How To Count To Eight

I´m finally sitting in my office, rugged up as the first snow storm of the season is passing through Andorra. It´s a stark contrast to last weeks conditions in Dubai for the T100, but more on that later.

Picture this: You've spent months clawing your way back from a hospital bed. The best triathletes in the world are here at US Open. You're about to mount your bike when you notice - black swim skin still on, layered over your race suit like my son´s superhero costume.

Heart sinks. Brain screams. But you do the math: overheating versus 15 seconds. Strip it off. Hand it to the referee who's looking as confused as I am feeling. Welcome to elite sport, where we can do incredibly complex things under pressure and simultaneously forget how zippers work.

Which brings me to last week's T100 in Dubai. Three leaders racing so hard they blow past transition and ride an extra 8km (if you really want my opinion- that´s on them). Then the run lap counting system implodes. Officials start waving athletes to the finish line after lap 7 (which, in my opinion, is clearly not the athletes fault).

Almost all the athletes follow the officials in. Race over. A handful of athletes look around, think "that doesn't feel like 18km," and keep running. Lap 8.

Pearson wins. So he should.

The irony: The volunteer whose literal job is counting laps couldn't count to eight. But a few exhausted athletes running at threshold could.

Turns out there's actual science here. Fire commanders apparently make gut decisions 80% of the time - pure pattern recognition, not analysis. Your brain is processing thousands of unconscious cues based on experience. When you're deep in your domain, you just know things before you can explain why.

Studies of surgeons, investors, military personnel - same thing. Expertise creates instinct. Your body tells you something's wrong before your conscious mind catches up. But here's the catch: It only works in YOUR domain. Give those same experts a problem outside their field and their gut instinct is no better than a coin flip.

I only raced 6-8 times a year maximum. Full focus. Mental space to prepare. My mistakes were usually in transition - the swim skin situation, fumbling with nutrition, those immediate "oh shit" moments you can fix on the spot. Counting to eight wasn't my problem. Remembering to take off my clothes apparently was.

Here's what's weird about sport: it's one of the few places in life where you always know where you stand. Literally. There are timing mats, finish lines, officials, and a scoreboard that tells you if you got it right.

Your body builds this finely-tuned internal GPS. I could tell you if my pace was 1.5 seconds off without looking at my watch. I knew what certain distances felt like, when to push, when to back off. Thousands of hours had programmed an instinct that worked at 180bpm.

But here's the thing: that clarity is the exception, not the rule.

Most of life doesn't come with officials or timing mats. You're making decisions about relationships, career moves, business partnerships, whether to move cities or change direction entirely. Big decisions in domains where you have zero expertise and no immediate feedback loop telling you if you got it right.

And yet we're supposed to "trust our gut."

The research shows gut instinct only works where you have deep experience. Outside your domain, you're just guessing. Which means most of us are making most of our important life decisions in the equivalent of running a race where we've never seen the course, don't know the distance, and the officials might be waving us to the finish line a lap too early.

Those four athletes in Dubai had something that´s not easy: enough expertise to trust what they knew over what they were being told. Their bodies said "this doesn't feel like 18km yet" and they kept running.

I daily life I often find myself more like the thirteen athletes who followed the officials. Or the leader. Looking for external validation, hoping someone else knows the answer, following the crowd because at least then we're wrong together.

Maybe that's why athletics is so seductive - it's one of the few domains where you can build expertise deep enough to trust yourself completely. The feedback is rapid. The rules are clear. You know when you've miscounted.

But life doesn't have a lap counter. You're on your own. I don´t think we’ll ever have all the answers. It's building enough experience in whatever domain you care about that your gut instinct becomes something more than a guess. Thousands of hours. Rapid feedback. Pattern recognition. Same process, different course.

And maybe - just maybe - you’ll remember to take off your wetsuit when you jump on the bike.

Enjoy your weekend

Jan.