Johannes Klæbo, The Aesthetics of Effort, and Cycling for Ice Cream

I’ve gone through different phases in how I think about sports. Most of the time, it’s just been something I enjoy. Other times, something to improve at or build my days around. And at times, the whole concept can all feel a bit meaningless: just another way of adults escaping reality and keeping ourselves busy.

Since getting into endurance sports, the same question has started to come up more often, from others and from myself: why do you do it?

I don’t think I’ve ever had a fixed answer. But the routine has stayed the same. Early mornings and long sessions. It’s effort that feels unnecessary in the moment, yet deeply rewarding once it’s done.

Part of the answer, I think, has to do with the kind of effort it is.

Most discomfort in daily life feels vague. It’s hard to locate, hard to measure, and even harder to resolve. You can feel busy or stressed without knowing exactly why or what to do about it. In sport, that changes. The effort is concrete. A distance, a session, a hill in front of you. You know what is required, and you know when you’ve done it.

There is also a brutal honesty to it. If you train consistently, you improve. If you don’t, you don’t. It’s not perfect, but the relationship between input and output remains unusually intact. It’s close to absolute self-accountability. A linear system in a world of noisy variables.

And importantly, it’s chosen.

Most discomfort in life feels imposed. Deadlines, expectations, uncertainty. In sport, you opt into it. You decide to suffer a bit. And for some reason, that makes it feel cleaner.

Part of this curiosity has been shaped by watching people who do it at a completely different level. Seeing Johannes Klæbo ski is one of those experiences. The speed is obvious, but what also stands out is the pure form. The movement looks almost effortless, even when it clearly isn’t. It feels less like brute performance and more like something refined into expression.

It is hard to watch without wanting, in some way, to move like that.

But that only sharpens the question. Why does any of this matter? Why do we voluntarily choose effort in a world that increasingly removes the need for it?

Part of it, I think, is how physical it is. It bypasses abstraction. Effort, in this context, is difficult to fake. It is immediate and embodied, something closer to a primitive form of truth. In a life that often unfolds through screens and representations, there is something grounding about a domain where the feedback is simply whether you can continue or not.

And yet, for all this seriousness, sport is, at its core, a game.

Running faster, skiing farther, and cycling longer. None of it is necessary in any real sense. Children play without needing a reason, but somewhere along the way, play becomes structured. Times are recorded, distances are measured, and routines are optimized. What begins as something light gradually becomes something we treat as meaningful.

Watching someone like Klæbo makes that transition visible. The same basic activity of moving across terrain has been elevated into something precise and highly developed. It is still, in some sense, play, but it no longer feels trivial.

We give it a weight it doesn't strictly have. And by doing that, we turn a game into something significant.

I see it much closer to home, too. I’m lucky to have real sources of inspiration around me: some fanatical friends, local heroes at the track, and my father, a veteran endurance nut who’s been at it for decades. Just watching how another person shows up, again and again, starts to shape how I think about it myself. Makes me want to push a bit further.

And over time, it adds up. Not just what you do, but how consistently you do it. You pick things up without really noticing. Ways of training, ways of thinking, ways of pushing through.

I think part of what we respond to is not just performance, but expression. There is something compelling about effort that is not only effective but elegant. Kipchoge. Biles. Messi. There is an inherent beauty in that kind of mastery. It’s more than just the outcome; we’re drawn to a way of being. Few things compare to watching someone who has fully inhabited their craft.

At the same time, the entire pursuit can take on a slightly absurd quality. The routines, the marginal gains, the attention to detail. While living here in Singapore, I tried a pair of those pressurized “recovery pants.” It felt slightly ridiculous. And in some way, it is. But the person using them isn’t joking. The effort is sincere. Seriousness and absurdity sit right next to each other.

Which makes me wonder: if all of this is, in many ways, constructed (rules agreed upon, goals defined), why does it feel meaningful to so many people?

It’s tempting to describe this as a kind of self-deception. A way of pretending that a pastime (however fun) matters on a deeper level. But that framing seems too cynical. It may be more accurate to think of it as a chosen frame. We act as if it matters, and through that action, it often does.

In a world where many constraints have been removed, we seem to create our own. Sport is a self-imposed constraint system. It imposes direction, provides feedback, and offers something to return to when everything else feels less clear.

I’ve started to think that this might be the real appeal. Not performance, at least not primarily. But the structure. The continuity. The fact that if everything else in life gets hectic or uncertain, this one thing remains simple: show up, do the work, move forward.

And at the same time, not all meaning in sport comes from large, structured goals.

There’s a difference between preparing for an Ironman and going out for a Sunday coffee ride with consistent ice cream stops. But the feeling isn’t as different as it should be. Both are chosen. Both are unnecessary. And yet both feel real while you’re in them.

Maybe that’s the point.

We take something that doesn’t have to matter, and decide that it does. What begins as play becomes ritual, and what becomes ritual starts to shape how you see yourself. Not just in races or results, but in small things: how you handle effort, how you deal with discomfort, how you keep going.

I don’t think it’s self-deception. It is a decision to anchor who you are to something more tangible than the noisy variables of your day-to-day.

And maybe that’s why I keep coming back to it.

Not because it’s necessary. Not because it’s always enjoyable. But because there’s something honest about it. Something simple. A kind of effort that feels real in a way that other things sometimes don’t.

And somehow, that ends up being enough to get me out of bed.