Can a regular 55-year-old body do a Hyrox just four days after running a full marathon?

Now I know it’s a yes.

These days, my calendar isn’t quite mine to keep. My schedule bends around my Mom’s condition, and so I’ve taken to registering for races the way one might make a tentative wish — not knowing which will actually come to pass. For the third year running, I let go of the Gold Coast Marathon, unsure what I would be free to run next.

Which raises the obvious question — why race at all, under such uncertainty?

The answer is simple. Having something to train toward is what keeps me anchored. And if the last several years have taught me anything, it’s that health — not merely the physical kind, but the harder-won discipline of staying mentally whole — is the one thing worth protecting above all else.

A friend said something recently, life is extremely hard. As I’ve gotten older, it isn’t only my own circumstances that settle their weight on me. The world does too — Gaza, Lebanon, grief happening far from here that somehow doesn’t feel far at all, and closer to home, the daily erosions in our own country. All of it accumulates.

Endurance sport is how I metabolize everything. I’m not fast, and certainly not gifted — but it gives me back a clarity I don’t find elsewhere, a way to keep loving the world when the world makes that difficult.

So it was in that spirit that I ran the Bulacan Marathon this past Sunday, through Manila’s relentless rain. It was hard, and yet — strangely — joyful: puddles underfoot, riverside alleys unlit and uneven beneath a pitch-dark sky. I noticed how far my proprioception has improved (thanks to Coach Tolitz Divina). Ground that once would have unsettled me now barely asked for my attention.

Then, four days later, came Hyrox Bangkok. I hadn’t raced one in over a year, and there had been no real runway to prepare — only Coach Adrien of Hybrd, working quickly and well to get me there.

Walking into the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center felt oddly like stepping onto the set of Physical 100 — a room full of bodies built for exactly this. A friend once told me that mine looks more like a Kenyan distance runner’s. Among all that visible strength, I felt, for a moment, like I didn’t belong.

The night before the race, sleep gave way to news that someone dear had passed on. I lay there weighing whether to run at all. But I thought of the time already given up, away from my family, to be there, and decided to finish what I’d gone there for.

Race morning, I told myself I only needed to beat 2:09, my Singles time from before. Only one station worried me: the Sandbag Lunges, the one obstacle that offers no mercy — you cannot pause, and cannot set the weight down. I moved through the SkiErg, the Sled Push and Pull, the Burpee Broad Jumps, the Row, the Farmers Carry, each its own small negotiation with fatigue. And when the Sandbag Lunges came, they felt, against all reasonable expectations, manageable. I simply kept moving. By the Wall Balls, I sensed something good was coming.

I crossed the line having shaved fifteen minutes off my previous record — 1:54, down from 2:09 — with barely any preparation behind it. I find myself wondering, quietly, what real preparation might yield.

What I know now is this: I no longer need to ask whether this body can. I have the confidence to run a marathon on any given day — and, as it turns out, to do a Hyrox on any given day, too.