CHAPTER 8
Work and Working Out

Most people opt to relax the day before they start their new job as president of a company. Others choose to compete in an Ironman.

Mike Zafirovski, then the president of Motorola’s handset division, was driving with his family to O’Hare Airport in Chicago in the spring of 2002. It was a Thursday and they were bound for Lake Placid, New York, excited for Zafirovski’s long-planned Ironman debut. He was participating under the auspices of CEO Challenges, a race-within-a-race concept Ironman was launching at the event. As a top executive, Zafirovski was getting white-glove treatment for him and his family—intimate dinners with top athletes as speakers, training advice, special viewing areas along the course for his wife and kids.

They were almost to O’Hare when Zafirovski’s boss, Christopher Galvin, the CEO of Motorola, called. “I need you to come see me,” Galvin said. Zafirovski reminded him that he was on the way to Lake Placid. Galvin himself had been among those who’d donated thousands of dollars to the charity Zafirovski was racing for. He asked if they could just talk on the phone. Galvin was undeterred. Zafirovski took him off speakerphone and picked up the handset; this wasn’t typical Galvin, with whom Zafirovski had a friendly relationship. “Please come to the office,” he said. Zafirovski turned around, dropped his family off and headed for Motorola’s suburban Chicago headquarters.

He arrived and headed through the executive suite, passing his friend and Motorola president Ed Breen along the way. The two men briefly greeted each other. Zafirovski had taken himself out of contention for the president’s job less than a year earlier, which Breen eventually got. He wanted to keep working on Motorola’s flagship handset business, which was struggling against larger rival Nokia.

Inside Galvin’s office, the CEO (and grandson of Motorola’s co-founder) told Zafirovski that Tyco, the giant conglomerate, would announce that afternoon that Breen was its new CEO. Zafirovski was now taking the president’s job—and was scheduled to be at a press conference for the following day. Instead of relaxing with his family and prepping his mind and body for the looming Ironman, Zafirovski stayed in Chicago to address reporters, then flew to Lake Placid Friday night.

The timing was more challenging owing to Motorola’s scheduled analyst meeting the following week. On Tuesday, several hundred analysts and investors would meet at Motorola headquarters for presentations from senior management. Zafirovski had already prepared his group’s remarks—a joint effort involving a half dozen other executives to lay out the latest in handsets. Now Galvin asked if he’d be comfortable giving Breen’s portion, an overarching kick-off speech to set the tone for the conference. Zafirovski knew it was important for his own credibility in his new job, and for investors’ confidence in Motorola’s future, that he deliver a compelling speech.

Saturday, the day before the Ironman, Zafirovski holed up in his hotel room going over notes and writing his presentation. He made it to the CEO Challenges team dinner with his family and then went to bed. Two major milestone events—ascending to the presidency of a global corporation, and completing an Ironman—were happening more or less simultaneously.

Skipping the Ironman wasn’t an option for him. “If you get that close and don’t do it, you’ll probably never do it,” he says, more than a decade removed from that weekend. He finished in 13:38 and hung around for a Chicago-based friend who came in after him. The pair took off from Lake Placid at 1 a.m. and got home at 3 a.m., giving Zafirovski little sleep before his 8 a.m. rehearsal. He pushed through the day, greeting the company’s analysts at a cocktail party that evening. “I felt great,” he says. “But walking up and down stairs was challenging.”

Zafirovski embodies a broad and deepening trend, where the business world—from the executive ranks to the rank and file—fuels the business of mind and body. Fitness junkie CEOs, along with corporate programs designed to create healthier, more productive, and happier employees have pushed fitness deep into our workaday lives, as a perk, a status symbol, or a way to get ahead with the boss.

Zafirovski was at the starting line in part because a guy who worked for him effectively dared him to. At Motorola’s analyst meeting in 2001, he led a group run in the baking Chicago summer heat. Even those desperately trying to impress the boss dropped out, while Zafirovski finished seven miles. He took pride, and still does, in his athleticism, which dates back to his childhood in Macedonia, where he was as standout soccer player and accomplished swimmer. He ran his first marathon with little training, vowing to do at least one each decade; he’s completed more than 10.

An email from an engineer who worked for him proposed that Zafirovski train for an Ironman, an idea Zafirovski dismissed almost immediately. “But he was persistent,” Zafirovski says, and continued to invite him out for training runs, making the case over the course of months. Zafirovski finally relented, and found out that there was a new program for top executives at the Lake Placid Ironman.

