A Brave New World: Is VO2 Max the New Social Currency at Kellogg?

Raj's workout summary

By: Raj Dwivedi, Comedy Club

Welcome to Kellogg, the leadership factory where everyone's eager to provide you with their favorite framework. Imagine my surprise, though, when I learned the plaza has been transformed into a high-stakes arena of cardiovascular sport. Forget your GMAT score, the faux prestigious internship, or the oversubscribed but banal social calendar. In this new world, your true worth isn't measured by your strategic acumen but by your VO2 max. If you're a NARP like me, you may need to Google that term, but it's essentially something about your blood oxygen.

Gone are the days when a Kellogg student’s social standing was determined by their ability to secure a table at Eleven or get bottle service comped at a club. The old order of conspicuous consumption has been overthrown. The new pantheon is made up of gods with names like Whoop, Oura, and Garmin. If you walk around the Hub, you'll inevitably be forced to listen to sleep scores, recovery metrics, and boasts of heart rate variability. It wasn’t that long ago that your friends would make you listen to their vivid dreams. Now, the process is complete with how challenging it was to fall asleep in the first place. Does one really need a watch to tell you that drinking 30 beers affects sleep quality? Our forefathers and foremothers, the titans of business from a bygone era, knew a different kind of hustle. They'd spend their evenings in dimly lit bars, evaluating potential partners not by their resting heart rate but by their proximity to a trust fund or a well-placed contact at Goldman Sachs. The ultimate power move wasn't a 5k personal record. It was a casual, “Let's take a private jet to Miami for the weekend.” Oh, how we yearn for that simplicity!

Today, the courtship rituals are bafflingly benign. The modern Kellogg student doesn't try to impress their crush with a sleek sports car. They impress them with a screenshot of a 90-minute Peloton ride and an "unsolicited" humblebrag about their FTP (Functional Threshold Power). The romantic dinner has been replaced by a meal of artisanal kale and grass-fed protein, meticulously tracked on MyFitnessPal. Forget the art of a witty repartee over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The new "seduction" is a deep-dive conversation about the optimal ratio of Zone 2 training to HIIT.The competitive spirit, once reserved for a brutal final exam or an M&A case study, has been rerouted to the running trails of Lake Michigan. The daily walk to the Global Hub is a high-speed sprint to see who can log the most steps. The ultimate social faux pas isn't a bad PowerPoint presentation. It's being caught with a "low activity" day on your Whoop. The shame is palpable. The whispers of "Is he not even trying?" echo through the hallways.

We've become a school of walking, talking biometric data points. Now, my dear reader, I’m not making a salient point about the over-medicalization of America or "the age of diagnosis" that we live in. This is merely an observation about how the brightest minds in America treat their body like a random number generator. This is me yearning for a simpler time. What about the age-old practice of objectifying human beings based on physical appearance? That's been replaced by the far more sophisticated, nuanced, and frankly, more judgmental practice of objectifying them based on their cardiovascular efficiency. Who cares if she has a beautiful smile when her VO2 max is in the low 40s? What good is his perfectly coiffed hair if his sleep score is perpetually in the "fair" range?

The old business school was a place of excess, of late-night networking events fueled by cheap beer and even cheaper gossip. It was a place where you could network your way into a job, a relationship, or even a friendship. The currency was charm, charisma, and a well-practiced anecdote about your gap year in Nepal. Now, our social currency is a low resting heart rate and high-endurance performance. Our evenings are spent not at bars, but on treadmills. Our conversations aren't about leveraged buyouts, but about lactate thresholds. We’ve become a generation of business leaders who may not be able to close a deal in a boardroom, but by God, we can crush a half-marathon. Is this who we want to be? Can the grindset even be practiced at the hydration levels we hold ourselves to? The imagery of the delirious, sleep-deprived executive doesn't hold up if we can track it to the tenth decimal. This is a call to action. Leave your Oura ring at home and let’s come together to crush some Natural Lights. I’ll let you know that your sleep score will likely suffer, and more importantly, it doesn't matter.

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