Sports & Fitness

I run — both distance and sprints, which most people will tell you is a mistake, because the training adaptations pull against each other. I do it anyway. Sprinting and endurance ask for different things from the same body, and holding both means you're always slightly worse at each than a specialist would be. I've made peace with that. The range is the point. Beyond running: gym work, football, swimming, dragon boating, badminton, and chess. I'm open to any sport, including ones I'll be bad at. Being bad at something new is a renewable resource and I don't think you should let it run out. Why the mix. Training as a hybrid athlete keeps me honest in a way any single sport wouldn't. A specialist gets very good at one pattern and can convince themselves the pattern is fitness. Spreading across running, water, court, and field means I'm regularly confronted with something I can't do, which is a useful thing to be regularly confronted with. Dragon boating is the one that surprised me most. It looks like a strength sport and it's actually a synchronisation sport. Twenty people pulling hard out of time move slower than twenty people pulling moderately in time. You cannot solve it by trying harder as an individual, which is a lesson that generalises further than it has any right to. Swimming taught me something similar from the opposite direction: efficiency beats effort, and the water punishes you immediately for fighting it. Chess belongs on this list even though nobody sweats. It's a sport in the way that matters — limited information, an opponent with their own plan, and a clock. It's my favourite mental battleground, and the discipline it trains is thinking several moves out rather than reacting to the last thing that happened. The one preference I'll defend. I don't play games online. If it can be played in real life, I want to play it in real life. Not out of any principle about screens — I spend most of my working life in front of one. It's that a sport played in a body has stakes that a sport played through an interface doesn't. You feel a badminton rally in your legs the next day. Something happens in a room with other people that doesn't happen in a lobby. Consistency beats intensity. That's the whole philosophy and I have very little else to add to it.