CEO Challenges was the brainchild of Ted Kennedy, then an executive at World Triathlon Corp. (WTC), which owns and produces the Ironman series. He came up with the idea after learning that almost 1 in 10 (8 percent) of the participants in the 2001 Lake Placid event were CEOs or equivalent (i.e., running major divisions at large companies or senior partners in professional firms).1

Kennedy’s notion was that Ironman could recruit even more high-level executives through a white-glove program that mirrored a CEO’s life in his or her day job—personalized training programs, special transportation, intimate dinners with famous athletes, and networking with their peers, among other perks.

With Ironman’s blessing, Kennedy sent out paper invitations—this was 2001 after all—to the qualifying participants, offering the added perks, for an added cost.

(Kennedy says he mispriced it the first year, charging $3,500 to the CEOs; that wasn’t a meaningful premium given the package included the $750 entry fee, several nights at a five-star hotel adjacent to the start and finish line, transportation, and meals. In later years, participants paid $5,500.)

Kennedy figured he might get half a dozen CEOs to sign up, a good beta test. He got 15, including Zafirovski.

Kennedy’s CEO Challenges caters directly to those executives, notably through an annual competition that determines who is the World’s Fittest CEO. The company is now a division of Life Time Fitness, a publicly traded company based in Minnesota that runs a chain of fitness centers, as well as races. Part of its portfolio is the Leadville 100, a famously grueling endurance race held in Colorado and memorialized in the book Born to Run.

Membership in the CEO Challenges network is limited to those who head companies with at least $1 million in annual revenue, giving Kennedy a broad target market. The mean size of companies represented is $20 million in sales. The other stats indicate at least a few massive companies are in the mix: the total annual revenue represented by competitors is $1.9 trillion, and the average sized company is $3.2 billion.

CEO Challenges aims to blend the trappings of the CEO life with the rigors of competition that are a natural extension of many chief executives’ personalities. While competing in an Ironman or similar endurance race already is something of an exclusive experience, CEO Challenges creates an even more VIP experience, setting up meet-and-greets with athletes and rolling everything into a single price. Portions of that fee go to charity, primarily the Challenged Athletes Foundation.

For Ironman, it was an idea steeped in enlightened self-interest from a sponsorship perspective: CEOs who were into the idea of endurance sports were more likely to instruct their marketing division to sign up as sponsors. “If a CEO is passionate about a sport, that’s typically the sport the company invests in,” Kennedy says.

After the surprising turnout the first year, the numbers rose, for a time. The following years drew 25 and 35, respectively. He opted at that point to cap it at 30 in order to ensure a high level of service for those who participated.

The program appealed to CEOs on a number of levels, he says. First, it was a way for a naturally hypercompetitive set to differentiate themselves, especially as endurance sports hit the mainstream in a major way. “By 2000, Betty in accounting had done a marathon,” Kennedy says. “So CEOs say, ‘You think a marathon is tough, try an Ironman.’”

And CEOs, like all of us, like to be around their peers. CEO Challenges, by definition, was exclusive and the competitors found themselves sweating, and networking, with people with similar day-to-day lives. “It’s a race against people who had to travel all over the place, attend board meetings, and take care of their families,” Kennedy says.

The group went to great lengths to keep those often-ignored families happy, too. Already away from home a lot, the sell for a CEO at home got easier when they told their families they too would get high-end treatment, with fancy meals and amenities. Staff would whisk them to the best viewing points. Triathlete widows and widowers, and restless kids, liked that treatment.

The key for Kennedy was putting himself in his customers’ mindset, where money is not an obstacle. He recruited star endurance athletes like Paul Newby-Fraser for kick off dinners and brought in exercise psychologists to give advice.

In 2005, Kennedy spun CEO Challenges out of Ironman as a separate company. The Ironman events remained the core offering, with Kennedy’s new outfit running the program as an outside contractor. He says WTC surprised him in 2008 by not renewing that contract, opting to run its own program for CEOs, in house.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for someone in the business of CEOs, a fact underlined at one of Kennedy’s first races as an independent producer. He managed to recruit AIG, the global insurance and financial services firm, as his title sponsor and one of the company’s senior executives was competing in a half Ironman-distance race outside of Toronto. It was September, 14, 2008.

He showed up for the race distracted, and Kennedy, assuming it was pre-race anxiety, assured him that he was well-trained and prepared for the event. He handed Kennedy two mobile devices to hold during the race, noting that he’d like to get them back as soon as he crossed the finish line.

The race itself was miserable, raining throughout, Kennedy recalls. The executive endured three flat tires during the bike portion, but finally crossed the finish line. Kennedy delivered the devices. Glancing at them, he told Kennedy he needed get back to New York immediately. Kennedy reminded him of the dinner that night, with then-Ironman world champion Craig Alexander.

“I can’t stay,” he said, according to Kennedy. “You’ll read about why in the papers tomorrow.”

