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My hybrid training paid off, but my skin suffered because of it. Now, I’m doing Hyrox looking like THIS and here’s how I got here! If you know what Hyrox is, you already know what it demands. If you do not, the short version is this: it is a fitness race that combines running with eight functional workout stations, sleds, ski ergs, rowing, burpee broad jumps, all back to back, all timed, all designed to find exactly where your body gives up and push past it. I have been training for it seriously for two years. I have also been doing it at 67, which gets a reaction every single time I mention it. The training works. My body changed in ways I had stopped expecting at this stage of my life. Muscle definition I had not seen since my forties. Endurance that surprises people half my age. A physical capability that has genuinely made my daily life feel different. I am not going to pretend any of that was easy because it was not. But the results were real and I earned every single one of them. What nobody in my training circle talked about was what high intensity training does to your skin. Not the sagging, which is what most people assume is the conversation. Something different. Repetitive heavy sweating, followed by cold showers, followed by more sweating, strips the skin's surface barrier over time in a way that is slow and cumulative and easy to miss until you suddenly notice it all at once. My skin had become reactive. Dry in a way that felt different from regular dryness, tighter, more irritable, quicker to show redness after training. The skin on my arms and chest, which I had been exposing in training kit every day for two years, looked weathered in a way that did not match the rest of what I had been building. I had been putting so much into the body and essentially nothing into the skin protecting it. I started paying attention to this about a year ago. I did what I usually do when I want to understand something properly, I researched it. What I found was that skin under consistent athletic stress needs something specific. It needs barrier restoration. Not just surface hydration but the kind of deep, lasting nourishment that rebuilds the skin's ability to protect itself rather than just temporarily soothing the damage done to it. Most products I had tried were doing the latter. Something would feel better for a few hours and then my skin would be back to reactive and tight by the following morning. I came across Besque through a woman in my running group who had similar skin complaints. She had been using the body oil for about three months and said the reactivity she had been dealing with for years had significantly reduced. I looked at the formula carefully, the way I look at anything I am going to put in or on my body. Seven cold-pressed natural oils. Nothing synthetic. No alcohol, no artificial fragrance, no preservatives. Crucially, nothing that would further compromise a skin barrier that was already working overtime. What made sense to me about Besque for an athletic body specifically was the vitamin E content. Vitamin E is the skin's primary antioxidant defence. Every training session generates oxidative stress, not just in the muscles but in the skin too. Environmental exposure during outdoor runs, UV, pollution, temperature changes, all of it accumulates in the skin's surface layers. Vitamin E works actively to neutralise that damage rather than just covering it. Combined with the lavender oil in the formula, which reduces the inflammation and redness that show up in skin that has been consistently pushed, the combination was doing something my previous routine had completely missed. I started applying it twice a day. After my morning training session and again in the evening. Within two weeks the tightness after training had reduced noticeably. Within a month the reactive redness that had become my normal had calmed down to the point where I stopped expecting it. My skin felt more resilient, which sounds like an odd word to use about skin but is exactly the right one. It stopped reacting to everything and started just getting on with things, the way skin is supposed to. By month two the texture across my arms and chest had genuinely improved. Smoother, more even, with a quality that looked healthy rather than just adequately maintained. The skin I had been pushing hard alongside the rest of my body had finally been given something to recover with. I did my first Hyrox event four months after starting Besque. Wore my kit, arms out, fully visible, moved through every station without thinking once about anything other than the work in front of me. Crossed the finish line feeling exactly the way I had trained to feel. That evening I got home, showered, did my routine, and stood in front of the mirror in this bikini for the first time since buying it months earlier. Purple, floral, the kind of thing I had picked up thinking maybe, not yet sure. I put it on and looked at someone who had built something over two years that she was genuinely proud of. Not just the performance. The whole picture. Training takes care of the strength. Nutrition takes care of the fuel. Sleep takes care of the recovery. And the skin that covers all of it, that goes through every session and every outdoor mile and every cold shower alongside you, that needs its own category of attention.