Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

What a race with my nephew taught me about time, rules, effort, comparison, and love.

Sport is a metaphor for life. Or, for the Bantu-educated among us: sport is an analogy for life. A metaphor says one thing is another,  the Hyrox  race is life. An analogy explains one thing by way of another we already understand,  the Hyrox race behaves like life behaves. Either way, we were trained never to just watch the game. We were trained to ask what the game is teaching us about ourselves, our discipline, our leadership, our families. I  did Hyrox with my nephew,  my son in every way that matters and being a social and behavioural scientist, I could not simply participate. I had to observe. Somewhere between the running, the stations, the fatigue, the penalties and the cheering, the race became a laboratory. Eight stations and eight lessons came home with me.

1. Things Start On Time. Time Matters.
Hyrox starts when it says it starts  not when you feel ready, not when your green juice is finished. Miss the cut-off and you don’t race. That is a harsh little lesson dressed up as a logistics rule. Time is one of the few resources distributed with any equality. We don’t all start with the same money, the same schooling, the same networks, the same genetic hand. But the clock does not negotiate, and that is precisely why punctuality functions as a behavioural leveller: everyone, regardless of what they walked in with, is judged against the same second hand.
There is real science behind why a hard deadline changes behaviour. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work on the planning fallacy shows that people routinely underestimate how long tasks take when there is no external enforcement pulling them back to reality, we plan in the best case and live in the average case. A fixed start time forces the correction: it makes you plan backward from the gun rather than forward from your intentions. What time must I leave? What must I lay out the night before? That is an executive function, externally imposed.
Conscientiousness,  one of the Big Five personality traits (add IQ), and consistently one of the best predictors of job performance and life outcomes across decades of organisational psychology research,  is partly built from exactly this kind of small, repeated, time-respecting behaviour. The downside is real too: rigid systems that show no proportionality for circumstances genuinely outside someone’s control stop building trust and start building resentment. The lesson isn’t “latecomers are bad people.” It’s that shared systems collapse the moment enough people decide time is optional.

2. There Are Rules. They Must Be Obeyed.
Hyrox has rules, and it has officials whose entire purpose is making sure you follow them. Some looked ready to disqualify you for breathing wrong. Others coached you through the movement first and penalised only when you ignored the correction. That difference is not cosmetic,  it is the difference between two ways of holding power.
Tom Tyler’s decades of research on procedural justice, much of it built on interviews with people who had direct contact with police and courts, found something counter-intuitive: people’s willingness to comply with authority and accept an unfavourable outcome depends far less on the outcome itself than on whether they believe the process that produced it was fair. Being heard, treated with respect, and judged by a consistent standard predicts legitimacy and compliance better than the verdict does. People obey rules they believe are applied fairly, even against them. They resist rules, however correct, applied by someone they believe is arbitrary.
Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning work on managing shared resources found the same pattern at community scale: groups that govern common resources sustainably almost always have clear rules, graduated sanctions, and critically, mechanisms for the people affected to have a say in how those rules are enforced. Remove enforcement and the incentive to free-ride grows until the system degrades. Enforce without proportionality and the group stops trusting the system enough to police itself. Good systems have rules. Great systems have rules plus judgement in how they’re applied.

3. The Look Does Not Always Equal the Performance.
Some competitors were built like the cover of a fitness magazine. Others looked like the invitation arrived two days earlier. When the gun went, several of the second group beat several of the first. This is not a hot take,  it is a measurable finding. There is a well-documented cognitive shortcut behind why we default to reading fitness off a physique: the halo effect, first described by psychologist Edward Thorndike and later extended by Karen Dion, Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster into the “what is beautiful is good” literature, we unconsciously assume that a person who looks the part in one dimension (aesthetics) must also excel in unrelated dimensions (competence, discipline, performance). It is a fast, frequently wrong heuristic.
And the corrective evidence is specific. Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and colleagues ran the most rigorous meta-analyses to date on deliberate practice and performance. Across sport specifically, accumulated deliberate practice explained about 18% of the variance in performance,  meaningful, but leaving the large majority of the difference between competitors unexplained by hours logged alone. Their 2016 follow-up found something sharper still: among elite-level performers specifically, deliberate practice explained only about 1% of the variance,  at the top, the training-hours story runs almost entirely out of explanatory power, and other factors (physiology, technique, psychological regulation, circumstance) take over.
So both instincts in the room were half right and half wrong. The instinct to distrust appearance as a proxy for capability is well founded. The instinct to think preparation doesn’t matter is not deliberate, structured training remains one of the larger single factors we can actually control, even if it isn’t the whole story.