On September 16, AIG agreed to what eventually totaled a record $182 billion bailout, one move in a series of devastating actions involving Wall Street and the U.S. government that sent the country and world into crisis.

In the teeth of the worst recession since the Great Depression, top executives shunned extracurricular activities. Not only were CEOs focused on running their businesses, anything that brought attention to a chief executive—especially a seemingly selfish, seemingly indulgent activity like an endurance race—was highly unpopular.

“It was probably the worst time in modern history to be in the ‘Hey look at me, I’m a CEO’ business,” Kennedy says. While Ironman races dipped slightly in participation, Kennedy’s company was on the verge of extinction.

What saved him was a pair of events for the Young Presidents Organization, which asked Kennedy to organize mini-endurance events for its retreats. Through the recession, he hunted for new races to drop the CEO Challenges concept into, like Escape from Alcatraz and a cycling event with well-known cyclist George Hincapie.

He keyed in on the Leadville 100, which brought him to Life Time in 2010 for a discussion. Two years of on-again, off-again conversations with the company ensued. Early on, Kennedy says, there wasn’t much to sell. Without Ironman, he was rebuilding, and endurance races were recovering from the broader economic hit, with CEOs slowly emerging from hiding.

Now he has access to 10 Life Time salespeople, and a marketing group. Life Time has a portfolio of more than 60 races that Kennedy can consider adding his concept to. There are also non–Life Time events like Spartan Race, where Kennedy created a partnership for his clients who are looking for something new and different. The inclusion within the Life Time family gives Kennedy access to an even broader population of top executives looking to better themselves and find kindred spirits who are keen on demonstrating high performance across all aspects of their lives.

Kennedy’s original theory is more than intact—anecdotally, the top jobs at companies across industries are held by men and women who take their bodies and minds seriously, favoring a look that’s more slim suits with a green juice over double-pleats with a cigar and Scotch. Corporate America has largely left behind the steakhouse and the golf course as bastions of its top executives.

Participating in races and other public events—even just working out regularly at the company gym—allows chieftains to satisfy their own needs to relieve stress and maintain a holistically healthy lifestyle while also modeling that behavior for the workforce. The boss sets the tone, in the office and beyond. Employees take their cues on everything from dress code (see Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg for their influence on what to wear to work) to management styles (aggressive screamers tend to set a certain tone). So the notion of the CEO as a serious athlete has implications for how employees see a particular boss, as well as how those employees see fitness in their own day-to-day lives.

Part of it is simply humanizing. Evidence that a big boss has ground out a marathon or triathlon puts them on something of a level playing field with an underling who has similar interests. Maybe more importantly, there’s a sense of implicit permission to indulge, as it were, in such activities outside of work. That is, if a CEO is making the time to fit in a run or a swim before or after work, I might feel better about doing the same.

With apologies to supply-side economists, we might refer to it as trickle-down fitness, whereby the wealthiest and most successful choose to pursue such activities, setting health and wellness as a kind of status symbol. Now, it becomes cool to spend your nonworking time riding a bike or hitting the gym rather than indulging in less healthy activities.

At more and more companies, the leader is blurring the lines between work and workout into nonexistence. The implications are vast, as they both join and influence the rank and file, broadening the fitness economy audience.

Strauss Zelnick is a scion of the family that ran Twentieth Century Fox, where he once served as chief operating officer. He’s the chairman of the video game company Take-Two Interactive and runs an eponymous media-focused private equity firm, Zelnick Media Capital. The best way to get to Zelnick is to meet him for a workout. He tells his staff, “You can have an hour with me anytime you want,” provided you’re willing to spend that hour on an adjacent workout machine or in some sort of state of exercise.

Zelnick stops short of requiring his staff to work out, but it’s hard to see how someone could walk around his office with a doughnut in each hand. “It’s a powerful message when the boss and others look pretty good,” he says. Encouraged to do so—“there are no demerits for leaving the office for exercise”—people tend to take advantage of it, and end up transforming themselves.

Like many educated adults looking to stay in shape, Zelnick started as a runner. Around 2000, his regular running partner, complaining about his knees, convinced him to buy a bike. A skeptical Zelnick plunked down $3,000, an amount that made him to decide to put it to use. He took immediately to cycling, mainly because he was able to actually have a conversation with his buddy.

A few years later, Zelnick’s wife suggested, to his surprise, that he go see her trainer. “She told me, ‘For a guy who spends a lot of time in the gym, you don’t look so good.’” That caught his attention. Like many in finance and other highly competitive, measurement-happy industries, he threw himself into the data, making his body his project.

He describes a typical week, which spans eight to eleven workouts, including weights, cardio, hot yoga, running, cycling, and CrossFit. In season, he skis. (He aims to take one full rest day a week, but concedes, “I don’t always.”)

