Some of the most impressive athletes in the world are competing this weekend in Chicago in a sport that is growing, they believe is very accessible, and a sport whose name they hope everyone knows in the near future.

"Some people around you don't know what HYROX is, and it's really annoying – I think we all know that – and they're like, 'What sport are you doing?' I'm like, 'HYROX,' and they're like, 'Huh?'" HYROX Elite athlete Emilie Dahmen said.

She is one of the thousands of athletes competing in the HYROX World Championships at Navy Pier this weekend.

HYROX is a relatively new sport that consists of eight separate one-kilometer runs, and in between each run, what they refer to as eight "functional movement" stations.

"It's a fitness race. It's very accessible to everyone. I got involved in it just because I had a love for running and I had a love for weightlifting, and this kind of combines them both," HYROX Elite athlete Jake Dearden said. "It is crazy, and it does take up, like, it's a full-time job. The training hours are intense; you know, 20 to 30 hours a week, but yeah, it's great."

Dearden is one of the newcomers to the sport, competing at the highest level on the men's side in the Elite 15 Series.

For the women, American Lauren Weeks is a three-time world champion, who's been in the sport basically since the beginning in the late 2010s.

"To take you back to my first world championship, I was on the start line with five other women," she said. "There were maybe 25 people in that entire venue. So to see it go from like 25 people in one venue to 6,000 athletes competing, that is just astronomical growth that I definitely couldn't have predicted, and I don't think anybody else could have either."

Weeks, like all of the competitors, trains intensely to compete at the highest level. Her training now includes a little helper, her 3-year-old daughter, Lilly.

"Everything that I've done, I've made sure that she has a small version of it, because no matter what I'm doing, she wants to be part of it. So she has her own mini sled, and mini dumbbells, or a barbell," Weeks said. "I just lay it out there when I start. If she wants to do it, great. If she'd rather run around in the back yard, great. Most of the time, she does join, it's just usually for like 20 seconds at a time."

Weeks and the rest of the competitors in the championship might have another goal in mind, with talks of getting HYROX in the Olympics, possibly as early as 2032.

"I'm sure so many of us would love to be able to call ourselves an Olympian; 2032's a long ways out, but it's sure going to keep me in the game even longer," Weeks said.

Weeks competed in HYROX while eight months pregnant, saying she wanted to show people you don't have to stop exercising, and basically anything's possible.

• Chicago
• Navy Pier