This story was brought to you in collaboration with AIA Singapore.
All images by Yee Jia Ying and Darren Satria for RICE Media
“It started with anger,” Bani Muhammad Iyad says as he heads to the bus stop after a musical theatre open mic night. He’d spent hours waiting for his name to be called, but it never came.
As an openly neurodivergent man, Iyad has multiple passions. Despite his young age, he’s been formally recognised for years of volunteering, has a captive audience across various social media platforms, and thrives in the performing arts as an emcee, actor and singer.
Yet, the 28-year-old feels like an outcast.
“I just want people to accept me for who I am, as a human being. I refuse to be defined by my autism.”
Iyad can certainly take a couple of hard knocks. When I ask how he’s feeling about not being called to the stage at Blu Jaz that night, he shrugs it off: “I just wanted to try, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
What really fires him up, though, is his physical image—how it tends to become the sum total of how people form their first impression of him.
A few years back, Iyad weighed 122kg. A turn of events led him to enrol in a personal training programme that introduced him to running, swimming, and strength training. An AI coaching app helped him get smarter about nutrition.
You’d think it made him happy when his friends became, well, friendlier.
Instead, it enraged him: “They only began ‘accepting’ me when I was skinny.”
But through relentless self-reflection—a trait common among many on the spectrum, Iyad mentions—he realised the problem wasn’t them.
“I simply decided this is not how I want to be. I do not want to see three figures on the weighing machine in my future,” he shares, adding that he’s a long way from his “realistic” target weight of 99kg.
Lately, Iyad’s been paying close attention to, and even gearing up for HYROX, one of the fastest-growing fitness events worldwide with a presence in over 85 cities, including Singapore.
“I’ve been following the journeys of some of my friends and strangers, and they’re everyday people wanting to better themselves, challenge themselves,” he affirms.
“I haven’t signed up, but I’m preparing for it—I’m not intimidated. I’m going to show up, even if just as a spectator first.”
The HYROX Hype
Despite all its outwardly muscle-bro hype, HYROX seems to resonate with Singaporeans like Iyad—regular people who simply want to remind themselves what they’re capable of.
HYROX first landed in Singapore—and Southeast Asia—in October 2023 at the National Stadium, bringing with it a gruelling format: one kilometre of running followed by one functional workout, repeated eight times.
Two years since its debut here, HYROX has established itself as a cultural fixture. The AIA HYROX Open Asian Championships, at the National Stadium, drew more than 12,000 athletes across two days.
Unlike the unpredictable terrain of obstacle races or the elite lifts of CrossFit, HYROX offers a standardised course globally, meaning participants from all around the world compete in the exact same format. Your time ranks on a worldwide leaderboard, allowing you to see exactly how you stack up against competitors across the globe.
You can go solo, ‘split the pain’ in Doubles or team up with three friends for a relay—running eight kilometres in total, interspersed with challenges like ski ergs, sled push and pull, rowing, farmer’s carries and sandbag lunges after every 1km run.
HYROX Singapore’s Instagram account has since amassed over 39,000 followers, and the fitness community has embraced what experts are calling “competitive social fitness”—where every milestone becomes content. Race day turns into an all-out content mill thanks to official photographers on the ground uploading photos online for participants to purchase, while family and friends film enthusiastically from the spectator area.
Scroll through the #HYROX feeds, and you’ll find a curious ecosystem: gym bros posting split times, wellness influencers in matching activewear capturing ‘candid’ shots and finance types documenting their journey from boardroom to burpees.
The impact is widespread—it’s become a thing for ambitious Singaporeans to do when a half-marathon feels too pedestrian, and CrossFit sounds too cultish. A growing number of gyms are affiliating as official HYROX Training Clubs, offering HYROX training programmes to help participants get race-ready.
The Instagram highlights show chiselled athletes in compression gear crossing finish lines, looking merely glowing rather than destroyed. Motivational captions abound about “embracing the grind”.
All this to say that for the average individual considering signing up, it can feel absolutely daunting. Yet, even with all that pressure, people keep turning up.