Several days a week, he convenes what he calls #TheProgram, a group that comprises 60 people and some portion gathers 4 times a week at 6 a.m. He foots the bill for everyone, roughly $2,000 a month for various classes at Equinox. The group even has its own Instagram account (@theprogram_nyc).

For him, it’s an investment that drives his competitive self, and pushes his sensibilities to a much younger mindset. “I genuinely feel 25 years old,” he says. “Because I feel like that, I’m inclined to think like I’m 25. . . . It drives my investment philosophy.”

Marrying what once were considered outside interests with day-to-day business life has the potential to further push fitness into our collective consciousness, especially if those practitioners—as Strauss clearly can—demonstrate how those activities accrue to their own career development, and bottom line. The linking of outside interests and work are a meaningful shift in the way we work, and reflect how both technology and our need for community have infiltrated our work lives, says Henry Albrecht.

Albrecht runs a company called Limeade, a company based near Seattle that has almost 200 employees. A former product guy at the software company Intuit, he started Limeade back in 2006. Its goals are lofty, and built around how companies can better engage their employees to make them healthier and ultimately more productive.

His professional and personal goals collide happily all the time. Ten days before we connected on the phone, he ran his first-ever mud race, with his wife and two children, then 7 and 13 years old. “We live and work in these beautiful glass towers with the Internet connected at all times,” he says. “There’s something really awesome looking at your wife and kids covered in mud. There’s something primal.”

Unlike some of his fellow CEOs, he himself isn’t an endurance sports junkie; he prefers to play recreational basketball. At an annual tournament near Seattle called Hoopfest, his team was one of hundreds competing on what ultimately was a sprawl of pick-up basketball games. “It’s a weird and awesome spectacle,” he says.

He says Limeade has “a very disproportionate amount of marathoners, half marathoners, and ex-jocks. Those are people you can rely on to not let you down. They’re not going to give up easily.” His colleagues reflect their customers, many of which are run by former athletes and want that ethos embedded in their companies.

“There’s the idea of the corporate athlete,” Albrecht says. “The higher up you go, you hear it more. More of those people have addressed issues of stress and mood balance in a conscious way. They have high emotional quotients.”

Millennial expert Nadira Hira says her generation’s tendency to blend their work and social lives, as well as what they expect work to be, means a largely different approach.

“When you’re going to work, you don’t want to feel this is something soul-killing,” she says. “You’re starting from a place where you want to be able to connect with people, yourself, and your work, meaningfully. Millennials all look at work that way, whether it’s at the juice shop or in finance.”

While it’s easy to roll your eyes at team-building exercises, Limeade found that companies that do nonwork activities with their fellow employees perform at a higher level, and opportunities around fitness abound. “People feel an emotional connection to work,” Albrecht says. “The definition of employee engagement is people who in the absence of extra pay will go the extra mile.”

Sometimes literally. Albrecht has seen events like walking challenges where employees sign up to compete with one another for prizes. Such activities ultimately have external effects that help the company’s public image and recruit people who are drawn to that sort of culture. “Inside the company, it builds teamwork, connections to the community,” Albrecht says. “It’s a talent optimization and retention strategy, but it’s also a marketing strategy for the brand. Compensation and other things may be roughly similar, but only one of the employers you’re looking at is super-embedded in this community.”

With that in mind, it’s getting rarer to see a company of any meaningful size that doesn’t have some sort of wellness program with a fitness component. Companies, fueled by enlightened self-interest with a strong sense of the bottom line, are pushing fitness and wellness programs down through the ranks.

For two nights every June in midtown Manhattan, the end-of-day rush hour has a different feel. While suited commuters head south down Park Avenue toward Grand Central, packs of bankers from brand-name banks and investment houses move toward Central Park, for an annual event called the JPMorgan Chase Corporate Challenge.

The Corporate Challenge dates all the way back to 1977, when New York Road Runners created the run in its home city, pitting teams from local companies against one another. By 2014, it had blossomed into an event involving more than a quarter-million people representing more than 8,000 companies. The world championships, featuring top finishers from around the world, took place in London in October.

Massive events like the Corporate Challenge point toward a larger trend of company-directed or at least company-encouraged, fitness and wellness. From 2009 to 2014, the average amount of incentives offered by companies, on a per employee basis, more than doubled to $594, according to a study conducted by Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health.2

A Harvard Business Review study mapped corporate wellness to profits in 2010. The piece noted that healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson saved $250 million in healthcare costs over a decade. Sliced a different way, the company got $2.71 back for every dollar spent on such programs. The authors point to both higher profits due to better-managed healthcare costs—healthy employees cost you less—as well as the tendency for healthier employees to be happier in their jobs. Effective health and wellness programs led to voluntary attrition rates of 9 percent versus 15 percent with ineffective programs.3

That finding points to a different aspect of the equation, beyond lower healthcare bills. There’s recent science indicating that healthier employees not only show up more regularly, but perform better, as well.

