ROAD TO AN IRONMAN EPISODE 3: HYROX WORLDS AND THE ROAD AHEAD

Published: 04/09/2026 | By: David Van Wetherill

David Van Wetherill has spent the summer pushing his body to its limits – racing HYROX Worlds, building towards an Ironman and navigating the much harder work that happens away from the start line. In this deeply personal training diary, our training ambassador reflects on resilience, vulnerability, identity and what a comeback really means. 

What does it mean to be admired for what you've overcome, versus being truly seen for who you are? 

Three things stacked on top of each other this summer. HYROX. The Ironman build. And a year that's asked a lot more of me than fitness ever could. Racing in the adaptive division at the HYROX World Championships, training for Kalmar in between flights, trying to actually feel something instead of just getting through it, none of it happened separately. Looking back, I'm not sure it could have. 

Racing As Training 

There's no separate "HYROX block" and "Ironman block" at this point in the year, they’ve had to become the same thing. HYROX in the Invitational adaptive division at the World Championships in Sweden has doubled as some of the sharpest race-intensity work I could ask for: short, brutal efforts that do for my top-end fitness what steady mileage never could. The functional movements crossover directly into the joint control I need for the run leg of Kalmar, and racing itself – under fatigue, under pressure, travelling to get there – has been better preparation for August than almost any single session at home. 

But, training while travelling isn't ideal, but this time it was made easier than usual. Thanks to Puma, I trained out of the HYROX House, which had a fully kitted-out high-performance centre on site – proper equipment and the reassurance that the Puma team could get me into whatever training facilities I needed. 

The bigger decision was what to do after Worlds. The usual instinct with a race like that is to taper into it and back off afterwards, protect it, recover around it. I did the opposite. With Kalmar only weeks out, there wasn't room to lose days either side of a race to recovery. So Worlds became the session rather than the peak: a genuine, event-specific stimulus banked as the hardest single effort of the block, then straight back into training within 48 hours instead of easing off. 

The Big Stage 

What does it mean to be truly seen? 

As I stood on the stage at HYROX Worlds, delivering a speech at the Opening Ceremony and being named HYROX Inspirational Athlete of the Year, it was a huge honour – one I don't take lightly. But what stayed with me wasn't the award. 

Seen. Heard. Understood. 

For the first time, not just admired for what I'd achieved despite the challenges. 

The version of me standing there understood himself differently and understood others differently too. It wasn't the disability. It wasn't the surgeries. It wasn't the race. It wasn't even the speech itself. It was that all of it was honest. All of it was real. 

Identity. Suffering. Meaning. Purpose. That's what was on my mind up there. Every one of us has something we're uniquely able to give, success is a privilege but impact is a choice. Before the surgery, the physical pain in my body was limiting my life. After surgery, it's been my emotions doing the limiting. Life got hard. I didn't get harder – I got softer. 

The Comeback Isn’t A Return 

The world loves a comeback because it thinks a comeback is about returning. I'm starting to feel, with something close to certainty, that it isn't. 

What if it's becoming the person your old life could never have produced? 

The comeback isn't proving you can get back to who you were. It's discovering who you became because you couldn't. Because you can’t, you have to go through it, all of it. 

I'm not the man I was before surgery. I'm becoming someone stronger, wiser, more resilient, through understanding myself more deeply, not through outworking anything. The visible comeback is built on invisible work. 

Nobody sees the invisible work. Not really. They see HYROX Worlds, the stage, the finish line at Kalmar if I get there. They don't see the mental struggles, the taping up before every session because the crutches don't care that my palms are already blistered from the last one. They don't see the physio sessions on the mornings I can’t walk because my joints have seized, or the therapy that I lean on when my mind and my body are not in sync. That’s where the actual rebuilding happens, not on race day, in the sessions nobody photographs. 

A softening. Maybe the real comeback is to yourself. 

Being Met 

The finish line at Worlds is one of the most powerful moments I can remember, not just because we reached it together, but because we were met. Hugs & Connections. Real ones, lying beyond performance. 

Not all strength is visible. Not all courage is visible. Being met, emotionally as much as physically, is everything in letting yourself receive support rather than just deliver a result. 

That's the same thread running through this whole season, on the training side as much as the emotional one. Training with friends, travelling alongside people who understand the disability, has meant the hard stretches, three events overlapping, sessions squeezed in before flights, haven't been carried alone. That's what's made the discipline sustainable across a calendar this packed. 

Most endurance culture celebrates stoicism first. I'm growing to put vulnerability and understanding first instead. Finding peace, compassion and understanding. Stoicism comes later. 

What's Left 

Straight after Worlds, it's back into the build. There is no gap, just the next block starting immediately. What's ahead is the final push towards Kalmar: less banking fitness now, more sharpening it. 

There are two things left to properly test before go-time: the bike legs, and the mental strength to back them. That's what an Alps training camp and a trip to Kilimanjaro are for. Long climbs to find out what the legs actually have left, and long hours with nothing but my own head for company to find out what the mind has left too. After everything this season has already asked, I want to know both answers before I'm standing on a start line with no more sessions left to bank. 

There's a strange quiet in that, after weeks of being visible, the stage, the cameras, the crowds. Now it’s just sessions in front of me and the work of actually processing what's happened. 

I don't fully know yet what this stretch is trying to teach me. But the finish line was never really a place, and neither, I'm starting to think, is any of this. 

Winners find a way.