Last Friday, my fellow Lifehacker writer Beth Skwarecki and I completed a Hyrox race with a time of 01:36:48. I consider this a perfectly solid debut for one runner and one weightlifter trying to meet somewhere in the middle. While we were at it, I strapped the Garmin Forerunner 970 ($749.99) to my left wrist and the Amazfit Cheetah 2 Pro ($449.99) to my right, turning the race into a nifty experiment with a couple of my favorite watches. Here's how it went.

Beth goes into more depth elsewhere, but here's the quick version of what Hyrox actually is: It's a structured running race combined with functional workout stations, repeated eight times over. You run 1 km, hit a workout station, run another 1 km, hit another station, and so on. The stations cycle through exercises like sled pushes, rowing, burpee broad jumps, walking lunges, and wall balls. Check out Beth's recap to get the gist:

How to set up your watch for a Hyrox race

Right from the start, the Amazfit has a much easier Hyrox-specific interface to navigate. Amazfit has a built-in Hyrox race setting baked directly into the Cheetah 2 Pro. You go into the workout menu, select Hyrox, and you're ready. The watch already knows what the race looks like, and it structures your data capture accordingly from the moment you press start.

Garmin, for all its dominance in the running watch space, doesn't natively support Hyrox as a dedicated race mode. To get the most out of the Forerunner 970, I needed to download Roxfit, a handy third-party app that integrates with Garmin Connect and adds Hyrox-specific structure to your activity. It works, but it requires setup ahead of time, and if you miss any steps (which I think I did), you're on your own mid-race.

I do want to call out that Roxfit is your go-to app regardless of which watch you're wearing. It's the official companion app for Hyrox races, and it's where your official race results, splits, and station breakdowns live after the event—Amazfit user or not. Think of it less as a Garmin workaround and more as a core part of the Hyrox ecosystem. The difference is that Garmin athletes also need to install it on their watch beforehand to get structured in-race tracking, while Amazfit athletes can use it purely as a post-race results hub without relying on it to fill a gap in their watch's native capabilities.

How these watches performed during the race

As I’ve previously covered, these two watches are matched in terms of core metrics like heart rate. In terms of user experience, during the race itself, the Amazfit's built-in Hyrox mode took the throne almost immediately. As you move through the race, the watch displays small icons on-screen indicating what's coming next. I realize this might sound like a minor thing, but when all your brainpower is going toward your physical performance, those little graphics are a major lifesaver. 

The lap button interface was also more intuitive on the Amazfit during the race. Hyrox requires you to manually transition between run and station segments as you move through the course, and the Cheetah 2 Pro made that feel natural. The Garmin, despite being a more technically sophisticated device in many respects, felt clunkier to operate when my focus was elsewhere.

The Zepp app beats Garmin Connect

Amazfit's companion app, Zepp, is significantly better than Garmin Connect for analyzing Hyrox data. After the race, Zepp presents a clean timeline view with icons marking each station and each run segment in sequence. The data is organized around the structure of the race itself, which is exactly how your brain wants to access it after the fact.

Garmin Connect, by comparison, requires more manual work—something all Garmin fans are used to tolerating. Because the watch logged everything as running intervals rather than properly distinguishing between runs and stations, the post-race analysis means cross-referencing timestamps against a heart rate graph and trying to mentally reconstruct which segment was which. That leads me to my one significant complaint about my Garmin experience.

Despite my attempts to configure the Forerunner 970 properly for the race, Garmin logged every segment as a run. That's surely some form of user error on my part, and I'm not going to blame the hardware entirely for a setup issue. But that's somewhat the point: Amazfit doesn't give you the opportunity to make that error in the first place.

The bottom line

I am a die-hard Garmin fan. My Forerunner 970 is one of my most-used pieces of gear, and in my previous head-to-head comparison of these two watches during a half-marathon, the Garmin won—largely on the strength of its interface reliability and the sheer depth of running dynamics available for post-race analysis.

But Hyrox is a different kind of race, with a specific structure, and specific in-race mental challenges and demands. The built-in Hyrox mode, the on-screen station icons, the more intuitive lap transitions, and the all-around superior post-race app all point to Amazfit as the winner here. For the $300 price difference, it's not even close for this specific case.

One caveat worth noting: I'd like to pair the Amazfit with a chest strap heart rate monitor for future Hyrox races, just to be confident the optical wrist-based readings are holding up under the physical demands of the station work. After all, wrist heart rate sensors can struggle with exercises like sled pushes and rowing, where wrist positioning changes significantly.

Garmin still has my heart (and my wrist!) for traditional running; but for Hyrox race day, with all its specific demands and organized chaos, Amazfit wins this one.