In his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John J. Ratey cites a 2007 study around cognitive flexibility. The study, he wrote, compared participants’ ability to perform a mental exercise after half of them watched a movie and the other half ran on a treadmill. The results were stark, with runners performing the task better, and the movie-watchers staying the same. He writes: “Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs.”4

While CEOs influence their employees, there are certain corners of the business world that set the tone for the rest of us worker bees. In that regard, Wall Street and Silicon Valley stand out as leading indicators of future fitness trends. It’s no coincidence that both of these places are awash in technology, money, and ambition, making them the perfect petri dishes.

New York City plays a vital role in the American consciousness, regardless of whether folks outside of the city want to admit it. Trends in music, fashion, and food tend to incubate in Manhattan and its environs.

Fitness is no exception. Its surge in popularity fits in with New York’s ethos—a collection of relentless, enthusiastic, and competitive strivers from all walks of life, many of whom come from other places with the express intent of making it here. Ratey’s Spark research is relevant again in this context, given the popularity of endurance sports and fitness inside firms defined by their so-called intellectual capital.

Wall Street—broadly defined to include investment banks, trading desks, and various flavors of investment funds such as private equity and hedge funds—is a natural place to find the sort of competitive men and women (mostly men) for whom endurance sports can calm their anxious minds, cater to ample egos, and help ensure an appealing appearance. And Wall Street isn’t limited to New York City. Its influence and practice extends across major American cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta, as well as global capitals like London, Hong Kong, and Dubai, where brand-name firms and their offshoots have expanded.

For the hardcore, there’s the Wall Street Decathlon, an annual competition that pits the best athletes from various financial institutions against one another across 10 events. It’s covered by the likes of uber-blog Business Insider (which produced a slide show of the ripped bankers and traders under the headline “51 Wall Streeters Who Are Ridiculously Cut”) to Bloomberg, which assigned a reporter from the sports desk to cover it like any other major sporting event.5

Those guys are the extreme of the extreme. To a man, they were either collegiate or, in several cases, professional athletes. The pictures look like they were cut-and-pasted from a report on the NFL tryouts.

The less extreme, yet still dedicated to a crazy extent, are legion among banks and funds. Lincoln Ellis, an investor and founder of Astor Janssen Holdings, splits his time between New York and his native Chicago. He worked for a handful of financial services firms during a 20-year career, including Morgan Stanley, putting him in direct contact with like-minded amateur athletes.

He came to endurance sports early and recalls watching the iconic Ironman finish of Julie Ross in 1982, when she essentially crawled across the finish line. “The desire, grit, and sheer willpower to do this was fascinating,” he says. Three years later, a 15-year-old Ellis used his neighbor’s driver’s license to register for the Lighthouse Triathlon in Racine, Wisconsin. He placed second in the 16–19 age group.

During the next two decades, he dipped in and out of cycling and triathlons, completing his first Ironman in 2010 in Louisville, Kentucky (he’s since completed three more). He has also competed in numerous long bike races, including the 2014 Triple Bypass, a two-day event in Colorado that covers three separate passes in the Rocky Mountains, with 10,000 feet of total elevation gain. (For the advanced/crazy, there’s a Double Triple Bypass, where riders basically turn around and come back.)

By virtue of his Ironman training, Ellis is slender and earnest, a post-modern investor with a hint of hipster (I complimented his jeans one time and he conceded he bought them at Uniqlo, the Japanese discount apparel maker with a Fifth Avenue outpost; their jeans, he says, seemed to be made for the triathlete’s body—skinny, with pronounced quads). Over a series of (very healthy) lunches, phone calls, and emails, he lays out his insider’s view of the Wall Street/athlete archetype.

By Ellis’ reckoning, the wave of driven bankers, lawyers, and executives that descended on the cycling and triathlon world during the early part of the 2000s were drawn by the possibility to excel in something else they could manage. “I call them, as they are already known in other contexts, the Type As. There are a lot of these people who think they are, or want to be, ‘the ones in control,’” he writes to me one evening in an email. “This is a very task-driven, box-checking world where everything can be measured. They can be less-than-pleasant as training partners.”

Some of this group, he says, evolved into what Ellis called the Seekers, a category where he places himself. “They were probably Type As at one point, but really do the work for the spiritual fulfillment that comes out of accomplishing a physical feat. Make no mistake—there’s competition and gamesmanship and there’s an occasional geek-out around equipment and race times. But the point of all the time spent is much more a focus on the journey.”

