HYROX Co-Founder Moritz Fürste: "Losing Is Not Failure"

But it also shows that the brand and the community that you've got, that actually that it's a moment that everybody wants to come and watch, and we're in the era of moments and experiences.

But I am gonna come back to, so almost, COVID's almost a sliding door moment for you, that you'd done the early work, effectively, and it had gone well.

Then it's like, oh! COVID happens, the world shuts for a bit, then you're making investments into changes because you've got to adapt to it.

But I mean, looking back on it, just talk to us through that period at the start and where you came to through it and how you use that time to then go, okay, you know, we're coming back and we're gonna build from there.

No, I think, I mean, COVID after all was a super crazy learning experience for various reasons.

I think for us all as human beings globally, I don't think anyone ever expected anything like that to happen.

And the way the world handled this was... let's say, a quite interesting experiment in good and bad ways.

We all learned a lot about ourselves, about the world, about people.

And we also learned a lot about the upsides and downsides and potential problems of the business world and how things can go south in a second.

But the most important thing we learned is that you need some...

We learned about ourselves that we are able to overcome obstacles even in the worst possible way for a mass participation business from a business perspective.

Only looking at that part now and not the tragic humanity issues that we had in that time.

And I think this is something that was a very, very important fact for us that we realized, hey, And whatever happens, we will find a way and we will keep fighting and we will try to get out of that.

And we did.

And so I think for us, that was almost like in sports when you...

When you tour your ACL and you think life is over and then you get back stronger and then you in hindsight, you tell that story and it seems like the normal, most logical thing in the world.

But in that particular moment, you are so frustrated and you might as well think about quitting.

But you don't.

And we didn't.

And yeah, that's something we are pretty proud of.

Yeah.

And it's almost that since then, since, you know, your growth since 2021-22 has just done that, effectively.

It's almost that, you know, there was a change in that moment in time.

I just want to talk to you about, you know, rivals are rivals and they're not ultimately your own domain.

But looking at it of, you know, what happened with sort of CrossFit, Spartan, Tough Mudder, effectively, which are all great concepts in their own right, effectively, but that you've You've sort of grown over them in some respects.