4. Run Your Own Hyrox.
Build your race around watching the runner beside you, and you will falter. Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, one of social psychology’s oldest and most replicated findings, holds that people evaluate their own abilities largely by comparing themselves to others rather than against an objective standard and that upward comparisons (against people who appear to be doing better) reliably produce anxiety and diminished self-evaluation, even when the comparison target’s actual circumstances are invisible to you.
More recent research on social media use,  including work by Jasmine Fardouly and colleagues on appearance comparison,  extends the same finding into the feed: constant exposure to curated highlight reels measurably worsens mood and self-assessment, precisely because the viewer has no access to the input side of what they’re comparing against,  the sleep, the genetics, the money, the steroids, the creatine, the childhood, the private cost. You are always comparing your behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel, and the maths is rigged before you start.

5. Alone Faster, Together Further and More Memorable.
For twenty years I did most sporting events alone, no family, no one in the stands. There is a discipline to that. But today I did Hyrox with my nephew, and my family came to cheer. The texture of the entire day changed. There is real evidence for why shared physical struggle bonds people more than solitary struggle. A 2014 study by Brock Bastian, Jolanda Jetten and Laura Ferris found that people who underwent a painful, effortful shared task together,  not simply doing the same task alone,  reported significantly higher feelings of bonding and cooperation with their group afterwards than those who did an easy task together. The exertion itself, shared and witnessed, appears to be part of the glue.
Separately, the social-support literature in health psychology,  going back to landmark work by James House and later Sheldon Cohen on stress-buffering,  consistently finds that people with visible, present social support report lower perceived exertion and better physiological stress responses under acute strain than people facing the same strain alone. Cheering is not sentimental decoration. There is a measurable physiological reason it makes the same distance feel shorter.
A personal best lives on a stopwatch. A memory lives in people  and outlives the stopwatch by decades.

6. Take Your Child With You.
This lesson grew large enough to need its own piece,  the grant-versus-ticket-price math, the informal count of parents at soccer versus rugby matches, and the full #TakeYourChild campaign playbook from African Men Care live in last week’s post, “The Gladiators for the Have Lots.” The short version stands on its own here: take the child in your life,  son, daughter, nephew, niece, the neighbour’s kid nobody else is taking anywhere,  into the rooms you love. Once a month, minimum. Phone away while you’re there. Attention is the highest form of love.

7. Be Communal, Not an Asshole.
Cheer others up. Stop for the person struggling. Don’t be the Pharaoh or the priest in the parable who crosses to the other side of the road.
The uncomfortable research here is the bystander effect, first documented by John Darley and Bibb Latané after the Kitty Genovese case: the more people present at a scene of need, the less likely any single one of them is to help, because responsibility diffuses across the crowd, everyone assumes someone else will act. An endurance race is, structurally, the opposite condition: it is full of people, but the norm is explicitly pro-social, which is precisely why it produces so many small, unscripted acts of strangers stopping for strangers. C. Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism research adds the mechanism,  feeling empathic concern for someone in difficulty, rather than merely noticing their difficulty, is what predicts whether a bystander actually intervenes. Noticing is not enough. Cognitively feeling with them is what moves your feet.

8. Effort Matters.  Yet Effort Alone Is Not Enough.
My nephew reminded me to live up to my own name. Mzamo means try,  try harder, try again. At stage eight, fifty squats deep with fifty still to go and a 6kg ball getting heavier by the rep, he said one word: effort.
Angela Duckworth’s research on grit,  perseverance and sustained passion toward long-term goals,  found it predicts achievement across contexts ranging from military academy retention to spelling-bee performance, independent of talent. But the corrective is important too: Carol Dweck’s growth-mindset research, once treated as a near-universal fix, was tested at scale in a 2019 large national study led by David Yeager and found real but modest effects, concentrated mainly among lower-achieving students and dependent heavily on how the mindset message was delivered. Belief in effort is not a substitute for technique, pacing or coaching,  the same Macnamara findings from lesson three apply here too. Effort is necessary. It was never sufficient on its own.

EFFORT + TECHNIQUE, NOT EFFORT ALONE
Hard work without technique is exhaustion.
Technique without hard work is unused potential.
The two together are the only place performance actually lives.

Closing
None of this required Hyrox specifically. It required showing up, on time, inside a system with rules, next to people whose appearance told me nothing reliable about their capability, running a race that was mine and not anyone else’s, with people who loved me in the stands, trying not to be an asshole along the way, and putting in effort I could not fake my way around. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,  a person is a person through other people. My nephew reminded me of that at stage eight, when I needed reminding most.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.