The final group in Ellis’s architecture is the Groupies. He does not like them. “It’s great that the sport has more fans and participants but I must admit I find this population extremely confusing. How is it that you can go run 13 miles and then eat a stack of pancakes? Why are you drinking five nights a week and then trying to ‘weekend warrior’ your fitness? Commitment is commitment. This group can be, or appear to be, uncommitted.”

Herein lies one of the more interesting burgeoning conflicts of sorts, as these sports pivot into the mainstream. For a certain segment of the population, mass appeal signals that it’s time to find something else. Like the indie band that’s suddenly allowed its ad to be used in a car commercial, or the hot new restaurant that’s now gotten good notices in the Times, some of the more hard-core athletes are surrendering traditional endurance to the hoi polloi.

“I have to say I feel the tidal wave of endurance is receding,” Ellis writes. “The broadening of the base is now in place. I’m not sure where it goes from here, but it seems like a peak in the market to me.” Falling into his role as investor, he concluded, “Then again, I’m always bearish.”

Nowhere is the cool new thing more important than in the ecosystem of technology companies and the investors who love them. The trend is similarly, maybe even more powerfully, reflected in Silicon Valley, where many argue much of the nation’s real innovation happens. There’s arguably even more fertile ground for these sports coming to the fore, given the affinity high-tech companies have for recruiting and retaining employees by appealing to their whole selves, not just their brains.

Northern California also has a long history of appealing to the outdoorsy nature in all of us. It’s practically impossible to spend more than half an hour in the Bay Area’s natural areas and not want to take a hike, bike ride, or run.

Max Levchin, a founder and former CTO of PayPal, spoke at a Bloomberg technology conference in June 2014 about his own affinity for cycling and how it plays into his entrepreneurship and leadership. Levchin, still in his twenties, has embarked on a slew of post-PayPal projects. He’s working on a new consumer finance company called Affirm and another called Glow. He also serves as the chairman of Yelp and on the board of Yahoo! (His personal website is sparse, featuring only 13 lines of text, including the gentle warning: “You are welcome to contact me via whatever channel you like, but please do not be offended if I never respond, as I tend to be very busy.”6) Part of what keeps him busy is an intense cycling habit, where he rides with like-minded, successful entrepreneurs and investors.

For many executives, pursuing endurance sports is part innate competitiveness, with some ego and example-setting mixed in. Many profess their avocations proudly, through interviews and social media. John Legere, the CEO of T-Mobile USA, is an avid marathoner—and Tweeter. A healthy dose of his tweets are fitness-related. Other executives use the sharing features of the wearable fitness hardware like Fitbit and Jawbone to compete with one another, privately and publicly.

Beyond the formal competition is a subtler version, and in the Information Age, everyone’s personal best is only a few clicks away. Boston Marathoners have become accustomed to their at-work colleagues tracking them in real time during the race, held on a Monday. Having a near-stranger parrot back your splits is simultaneously flattering and slightly creepy.

Part of that familiarity speaks to the broader popularity Ellis referenced. With endurance sports no longer living solely in the realm of fitness nutjobs, an everyday colleague has a sense of what’s a respectable time, likely because they or a spouse have participated in a race, be it a 5-K, 10-K, or half marathon. Maybe they’ve sweated alongside other employees, at a nearby fitness boutique or on a company-sponsored team at a local race.

Companies in the business of fitness, like MindBody, are natural places to find an emphasis on pushing well-being and work together. The biggest provider of software used by studios to schedule classes, keep track of their members, and get paid, MindBody has from the start made sure its employees can take advantage of the types of services its own customers provide.

CEO Rick Stollmeyer knows that the movement is following all of us from home into the workplace and his fervor manifests itself in the work of his employees. In 2014, inspired in large part by the NBC hit show The Biggest Loser—the show’s host Alison Sweeney is an investor in MindBody—the company created a program for its employees to encourage a somewhat radical change in health. While a company like MindBody tends to draw a certain type of person—young and fit—not everyone looks and acts like they just showed up from yoga class—though, like an increasing number of companies, MindBody subsidizes health classes. Employees there get a debit card with $65 worth of use-it-or-lose it credit per month for boutique fitness sessions, or even spa treatments—given that some of the company’s clients are more traditional spas and salons.

He also realizes that part of what drives a fitness lifestyle is subtle, or not so subtle, peer pressure. That is, if a coworker is chatting/bragging about her killer spin class or great run over the weekend, we’re at least slightly more likely to entertain the idea of doing something active, assuming we have the ability and basic desire to do so.

