2024 Recap

But first, let's take a look back at 2024. We saw the rise of run clubs, luxury fitness clubs, strength training, longevity, GLP-1s, and the Oura/WHOOP duopoly.

• Run Clubs broke out big in 2024, emerging as a fun and casual way to meet people in geographic proximity. According to Strava's 2024 Year In Sport report, there was a 59% increase in running club participation year-over-year. This trend may be partly driven by burnout from dating apps as more people look for authentic, real-world connections and a subtler cultural shift away from alcohol. Notably, Gen Z survey respondents were 4x more likely to prefer meeting people through working out than bars, and some run clubs in New York such as the Lunge Run Club have a black apparel dress code to signal that you're single. Some of that has trickled down to marathons, with the 2024 New York City Marathon attracting a near-record high of 165,000 applicants (beat only by the 2020 race which got canceled.)

• Luxury Fitness Clubs are also on the rise as awareness around holistic health and recovery continues to grow thanks to high-end wearables like WHOOP and Oura popularizing recovery scores and recovery products like Theraguns, NormaTec compression booths, and cold plunges slowly but steadily reaching mainstream consciousness. We're now seeing that trend taken to the max with new fitness club concepts like Love.Life and Continuum offering high price-point memberships for best-in-class experiences around fitness, recovery, and overall wellness. I think this trend will continue to grow in 2025 but am skeptical of broader adoption here due to consumer willingness to pay ever embracing pricepoint on the order of several hundred dollars a month.

• Longevity stil feels like a bit of a sleeper, but thanks to Bryan Johnson's Blueprint brand and Peter Attia's book Outlive, we're seeing growing awareness around longevity. Johnson's brand has drawn significant attention in both my early 30s circles and in mainstream media—even Netflix is running a documentary on him now.

• GLP-1s reached an all-time high in awareness and adoption this past year. The biggest winners outside of Lilly and Novo Nordisk were startups like Hims and Fella which provide a telehealth model for easier access to these drugs. Fella is a particularly interesting story because they were founded before GLP-1s started to become more mainstream with the mission to help men lose weight. Initially, their solution was more behavioral therapy-oriented, but with GLP-1s starting to break out in 2023, they pivoted to this new model.

• Oura has taken off in the high-end wearable category in the past year. I initially wrote this as the "WHOOP/Oura Duopoly", but after some sleuthing on Google Trends, it seems like 2024 was Oura's year. Just based on search interest, Oura is starting to generate significantly more demand than the other giant in this category, WHOOP. I think Oura's sharpened focus and repositioning around general wellness and women's health have started to pay off. They raised another large round at a valuation north of $5 billion and announced reaching sales of over 2.5 million rings to-date.

2025 Predictions

Many of the 2024 trends will continue to grow in 2025, but here are the ones that still have not hit the mainstream consciousness yet but that I suspect will start to in the coming year or two:

• HYROX and Hybrid Fitness: As someone who has focused exclusively on endurance or strength sports during different periods of my life, this one's a really exciting trend to watch. HYROX, a fitness race that started in Hamburg back in 2017 with 650 participants is now over 600,000 racers strong and more than doubling year over year. Functional, interval-style workouts have been popular for a while now (F45, Orangetheory, etc), but there hasn't been an experiential product that has capitalized on that. The format is accessible and easy to understand because it's eight 1 km runs with an exercise in between each like 100 wall balls or 200m farmer's carry. On the business side, it's very scalable. Unlike Tough Mudder or CrossFit, every HYROX event follows a consistent spec comprised of simple equipment and only requires a convention center-sized space, making it highly replicable across cities. Races in most major cities completely sell out, and they only recently made a concerted effort to grow in the U.S. I think we'll see opportunities for brands and influencers to benefit from the growth of this competition and the rise of hybrid fitness in general. HYROX is a great example of how Gen Z and Millennials are increasingly gravitating toward multiple modalities of fitness with strength training becoming more popular for overall wellness.

