floating festival of fitness”. It was not a race, rather a plethora of training options led by the sport’s finest coaches, sailing from Palma to Marseille to Barcelona and back again.
Since its inception in 2017, Hyrox — an 8km run broken up by eight functional fitness stations — has exploded in popularity to become one of the fastest-growing sports in the world. It’s estimated that more than 1.4 million people entered its races during the 2025-26 season. Such is people’s desire to bag a Velcro finisher’s patch, the tickets for these globe-spanning events (which cost about £120) go like Glasto.
Like marathon running, this inclusive sport embraces all demographics and abilities. Home to the best of the best, its professional Elite 15 athletes — the top 15 men and top 15 women in the world — appear hewn from rock, completing races in brain-boggling times. But it’s also loved by fitness fans chasing personal bests, and ordinary folk like me who just want to complete the course to say they’re a bona fide “hybrid rockstar”. Detractors suggest it’s a cult. To which I’d respond, “Have you read our pamphlet?”, before musing on whether being a (lapsed) Irish Catholic has anything to do with my devotion to collective suffering in search of euphoria. The jury’s out.
Where Hyrox has run, other fitness competitions, such as ATHX Games and Xenom, have followed, and you can now test your running, strength and endurance mettle in various contests in far-flung destinations from Mexico City to Madrid, Athens to Abu Dhabi, Beijing to Birmingham. More people than ever are booking some sort of race, then making a holiday of it. Destination fitness. I’m a case in point: my first Hyrox was a group of mates heading to Stockholm. Today, if you’re looking for a getaway that also gives you Doms (delayed onset muscle soreness), there are loads of options.
Hyrox was the frontrunner in all of this, so it makes sense it’s Hyrox upping the ante. But no one was expecting the cofounders, Moritz Fürste and Christian Toetzke, to do it at sea.
On the day we boarded it was announced that our trip to Marseille was off, because of very high winds and riots in France. Instead we docked at Valencia. On any other cruise a last-minute route and destination change might have mattered, and I’ve no doubt it caused headaches for the organisers, who had been meticulously planning this event for more than a year. But for this trip the focus was the ship itself, no longer really a cruise ship, but a sea-bound carnival of sporting and cavorting. The ship’s decor still visible amid the very thorough branding was neatly simple and unobtrusive, testament to its relatively tender 12 years.
I went with my sister-in-law, Kate. She came 35th in her age group (45-49) in the 2026 Hyrox World Championships and has completed the London marathon in 3hr 7min. Twice. She’s a full-time personal trainer, so it’s fair to say that she is proper. On the other hand, I am enthusiastic but easily tired.
The cruise catered to us both and to all levels in between and beyond, younger and older, with a programme as impressive as it was wide-ranging, offering more than 350 hours of classes, workshops, clinics and panels. Maths isn’t my strong point, but 350 hours is more than the 90 hours we spent on board, and we did spend some of that sleeping in our very comfy cabin with a decent-sized balcony, perfect for sipping that first coffee of the day. We also spent some of it admiring beautiful Valencia and going for a city run around Barcelona with a busload of our shipmates.
In fact, the programme was almost too good, in that the sheer volume of things to do was a bit overwhelming, with the booking of choices not aided by a Mein Schiff app that was pretty glitchy and keen to revert back to German, this being a German-owned cruise ship chartered by Hyrox Experiences for this cruise. Nein danke.
Schedule-wise, the day was every individual’s for the taking. Some people worked out from dawn until dusk. I chose to get in a decent two to three hours of exercise, then filled my time with talks and workshops. I’m not one for bending and stretching, so the functional fitness classes with weights and cardio were the ones that most floated my boat.
The predawn and sunrise classes booked out faster than one of the Hyrox Elite 15’s finishing times. Yoga, spin and reformer Pilates also filled up fast, although Hyrox’s party atmosphere meant there was always a good chance someone would be too hungover to show and you could nab their spot. If you were up and not already raiding the breakfast buffet, that is. Because I tell you what, fit people are good eaters.
My one big beef was the paucity of vegan food. Kate assured me the meat, fish and dairy options at the Anckelmannsplatz buffet restaurant were delicious, but I was miffed that in 2026 on a fitness cruise, plant-based protein hadn’t been considered. In fact, the whole shebang missed a trick not having a protein shake bar, which would have done a roaring trade. Also, please stop playing light jazz in communal spaces. Consider this my petition to seemingly everywhere.
Before the cruise, I asked David Magida, Hyrox’s global head of training, how to make the most of the programme. He said: “It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of fitness, but at the same time sometimes you go to the buffet and get too much and can’t finish your plate. Leave a little bit of bandwidth open to relax because this is a vacation too.”
