What Hidde Weersma learned on the road to HYROX success

Hidde Weersma: Well, it’s easy to talk about it now that it’s behind me. I've been doing HYROX for about five years, and started to chase the Elites a year ago. Because I worked full-time before, I naturally had boundaries in how many hours I could train. But since I stopped working full-time in January, I can train like a full-time athlete.

To begin with, this was great. I had more time to train and rest, and it worked out really well for the European Championships in London. But, after that race, I got really enthusiastic and thought ‘OK, I will do more volume, more intensity, more heat training, and if I lose a little bit of weight, I will be unbeatable in Stockholm'.

It was a rookie mistake because, as a coach myself, I know you shouldn’t try to improve everything at the same time. I walked into that trap and ended up becoming sick three weeks before Stockholm. Ignored all the signals from my body and trained too hard. So I wasn’t in the best shape for Stockholm, and I know I can do much better.

When I worked full-time, I was coaching myself by necessity. I didn’t want a strict coach because I needed to be flexible and just fit in with what was best for me at that time. But now, coming back from Stockholm, I decided that I do need somebody who looks over my shoulder because, to be honest, I don’t trust myself not to overtrain!

Now I have a coach – an exercise physiologist who also works for the Dutch Olympic team. He doesn’t write my programmes, but does look at what I do on a week-to-week basis and helps me with the periodisation. He also checks a few metrics in the morning, like heart rate variability, just to make sure that I don’t overtrain again. I have a lot of confidence in him.

I am looking at the differences in how I trained for London and Stockholm. I’m trying to make what I did for London the blueprint for next season. It is difficult because HYROX is growing so fast, so you need to experiment a bit and take a few risks so that you can keep up. It’s a game we all play with our training routines.

For London, I did a lot of low-intensity training sessions. And around five weeks before London, I went to Tenerife, where I did loads of running and cycling, with one heavy work session per week. The focus was on building the biggest aerobic engine that I had ever had. And allowing lots of time for recovery. Once I had that, I noticed that every training session improved, and it increased my sports-specific fitness.

Before Stockholm, it was two months of very specific training sessions, with quite a lot of volume. Now, I’ll definitely go back to having a large aerobic block of two weeks about six to eight weeks before a big race – something I didn’t do before Stockholm.

It's not that I stalk my competitors on social media, but when I'm scrolling, I might see someone doing a workout and take inspiration from it. But I'm never that worried about what others are doing, to be honest, because I have seen so many athletes who are posting things on social media where I think ‘if this is what you're capable of in a session, then you should absolutely destroy me in a race’, and often, that doesn’t happen. I think people aren’t always telling the full truth about their training sessions. So I’m not that bothered about what they post.

I’m more interested in winning races. If you were to ask me, ‘Would you rather win the World Championships, or take back the world record?’, I would choose winning a major or the World Champs. But, if I break a record during a race, I will be very happy. To be known as the fastest is very cool, but at the same time I already did that, even if it only lasted three weeks before my record was beaten.

I actually still work two half days a week as a strength and conditioning coach for the Dutch Olympic team. I used to be full-time, but now it’s only with the Paralympic cycling team, which is great as cycling is one of my favourite sports. It means I get to spend a lot of time on the bike. Apart from that, I’m watching a lot of bike racing. I really enjoy working; it gives me something else outside of HYROX, plus colleagues and athletes to guide. It feels more like a hobby than work!

Downtime and recovery are so important. I also like playing video games, reading and walking outside. Social media, I have a love-hate relationship with, but I do really like to do it in my own way. Luckily, my Doubles partner, Thierry Willigenburg, and I have a similar sense of humour, so when we do race recaps, we bounce off each other, and it’s fun, and we’ll continue to do that next year!