You Do Hyrox? Funny, You Never Mentioned It!

He was a sceptic for exactly forty minutes.

Mark Bennett is forty-four, works in logistics, and walks into a six o'clock class on a retail park in a pair of shorts from Tenerife because of a Christmas photo and a brother-in-law with an estate agent's face. For forty minutes he thinks it's stupid. Then he does a fourth round, stands in a warehouse with his hands on his head, and finds his thing.

By the end of the first week he has told the dog. By the end of the second he has told the postman, a man in the Red Lion who said CrossFit, and his dentist, mid-filling, with the drill out. There is a SkiErg in the garage where the freezer was, paid for with the boiler money. There is a ring that measures the gaps between his heartbeats, a spreadsheet with a Feel column, six WhatsApp groups and a LinkedIn bio that says Hybrid Athlete. There is a coach called Dani who says one word a session, a very large man in a very small t-shirt who says nothing, and a congregation at ten to six in the dark that Mark insists, for four months, is not a church.

And there is Beth, his wife, a nurse, who did not tell him to do this, wants it on record, and has put a jar on the counter: a pound every time he says the word in the house. Their son Ollie is in charge of the jar. Their daughter Ava is under the table, listening, and has a question.

The third book in the Funny, You Never Mentioned It! series is a very British comedy about what happens when an ordinary man finds a sled, and the sled finds him back: the vocabulary, the money, the identity, the evangelism, and a wife standing outside a marquee wondering when she went outside.

For anyone who has done a Hyrox, is about to, or lives with someone who will not stop talking about theirs. The perfect gift for the athlete with a patch and the partner who keeps the jar.

It's basically a fun run with furniture. That's a pound.