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We Need to Talk About Fitness Culture’s Obsession With Pushing Through

BYMille Team

September 15, 2026

By Adrienne Everett, international yoga instructor, wellness entrepreneur and founder of HWH Studio

The conversation surrounding what happened at HYROX Beijing has understandably focused on one athlete and one extraordinary moment. But watching it unfold, I found myself thinking about a much bigger question: when did our ability to ignore what our bodies are telling us become a measure of strength?

At HYROX Beijing, Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk experienced fecal incontinence during the women’s Pro race but continued competing, eventually crossing the finish line first. Footage from the event quickly spread online, prompting a wider debate around athlete welfare, hygiene, and why competition officials did not intervene, particularly in a sport where athletes move through shared workout stations and use communal equipment.

In many ways, our reaction to what happened speaks to something fitness culture has spent years teaching us. We are told to keep going, push through, finish the race, and resist the urge to quit when things become uncomfortable. And I believe deeply in the value of that mentality.

There are moments in training when your body is uncomfortable and your mind is telling you to stop, but pushing beyond that point can teach you something incredible about yourself. Anyone who has trained seriously will probably recognize that feeling. Part of becoming stronger is discovering that the limit your mind has set for you is sometimes much closer than the limit of what your body can actually do. But experience also teaches you that discomfort and distress are very different things.

Through yoga, endurance training, and years working within the wellness industry, I’ve seen how easily strength becomes associated with how much we are prepared to endure. We celebrate the extra repetition, the final kilometer, and the athlete who finishes despite everything telling them to stop. Somewhere along the way, endurance itself can start to become proof of toughness.

Listening to your body can require just as much discipline. That doesn’t mean stopping whenever something becomes uncomfortable. Sport is supposed to challenge us, and sometimes our minds tell us we have reached our limit long before our bodies actually have. Learning to recognize when that discomfort has crossed into something more serious is part of becoming an experienced athlete. And that distinction becomes even more important when you are competing alongside other people.

What happened in Beijing was ultimately bigger than one athlete deciding whether she could continue. HYROX competitors share equipment, courses, and workout stations, which means there comes a point when “Can I keep going?” also has to become “Should I keep going?”

Once continuing has the potential to affect fellow competitors, the decision is no longer entirely personal. In Beijing, there was an obvious hygiene concern, but the incident also exposed a more complicated question about who should be responsible for deciding when an athlete has reached that point.

I don’t think that responsibility can sit entirely with the person competing. Adrenaline is high, months of preparation may have gone into getting there, and the entire mindset of competition is geared toward finishing. In that environment, expecting an athlete to suddenly override everything they have trained themselves to do feels unrealistic.

That is where coaches, officials, and competition organizers have a responsibility to step in. They need to be able to recognize when continuing presents a welfare or safety concern, particularly when an athlete may be unlikely to make that call themselves in the middle of a race.

HYROX has since acknowledged that intervention should have happened in Beijing and said its procedures and rules would change. For a sport that has grown as quickly and globally as HYROX, athlete welfare has to develop alongside the competition itself. The culture surrounding the sport matters too.

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I don’t think the lesson from Beijing is that athletes should stop pushing themselves. Resilience remains one of the most valuable things sport can teach us, and there will always be moments when getting stronger requires going further than you thought you could.

But knowing when to stop deserves a place in our understanding of strength too. There is no universal point at which discomfort becomes distress, and every athlete and situation will be different. Athletes need to learn their own signals, while coaches and sporting organizations need to create environments where responding to those signals is treated as good judgment rather than failure.

Yes, sometimes the stronger decision is to keep going. But sometimes, it is knowing you have gone far enough.

Main image: Portrait of Adrienne Everett

We Need to Talk About Fitness Culture’s Obsession With Pushing Through

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