Most performance data is built to answer one question: are you pushing hard enough? Josh Kerr’s system was built to answer a different one.
On July 18, Kerr ran a mile in 3:42.66, breaking the record Hicham El Guerrouj set in 1999, a mark that had stood for twenty seven years. He named the effort Project 222, trained at altitude in Albuquerque, slept in a home altitude chamber, and wore an Amazfit tracker that measured heart rate variability and recovery every day.
The obvious read is that all of it pushed him harder. The real story is close to the opposite. His coach, Danny Mackey, read those numbers mainly to catch overtraining before it happened.
Endurance training works on a simple rule. The workout is the stress. The gains arrive later, during sleep and rest, when the body rebuilds. Push past that line without recovery, and you don’t get faster. You break down. So the highest value number Kerr tracked wasn’t effort. It was readiness,when the body had absorbed the work and when it needed to ease off.
Most business dashboards never ask that question. They track leads, tickets closed, code shipped, usage, every metric built to reward output, none built to flag when output is the problem. Duolingo ran into this directly. In 2025, CEO Luis von Ahn began scoring employees on AI usage. The number climbed. So did AI use on tasks that didn’t need it. Von Ahn scrapped the score and kept investing in people’s judgment instead.
That’s the instinct worth building into your own systems. Add a metric that tells you when to slow down, not just one that rewards speed. Find the function where a number is pushed so hard that quality, trust, or your people are close to breaking under it. Treat recovery, slack, rest, pauses, as an asset you defend, not time you apologize for.
This Week
Build the brake. Add at least one metric that signals when to slow down or stop, alongside the ones that reward speed and output. Name your upper limit. Find the function where you’re pushing a number so hard that quality, trust, or people may likely break due to it. Protect the recovery. Treat slack, rest, and pauses as fuel for sustained performance and defend them like any other asset.
Where in your business is a number climbing while something underneath it is close to cracking?
I publish Leapfrogging the Headlines to help leaders cut through the noise, gain clarity on what’s happening, and make smarter decisions. Subscribe below to get each issue delivered free.
Join 30,000+ other leaders