Wise words, David, but “Race hard. Party harder” was the Hyrox Cruise’s slogan, with ample opportunity for both. Not least on decks 12 and 14, which served as the main exercise engines of the ship.
At one end of deck 14 the Hyrox Arena housed classes led by, among others, HWPO (“Hard Work Pays Off”) and Athletic Camps. We did a HWPO class, run by the CrossFit legends Steven Fawcett and Jake Marconi, and an Athletic Camps hour, both of which offered great performance tips, with on-the-machines training as well as grist for the muscle mills via a 20-minute intense workout. Dear sled, I love to hate you. (A sled, in case you’re wondering, is a heavy metal training platform that you load with weights and push and/or pull along a track. Fun.)
Deck 12 was another epic meeting of minds and sweaty bodies, with an all-day, hour-long circuit class run by F45, the don of high-intensity workouts. Six stations surrounded the pool, with groups of new people joining classes every ten minutes. Halfway through our prebreakfast workout, I was furious with station four’s sandbag lifting, sit-ups and push-ups; by the end I was a sweat-drenched giddy kipper.
It’s also where we had a training lab on the Concept2 SkiErg (“ergs” is gym lingo for the row and ski machines) with top-of-his-class Lars Rademaker, whose passion for his ski machine was palpable, as well as visible in the tattoo on one on his legs. In fact, all of the coaches — many pulled from fellow fitness churches CrossFit, F45 and Les Mills (the music-powered group fitness global phenomenon) — were faultless. There was a good reason that Magida told me they were the feather in the Hyrox Cruise cap, and it was amazing to be in a class taken by leaders in their fields, training alongside world champions still looking to up their game.
The one big question I had before the cruise was: why not a hotel? Why a ship? And on day two it clicked: in the nicest possible way, a load of like-minded people had been kidnapped, and these two decks brought everyone together in commune with our fitness gurus (I never said it wasn’t a cult), and again later for active recovery (drinking and dancing). Social immersion and cohesion at their finest. All over the ship people engaged in the kind of behaviour that would get you reported as a weirdo in London: smiling; saying hello in lifts; striking up conversations with strangers. I’m aware that this feels too cheesy in my vegan mouth, but it was a real community, where positive energy abounded. You have to love those endorphins.
There were also classes in the ship’s theatres, including Les Mills offerings, as well as reformer Pilates programmes from the specialist FS8. Workshops and talks took place in the various bars and lounges, where I gleaned endurance tips in one session and listened to stories from the professional athletes in another.
One of my favourite experiences was a breathwork workshop with the freediver Tavi Castro, aka “the real Aquaman”, who led a small group of us through his breath-hold methodology, the Protocol. On my first attempt my body was fighting for oxygen after about 20 seconds. An hour later I held my breath for more than two minutes. Also, if you think it’s bonkers to have a gym on water, this dude and his wife, Yanita Yancheva, lift weights under water.
It wasn’t all gains, gains, gains. If you wanted to party hearty — and a lot of people clearly did and took full advantage of the all-inclusive booze — that really wasn’t a problem. And it wasn’t a problem for those who didn’t: the deck was alive with revellers commingling to banging tunes until the early hours every night, but with our cabin door closed we were totally undisturbed. Again, something I’m not convinced would be the case in a hotel.
Event cruises are nothing new. Tui already has several on its roster, including a heavy metal cruise, and an Eighties/Nineties special called Electric Sunsets. But this transcended an event cruise — the ship was Hyrox. A staggering 97 per cent of the guests on the Hyrox Cruise had never cruised before. What’s more, we Hyrox Cruisers brought the average age of Tui cruise guests down by 20 years, from 56 to 36, with the biggest demographic in the 30-49 range, which tracks with Hyrox competitions. Stefanie Rokoss, communications manager of Tui, said it was like no other cruise she had experienced. On day two I asked her how it was going. She opened her eyes really wide and said two words: “It’s wild!”
Look, I realise this might all sound a bit like enforced fun. But what was a unique, slightly unhinged vision was almost perfectly executed with an infectious positive energy. And we’re all here for a good time, right? Every single person I spoke to — fellow guests, organisers, coaches, Mein Schiff crew — was buzzing about what a great time they had.
As a sport, Hyrox has conquered the world, and it has not finished making waves.
All recommendations within this article are informed by independent expert editorial opinion. This article contains affiliate links and links to our in-house travel agency, Times Holidays, all of which will earn us revenue.
Mickey Noonan was a guest of Hyrox Experiences; for updates on upcoming Hyrox Resorts and Camps see hyroxexperiences.com