Which makes you wonder: could the hype around HYROX be obscuring the quieter reasons people show up in the first place?
For many athletes who aren’t chasing podium finishes, it’s less about aesthetics than agency; less about looking strong than feeling capable.
It’s a race, sure, but also a reminder that strength comes in many shapes.
Of Friendships and Finding Yourself
For 38-year-old Ashley Benson, that strength came in the shape of a fish out of water.
The professional mermaid was born and raised in the American Midwest before moving to Hawaii to study, and then relocated to the Virgin Islands after graduating.
She eventually migrated to Singapore in 2013 after getting a two-year contract job at what was then known as S.E.A. Aquarium. Over a decade later, she’s still in Singapore, this time working in the marine animal care department at the same Sentosa attraction, now rebranded as the Singapore Oceanarium.
Uprooting herself for a job across the world was the easy part, she says. And then she got married in Singapore, reshaping her social life in ways she didn’t expect. The shift in identity—as a Muslim convert, as an American in Singapore—would, unknowingly, lead her to HYROX.
“I found myself having a lack of community. You get married and now you’re a wife, so the role you’re expected to play in the home changes, and you start to lose your sense of individuality,” Ashley recalls.
Her husband introduced her to his friends, but even though they got along well, Ashley knew she needed to build her own social circle. Fitness had always been her outlet—though, as a long-distance runner, it had always been a solitary one.
“You train on your own, and you race on your own, and even though you do have people around you, you’re not racing and strategising together. It’s just you and your demons trying to get to the finish line.”
It was in 2023 that she saw an ad for a HYROX event and joked with one of her few female friends and 5K racing buddy, Ira, about taking part.
Ira (“My ride-or-die hype woman!”) responded with an enthusiastic “let’s f**ing go”. Suddenly, Ashley’s world expanded.
That same year, they signed up for the HYROX Singapore Women’s Open solo race. Ashley placed third in her age group and qualified for the 2023/2024 HYROX World Championships.
“The event was appealing because it presented a lot of unknowns, which created a lot of room for growth as an athlete. Before HYROX, I was either a runner or a cross (shorthand for an iron cross gymnast), but I hadn’t put the two together in a competition before,” she explains.
“Not knowing what the outcome would be was intriguing.”
To prepare for her first race, the HYROX Singapore 2023 Women’s Open Solo, she had to join a new gym and meet new people—particularly women.
“It was a really uncomfortable position to be in for me,” Ashley admits. As an introvert, she was self-conscious about never quite fitting in.
“I used to be part of a big, predominantly male community, because my interests, such as dirt bike racing, aligned with most men’s. I couldn’t relate to women very well.”
Slowly, while training for HYROX, Ashley started forming some of her best friendships with other women, many of them through bold requests to buddy up for competitions.
“Suddenly, I had friends, especially female friends. I literally stop what I’m doing in the middle of the day sometimes and be like ‘holy shit, I have so many super cool women in my life’—and I had never been able to say that ever.”
Since then, Ashley has participated in 10 HYROX events over the past two years. Her husband, a regular spectator at her HYROX Singapore events, travelled with her to two World Championships and is her “loudest cheerleader in the crowd”.
And now, she’s a group fitness coach at Empower Fitness, a women-owned gym and HYROX Training Club.
“It’s really changed the trajectory of my life.”
What HYROX offers—a uniquely accessible opportunity for recreational athletes to qualify for and perform on a world stage—has not only redefined the concept of fitness for the seasoned competitive athlete, but it’s also helped her to find her community in Singapore.
“The cascade effect HYROX has had on my life has been mind-blowing. The friends I’ve made, the doors that’ve opened and the opportunities I’ve been given… And all because of the decision to sign up for a race I saw on Facebook.”
Of Fitness and Faith
Sorfina Fadzlon, a self-proclaimed “nano influencer”, grew up a natural athlete. But her intentional way of life, specifically her public display of it as a Malay-Muslim mother, extends beyond fitness. For her, HYROX was a way to show up, represent, and stay true to her beliefs.