• Precision Testing: Just this past year, I've noticed an uptick in friends getting DEXA scans, VO2 max tests, and resting metabolic rate (RMR) assessments. I think we're still early on this one, but I gradually see these tests becoming more mainstream as the tooling gets cheaper plus more compact, and demand for products and services complementary to earlier trends like run clubs and hybrid fitness continues to grow.

• Microplastics Aversion: Microplastics are poised to become the next big personal health concern as public awareness grows quickly, spurred by recent investigations like PlasticList.org, ProPublica’s deep dive into 3M's cover-up and Andrew Huberman’s podcasts on the health risks of plastics. We might start to see more brands advertise low leakage of microplastics in their packaging and products (think Owala and Stanley stainless steel water bottles) as well as new product categories emerge or take off around microplastic reduction (think specialized water filters for skincare routines or single-use cotton face towels). I've started to avoid mixing hot water and plastic bags or containers including plastic tea steepers (apparently, the traditional tea bag leaks a ton of microplastics). This is unfortunately bearish news for one of my favorite cooking methods sous-vide, which involves cooking meats in plastic bags simmering in hot water.

I'm currently exploring. Previously, I completed a year as an MS/MBA at Harvard Business School, invested at Costanoa Ventures, helped start FiscalNote (Series D) as an earl-lee employee, dipped my toes in the corporate world at Google, and studied Computer Science at Yale. In my free time, I love working on growth in all aspects of my life—fitness, mindfulness, and productivity. For more about me, feel free to check out my personal website.

In this newsletter, I’ll share practical advice and strategy on living a high-performance lifestyle. If you’re like me, you prioritize fitness but also strive for excellence in career and personal relationships. The high-performance lifestyle is simply that: Pushing yourself both physically and mentally to live a happy and fulfilling life utilizing the latest in technology and scientific research to do so—essentially Self-Improvement and Quantified Self 2.0.

It’s important to note what I won’t be doing. I won’t be pushing anything I write about whether that’s the latest wearable or the newest health food trend—which I’ll be sure to tell you about before it’s a trend—as a panacea. Ultimately, living a high-performance lifestyle is hard work, and optimizations are just that—optimizations. They may elevate you the last 10% but the first 90% is no secret. I hope this newsletter serves as motivation to do the work.

From time-to-time you may also see me writing about tech news, as it’s the industry I work in and practically everything these days are in some ways shaped by technology. I made a first attempt at this a few weeks ago on my personal website, but will start posting those musings on here.

Some ideas for what I’ll be sharing:

• How I went from 24% to 10% body fat by losing 35 lbs in 6 months, half of which was under quarantine and with only resistance bands, a pull-up bar, and a couple kettlebells. Also, lessons learned from trying to put on muscle and going from 150 lbs and 17% body fat to 170 lbs and 24% body fat.

• Implications of Apple’s WWDC announcements last week as it relates to “healthOS” and future of connected health.

• Standing vs. sitting for productivity and calorie burn.

• Cutting through the intermittent fasting and ketogenic diet fad and the real, boring reason they might help but are not magic pills for weight loss.

• Carb timing for optimizing nutrition.

Read on to get a better sense of who I am and what the three topics—fitness, mental wellness, and productivity—mean to me.

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Fitness

A decade ago, I competed in cross country and track. Now, I’m an avid weightlifter, having last competed at the 2019 American Open Series in Columbus, OH before school made it hard to travel and compete. I’ve kept training, however, even ending up in a stock photo for our school gym.

Yours truly. Don’t ask me what a hollow hold is, and yes, my jerk form on that repetition isn’t perfect.

More recently, I acquired a full set of weight plates, a barbell, and a squat rack. Because these items are hard to come by during quarantine, I programmed a bot that would text me as soon as the item I wanted came in stock. This was important because the websites would oftentimes update before a vendor’s in-stock notification emails went out which gave me several minutes of lead time to beat the rush. Text message notification also enabled me to act immediately, since I leave email push notifications off so that I’m not glued to my email inbox all day.

