From Marathons to HYROX: What Are Executives Performing?
Lately my feed has been flooded with HYROX. Race after race in Hong Kong and Shanghai, finish-line photo after finish-line photo. Fitness influencers and content creators are all over it, which makes sense. Missing a trending moment is a dereliction of their job.
What is worth discussing is a different and very large group of participants: corporate executives.
The number of executives in my network doing HYROX has grown large enough to be a phenomenon. Some of them genuinely love the sport. But for another group, participating in HYROX has little to do with the sport itself.
I can say this with some confidence, because years ago, when marathons were at their peak, more than one executive told me privately: I don’t actually want to run, but I have to. I have to present myself as someone bursting with energy, or it undermines how I lead my team day to day. And so executives flocked to marathons. The medals went up one by one, the captions without exception about perseverance, about pushing past limits.
There is another motif with a long lineage: sleeping little. “I only sleep four hours a night.” “The city at 4 a.m.” This template of executive narrative has survived to this day, and some add one more line: I have more energy after training, I work more efficiently.
Today’s HYROX wave is almost identical to the marathon era. The form changes, the core does not: using the body’s extreme performance to vouch for one’s leadership.
After much thought, here is what I want to say to those executives running and training against their own will: you do not need to project total energy and physical prowess to look like an executive. The standard for what an “executive” looks like is something you invented in your own head, not something the world imposed on you.
What is the fatal flaw in the logic of this executive narrative?
Start with sleep. Chronically sleeping four hours a night damages cognition, judgment, and emotional stability. The science on this is solid and not up for debate. The “short-sleep elite” is an act of self-mythologizing, not a capability worth emulating. A leader who needs “I sleep less than you” to establish authority is not revealing his energy. He is revealing a liability in his judgment.
Now the “more energy after training” claim. This one needs to be taken apart. Regular moderate exercise does improve energy, mood, and sleep quality. But the version executives tell is different. Their version says: I just finished a high-intensity session and went straight back to full-throttle work, with no recovery needed. What this violates is not “whether exercise works.” It violates a basic fact: after high-intensity training the body needs to recover, and performance drops during recovery.
Treating “I can run nonstop, I don’t need recovery” as a badge of honor is not strength. It is the denial of a physiological fact. Genuinely high-level athletes understand the importance of recovery. Only people performing exercise insist they don’t need it.
Why has this narrative template gone global?
Why do so many executives, in China and abroad alike, need a race, a medal, and a caption about four hours of sleep?
My read is this: because leadership reveals itself too slowly, and in ways that are not direct enough.
Whether an executive is any good comes down to the quality of their judgment, the outcomes of their decisions, whether the organization got better in their hands, whether talent stayed. These signals share one trait: they are slow, slow enough to take months, quarters, even years to surface. And they are indirect. You cannot turn them into a photo grid, cannot attach a caption and post tonight to collect likes by morning.
People need immediate feedback to affirm themselves, and executives are no exception. He too tends to want constant, ideally daily, confirmation that “I deserve this seat.” But the real evidence of leadership cannot supply that immediate feedback, so physical performance gets recruited as a substitute metric. It is fast, it is visible, it is quantifiable.
HYROX’s product design fits this psychological need seamlessly: a standardized course, a global leaderboard, split times to the second, a finisher’s badge. What it sells was never just a race. It sells a credential that is immediate, displayable, and comparable.
A distorted form of KPI thinking
Go one layer deeper and this stops being as simple as “finding a substitute.”
An executive who spends years managing an organization through quantifiable metrics will, over time, unconsciously apply the same logic to himself. Organizational achievement is a slow variable that offers no immediate confirmation, so he needs a metric that produces a score right now to confirm he is still in control. Physical performance is exactly such a metric: it has numbers, it has rankings, it has deadlines.
This is the distortion of KPI thinking. It turns from a tool for managing an organization into a way for the manager to affirm his own worth. When the real evidence of leadership refuses to settle, distorted KPI thinking drives him to find something in his life that can settle, and to treat it as proof that “I’ve still got it.”
So flocking to HYROX is not executive vanity. A formidable physical performance is, at bottom, a counterfeit currency of leadership: same face value, but it cannot be redeemed.
Closing
If reading this far makes you uncomfortable, I suggest a question to check yourself: if this race had no finisher’s certificate, no ranking, and no one would ever see your result, would you still enter?
That question helps you separate out your original motive.
Leadership that is genuinely secure does not need the body’s extreme performance to vouch for it. It reveals itself slowly, perhaps invisibly, but it is the real thing. A person who needs a flashy performance of physical markers to demonstrate his “leadership” is not lacking fitness. He is lacking confidence in that slow, even invisible, leadership of his own.
The performance of physical markers grows more popular not because executives grow more vain, but because in the age of KPIs we have less and less patience to wait for the real evidence of leadership.