For its version of The Biggest Loser (while a fan of the show, Stollmeyer concedes to not loving the name, especially for corporate team-building purposes so he called it MindBody Evolve), MindBody solicited applications for a 90-day intensive regimen of workouts and, more importantly, tracking. Each of the 65 participants in the original cohort in early 2014 were given a Fitbit or similar tracking device and submitted to regular weigh-ins and checkups. Stollmeyer’s team was able to monitor and calculate progress, including hundreds of thousands of steps taken, and dozens of pounds lost.

What surprised even him, he says, was the qualitative change, pivoting back to the gentle and effective implicit peer pressure, or encouragement. “They have a glow in their face, a spring in their step,” he says. “The thing that’s hard to quantify is their effect on everyone else.”

At the end of 2014, MindBody was monitoring its second 90-day group, with similar results. And while there was clearly a benefit to his own company’s morale and culture—a culture where the core values are printed everywhere, including the website—he was also using his employees as a test kitchen of sorts for a new product. He hoped to use the experiment to hone a concept MindBody could eventually sell to other companies, who could launch their own 90-day programs for their own employees.

It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley has embraced all these efforts, and hard. The workers’ paradises at companies like Facebook and Google go to extreme lengths to focus on the whole employee. Free, (mostly) healthy food, nap rooms, and state-of-the-art gyms all encourage the rank-and-file to take care of their bodies in ways very few companies did in past generations. The subsidized cafeterias, once seen as a major perk, have given way to stocked cafes and free massages.

Our jobs continue to push themselves deeper into our social lives. Technology allows (or demands) constant access to email, and therefore work. For many of us, it’s routine to engage in some form of work communication from the moment we wake up until the moment we fall asleep.

This is an important development, as it radically changes our relationships with each other, and even with our own minds and bodies. As professor Anne Bardoel writes, “On the football field, the boundary marks the edge of the field. Inside the boundary, the ball is in play; beyond the boundary it is out of play. The trouble with the boundary between work and personal lives is that it is very permeable . . . [W]orkplaces are greedy institutions and technology has allowed them by stealth to expand the boundary line and encroach on our personal lives.”7

This owes largely to the popularity of smartphones, our constant companions. While the aforementioned stalking happens, we’re often offering that information to the world voluntarily. Through social media—Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram posts from the finish line—we’re putting a lot more of ourselves out there.

Amid this flow of personal, even intimate, information to a broad scope of people, who we choose to spend time with, and how, has also changed. A 2014 survey conducted by LinkedIn—a company with deep insights into all of our work habits, especially from a social media and networking perspective, came up with some fascinating results. Millennials especially make fewer distinctions between friends at and outside of work, and are more likely to talk about personal issues and details with colleagues than members of older generations. The survey found that Millennials placed heavy emphasis on at-work friendships (57 percent said it made them feel happy) and, importantly, three out of five cited “socializing in-person” with colleagues as contributing positively to their work environment. Only half of Baby Boomers felt the same way.8

CEOs have a sense of that, and are increasingly looking for ways to engage their employees.

Skullcandy CEO Hoby Darling likes to declare Powder Days and join his employees on the slopes near the company’s Park City, Utah headquarters. Like Zelnick, the best way to get a one-on-one meeting with Darling is to ask him to go to the gym, or for a run.

One of Skullcandy’s advantages is its headquarters, home to former Olympic skiing venues and the annual Sundance Film Festival. The company sells headphones and speakers to the younger, hipper set. Darling, a former Nike executive, landed the top job at Skullcandy in part based on his ideas about rejuvenating the company’s culture. A key part of his solution: employees and executives need to work out more, and together.

The average age of a Skullcandy employee is 27. Working and sweating together promotes a level of collegiality and intimacy that’s appealing to a young demographic already comfortable with sharing—in conversation and online—pretty much everything about their lives. As Darling got to know his employees outside of the office, it led to marked changes at work, even in the physical layout. He ditched private offices in favor of an open floor plan, a move he said increased the speed of decision making because he could just turn his chair or pop up and talk across the desk. Fewer meetings also mean more time to ski, bike, or run.

While Darling and Zelnick’s proto-fitness version of a CEO man feels extreme, the shift toward a more fitness-oriented lifestyle and workplace has infiltrated a business class that once socialized over Scotches and steaks, not yoga mats and elliptical machines. The speed of modern life has also made that last mostly male bastion of networking—the golf course—a lot less popular.

As golf’s popularity fades, broadly and among the business set, a number of sports and activities are vying to become the new golf. On the eve of the 2014 PGA Championship, Bloomberg News reporters Michael Buteau and Eben Novy-Williams wrote a story with the headline “Golfers Swap Spikes for Sneakers in Endurance Sports Boom.”9

The number of regular golfers fell every year from 2003 onward. In 2013, the sport saw a 19 percent drop, to 24.7 million players.10 A portion of those ex-duffers were trading in clubs for bikes and running shoes.