The 31-year-old tells me she learnt early on that caring for one’s health and wellbeing is part of her ibadah—her expression of faith through daily actions. It started when she was a child.
“I learned portion control through sharing a plate of food with my brother throughout our primary school days; drank plain milk for breakfast until I was in secondary school; carried a water bottle everywhere so we didn’t order (potentially unhealthy) drinks when we ate out; and snacked on vegetables and fruits,” she recalls.
“None of us siblings ended up being picky eaters—we ate what was provided for us. That was a given.”
Sorfina’s parents also encouraged their children to take up sports as part of their schools’ extracurricular activities, so she played netball throughout junior college. As she entered adulthood, inspired by her brothers, Sorfina began going to the gym with them until it became part of her personal routine.
These days, she’s a full-time Quality and Standards Assistant Manager. But online, her over 3,000 Instagram followers tune in to see how even working mums like her can lead an active, healthy lifestyle.
Her intention, she says, was to promote healthy living through movement, conscious eating and “being in a good state of mind”. Sorfina champions local brands that share her values—including modesty, halal, and vegan diets.
Very quickly, the mother of one had fellow mums commenting and messaging her for recommendations on modest activewear and “how to start working out with a hectic mum schedule”.
Almost as quickly, she was invited to model for brands like Glowco and Decathlon—her face can still be seen in ads at the latter’s outlets in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
She’s spent most of her adult life sticking to a daily exercise routine while juggling work and, more recently, raising her four-year-old. But it wasn’t until 2024 that Sorfina took part in a HYROX event.
Like Ashley, she was looking for a community.
“I started with the Women’s relay at a HYROX Singapore race in 2024, two years after joining an F45 gym,” she reveals.
She made friends with three other women, whom she said were “fitter and more experienced” than she was. Still, it was Sorfina who initiated a team-up for HYROX.
“It was a real ‘just sign up and think or train later’ kind of thing,” she says. “With my background, I figured a relay would be relatively easy. But most importantly, I wanted to experience fitness in a competitive setting.”
That first brush with HYROX was enough to get Sorfina fixated on the adrenaline rush. She signed up for three different events in the first half of 2025 alone, including the Women’s Doubles at the HYROX Singapore race back in June.
“That was a rollercoaster ride! Planning the transitions and working on our individual strengths were key to our success. I also have my husband to thank because I had to train a lot for it, and his full support really helped.”
Sorfina and her husband are trying to have a second baby, which means taking a break from fitness events for a while. But as soon as she’s capable, she can’t wait to return to the circuit.
“The blood, sweat and tears are worth it!”
Ultimately, she knows her role goes beyond personal achievement. It’s about showing others that an active life—built on daily consistent movement and mindful food choices—is still possible, even if HYROX might feel out of reach for now.
Even right now during her off-season, Sorfina wants to remind women like her, particularly those who share her commitment to modest dressing, active living, motherhood and careers, to simply show up.
“We need more influence and representation in my racial community.”
The Act of Showing Up
The finish line is subjective.
For Iyad, it’s about reclaiming his body from other people’s judgements. For mermaid-turned-HYROX community leader Ashley, it’s about pushing past the discomfort to find herself. And for Sorfina, it’s about holistic health and wellbeing—for herself, her family and her community.
What unites them isn’t a time on the board or a quest to flex your muscles on social media. It’s the decision to just show up, even when you’re angry, vulnerable or unsure. Especially then.
HYROX has become shorthand for peak fitness, but these three remind us that peak is personal. It’s not about fitting into a mould. It’s about breaking it.
This year, as the official title sponsor of AIA HYROX Open Asian Championships 2025 and AIA HYROX Singapore 2025, AIA Singapore is backing that belief—literally.
Every participant receives complimentary insurance coverage*, a gesture that says: “We see you. We’ve got you. Now go.”
The real story of HYROX isn’t about who’s the fastest, who’s the strongest, and who can get the most likes on their sweaty post-competition social post.
It’s about who, despite everything, decided to sign up and show up. To lace up those shoes tight and decide what ‘healthy’ means on their own terms.