Note the sequence of time stamps when I bought a pair of 25lb and 15lb bumper plates:

Gmail view of what happened. The emails from “elee” are my bot and correspond with SMS messages that I also received at the same time.

I was notified by my bot at 5:31pm. Two minutes later, at 5:33pm, I had put in my order by clicking on the product page link in my bot’s text message and paying via Apple Pay. The whole flow takes about 15 seconds. Four minutes after I already ordered, the vendor sent out an email announcing that the bumpers plates were back in stock. I had gotten six minutes Of advanced notice before the public and had executed my order four minutes before the public was notified. Good thing we’re not talking about markets here.

Mental Wellness

The summer after graduating college I read Mindset by Carol Dweck. The book catapulted growth mindset into the common lexicon and was particularly impactful for me not because it taught me a new way to think but reaffirmed the lens through which I view life. I developed a growth mindset through my high school and college experiences—heavily influenced by my journey with performance sports and academics. In this newsletter, I plan to share my perspective on growth mindset. Under the same umbrella, I plan to talk about intelligence, knowledge, and psychology. The first two are areas I’ve always wanted to improve on, but it’s important to recognize that the third plays a large part in the first two. Over the past few years, I’ve become more attuned with evaluating my own emotions and designIn my life and behaviors accordingly. These are choices such as physical environment, the people I spend time with, how I choose to view circumstances, and even my daily routine. These choices help me—and I hope it will help you—be a better friend, relative, and mentor to others.

Productivity

Just as much as I strive to optimize my outcomes in performance sports, I love trying out new things to optimize my productivity. There’s no calendar or email app I haven’t tried or a to-do list app that I haven’t broken by overloading with items. My current personal productivity stack is as follows:

• Hardware

  • 11-inch iPad Pro (2020) which is a recent addition and feels like the future—see my tweet thread on why.

  • 15-inch MacBook Pro (2017)

  • iPhone XS Max which I actually want to downgrade to the smaller screen size version because I now realize that the extra screen real estate is not worth the cumbersome form factor.

  • WHOOP for HRV, sleep, and calorie burn tracking.

  • Withings Body Cardio for weight and body fat tracking. I weigh in every morning use a trailing 7-day average because that provides a much more realistic assessment of your body weight and body fat, which can vary widely depending on carb and water retention and can be misleading without the averaging.

  • Sony A7rii w/Vario-Tessar 24-70mm f/4 zoom lens

• Software

  • Roam Research for personal notes.

  • Notion for startup collaboration.

  • Toggl for time tracking.

  • Things 3 for to-do.

  • Overcast for listening to podcasts.

  • Shuffle for podcast discovery.

  • MyFitnessPal for nutrition tracking.

  • Safari instead of Chrome because battery life, reading list, reader mode, and continuity across devices.

  • Apple Calendar because I unfortunately have to use an Outlook calendar for school, otherwise I would exclusively use Google Calendar.

  • Gmail even after trying Superhuman. If I were still using Chrome, I’d also be using Simplify.

  • Google Maps for tracking restaurants, coffee shops, and grocery stores I want to try and like.

Final Note

I’m still experimenting with what content I’m most uniquely positioned to produce and is valuable to readers, so over time, you may see me writing more about one topic and less about another. Additionally, it would be extremely helpful if you tell me what was particularly interesting and helpful as well as what you skipped over or wish you had. I’m also happy to consider a topic you’re curious about. You can reach me via Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just respond to this email if you’re already subscribed. Thanks for listening!

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Why this makes sense

Retail distribution: Lululemon will be able to distribute MIRROR in its stores, resulting in much broader reach for the product and ability to hook users via demos. Peloton saw success with this in-person demo model, so MIRROR may too. It remains to be seen how much of a barrier Covid-19 is on this front. Additionally, MIRROR users may be more inclined to purchase Lululemon gear if they see MIRROR instructors wearing Lululemon. I suspect the benefit to be more unidirectional, however, boosting MIRROR product sales but less so Lululemon sales because anyone paying $1,495 for workout equipment probably already purchases high-end workout apparel.