That’s in part because the bosses—like Zafirovski, Zelnick, Darling, and Albrecht—either quit the game, or never took it up to begin with. Business and networking happens where people actually spend time. Thus, more networking happens in the SoulCycles and yoga studios and on bike rides.

More than one journalist has referred to it as sweatworking. Cringe-inducing terminology aside, the practice is an antidote to the breakfast, lunch, drinks, and dinner circuit that historically defined many jobs, especially those that involve face-to-face interaction with customers. Side-by-side downward dog poses do force a level of intimacy that breaking bread doesn’t. “For some reason it lets you break down barriers you wouldn’t be able to if you were just sitting next to someone at a bar,” Tracy Roemer, a co-owner of a Chicago boutique fitness studio called Shred415 told Crain’s Chicago Business. “You sweat and your defense mechanisms come down.”11

And it doesn’t even have to be that extreme. A burgeoning trend is the walking meeting, a practice observed most notably by Facebook founder and CEO Zuckerberg—along with many others. Nilofer Merchant, an author and executive credited with launching more than 100 products, made a passionate case for meeting while walking or hiking in the Harvard Business Review in early 2013, under the headline “Sitting is the Smoking of Our Generation.”

“When you step outside, you give yourself over to nature, respecting its cycles and unpredictability,” she writes. “It keeps me more awake to what is happening around me by experiencing the extreme heats of summer, or the frigid power of winter.”12

Merchant also said it helped her solve the problem of trading productivity for exercise because she can effectively combine the two. She approaches scheduling them with a business-like rigor, blocking off windows for walking meetings before sitting meetings. The walking meetings set a different tone. It’s much harder to check one’s mobile device and even the different proximity has an effect. “I can actually listen better when I am walking next to someone than when I’m across from them in some coffee shop,” she writes. “There’s something about being side-by-side that puts the problem or ideas before us, and us working on it together.”

At CEO Challenges, Kennedy is creating a new line of business around that very concept. Called Learn to Tri, the program involves a company asking its executives, and some of their clients, to train and complete a triathlon.

Among the first companies to try it was JLL, a Chicago real estate firm. In May 2014, Kennedy paired 15 JLL brokers with 15 customers and together they began a 12-week training program, culminating in the Chicago triathlon. “You can invite the CEO to a Bears game,” Kennedy says. “They may or may not show up, may or may not be engaged.”

This group couldn’t help but be engaged, given that they were publicly committed to a race, with colleagues. “I’ve never had a more focused group,” he says, the week after more than 80 percent of those who signed up completed the race, some at the sprint distance, and many at the longer, Olympic distance. “I think we’re onto something.”

He’s also launched a program called Fitness Incorporated, which aims to get employees to complete their first 5-K race in eight weeks. And he’s not abandoning the CEO set. Kennedy has plans for 2016 for Microsoft Challenge at the NYC Triathlon, where he expects 50 CEOs to participate, as well as the Workday CEO Challenge at the Chicago Triathlon.

One of his earliest customers—former Motorola president Zafirovski—is still more than hanging around the endurance world. After Motorola, he became the CEO of Nortel, the Canadian telecom giant, commuting from his Chicago home. He now runs his own consulting firm, the Zaf Group, from Chicago and serves as executive advisor to Blackstone Group, the investment firm run by Stephen Schwarzman. He commits to at least 10 hours of fitness activity a week, with one big “event” each year, which he’s mapped out through 2018. They include a 50-mile run that starts in the Moroccan desert, the U.S. senior swimming championships, and, potentially, a return to the Ironman in 2018, in Kona.

In the fall of 2014, Zafirovski ran the Chicago Marathon, mostly as a training run. That November, he flew to Tempe, Arizona to complete his second full Ironman (in the intervening decade-plus, he finished a handful of half-Ironmans and marathons).

Now 61, he planned to compete alongside his two grown sons, but both pulled out a few months before the race—one for a new job on Wall Street, the other in the throes of his first year of business school. There was also the matter of a bike crash four months before the race, which injured Zafirovski’s shoulder to the point that swimming freestyle—the most efficient stroke—was impossible.

He completed the 2.4-mile swim using the much-slower breast stroke, and the bike and the run went off without a hitch. He crossed the line more than 25 minutes faster than his 2001 time.

He shows no signs of slowing down, and anyone who works for him going forward might do well to mention his or her interest in endurance endeavors. Fortunately for Zafirovski, Zelnick, and others, there are more and more races to choose from.

Notes

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