Complementary brand: Both MIRROR and Lululemon are sleek, sexy, and high-end. They're premium products that make the consumer feel good about themselves.

Remain relevant: Fashion moves quickly. Lululemon already faces a crop of upstart athleisure brands. I personally skipped over Lululemon and went straight to brands like Ten Thousand (referral link) and Rhone. This is one way Lululemon can diversify revenue streams while capitalizing on its still relatively strong brand.

Connected apparel: Certainly a long-shot, but Lululemon could build connected apparel that complements MIRROR and increases ways of monetizing existing MIRROR users. Companies Startups like Athos are pioneering the edge here, but MIRROR users could get even richer feedback on their workouts by wearing apparel that utilizes electromyography to sense muscle activation. At face value, I think such functionality provides marginal benefit to the MIRROR user who likely don’t care that much. The value of MIRROR is likely more in the motivation it provides and the positive emotions associated with the experience—everything from breaking a sweat to having a nice, high-tech furnishing for your home.

Risks

Paying Covid-19 revenue: MIRROR’s 2020 revenue may be unduly propped up by temporary buyers driven by Covid-19. These users may end up churning or returning the product, meaning its existing ARR and revenue growth is not the same quality as MIRROR revenue and growth last year.

Competition heating: Besides the obvious competition—Peloton, Tonal, Tempo, etc—startups such as Onyx can provide a similar experience to MIRROR but for a fraction of the cost. Onyx uses computer vision to provide live feedback on your form and video-based workouts, similar to MIRROR. One can imagine what the experience might look like if you couple LIDAR sensors and 4K cameras on iPhones and iPads with a larger monitor screen. The large monitor would basically be a mirror, and the iPhone/iPad visual sensors would provide all of the sensing necessary for workout guidance (see my crude illustration above). That said, there’s value in simplicity, and a device focused on doing one thing frequently wins out over a more complicated solution.

Transaction details

Lululemon is paying $500M in cash with $50M of it held back as an earn-out over two years. It has over $800M liquidity in cash, a $400M revolver, and another $300M revolver.

With MIRROR's revenue expected to be north of $100M this year, the sticker price sounds reasonable, though I’m curious what percentage of the $100M is recurring revenue versus hardware sales. A simplistic view taking new subscriber contribution ($1,500 for the hardware and $480 for the subscription) as the overall revenue breakdown results in 25% of the revenue being recurring. In reality, that percentage will be slightly higher because of existing subscribers contributing pure recurring revenue. If MIRROR was growing quickly, most of its revenue will be from new subscribers. $25M ARR for $500M cash would imply a 20x multiple. For reference, Peloton is trading at ~16x EV/Revenue. MIRROR is also expecting to break-even or profit in 2021, but again, I wonder what impact the loss of quarantine-driven demand will have on this expectation.

Takeaway

Overall, this was a great exit for a hardware startup that only raised $72M, but I’m not confident it will be a win for Lululemon in the long run. I think if the parent company can let MIRROR run on its own while benefiting from improved distribution, there’s a chance this turns out to be valuable, but I also harbor some doubts that MIRROR, despite its surface-level similarities to Peloton, will see similar traction. One of the reasons Peloton’s social motivation works is that it’s simple. Cycling is easy to pick up and because it’s a single movement, you can elevate one simple metric as the number everyone competes around—Peloton’s output score. This drives peer competition.

It’s harder to do the same when users can do everything from burpees to crunches. To win on an equivalent output score in the MIRROR world, one might simply pick workouts that only ask you to do burpees because those will burn the most calories, increase your heart rate the most, etc. It’s one thing to justify paying for a stationery bike. You can’t replicate the experience without a stationery bike. It’s a whole other thing to justify paying for a nice-looking screen that will show you how to do exercises you could have done without the device.