WHOOP Podcast - Ed Baker, former Head of International Growth at Facebook & VP of Product and Growth at Uber talks leaving Silicon Valley behind and becoming a world-class triathlete.

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

Elite triathlete and former Facebook Head of International Growth & Uber VP of Product and Growth Ed Baker discusses founding his first company (4:43), lessons learned running startups (9:13), working with Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick (17:34), prioritizing sleep over exercise (24:36), becoming an Ironman triathlete (24:55), training methodology (27:10), insights from WHOOP (29:59), nutrition for endurance athletes (35:38), active recovery (39:53), his career highlight (44:40), pre-race routine (47:52) and in-race fueling (48:55), positive takeaways from a serious injury (55:23), and the decision whether or not to go pro (1:01:13).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

We discovered that there were secrets that your body was trying to tell you that could really help you optimize performance, but no one could monitor those things. And that's when we set out to build the technology that we thought could really change the world. Welcome to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. Having recorded about 25 episodes on the Whoop podcast, I can truly say it's a great lens into understanding how high performers, top performers, do what they do. At Whoop, our clients range from the best professional athletes in the world to Navy Seals,

to fitness enthusiasts, to Fortune 500 CEOs and executives. The common thread among Woop members is a passion to improve. What does it take to optimize performance for athletes, for humans, really anyone? And now that we've just launched all-new whoop strap 3.0 featuring Woop Live, which takes real-time training and recovery analysis to the next level, you're going to hear how many of these users are optimizing their body with WOOP and with other things in their life. On this podcast, we dig deeper, we interview experts, we interview industry leaders across sports, data, technology, physiology, athletic achievement, you name it.

How can you use data to improve? your body. What should you change about your life? My hope is that you'll leave these conversations with some new ideas and a greater passion for performance. With that in mind, I welcome you to the Whoop Podcast. For the 10 years or so that I was in Silicon Valley doing my own startup, then working at Facebook, then working at Uber, I pretty much put all of the athletic stuff on hold. In 2017, I decided to leave Uber and actually also moved across the country back to Boston. I decided to get back into shape and felt like triathlon would be a good sport to see what I can do. How we doing today, folks? My guest is Ed

Baker, wildly successful entrepreneur who started multiple companies before rising to become the head of international growth at Facebook and then later the VP of Product and Growth at Uber. Ed has experienced an amazing amount of success in technology, and I am proud to now have him as a board member at Whoop. Now, as it pertains to Whoop Data, Ed is a former collegiate runner during his time at Harvard. Ed recently left Silicon Valley and moved back to Boston, and he's actually turned himself into a world-class triathlete beating other professional athletes. We discussed lessons he learned about growth and management, startup success from leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick during his time at Facebook and Uber, how he's been able to win triathlons and

Ironmans and compete on an elite level at 40 years old, what does diet and training regimen look like and the insights he's gained from using Woop. We're thrilled to have Ed as a member of our board at Woop and his story of transitioning from the startup world to becoming a pro-level athlete is a fascinating one. Without further ado, here's Ed. Ed, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Will. So you've had a fascinating career so far, and you know, you've gone from rising the ranks in technology to now training like you're a professional athlete.

And I guess I want to go back in time. Like, you're a college athlete, you're at Harvard, you're captain of the cross-country team there. Like, did you know in training as a college athlete that this was something you were going to want to pursue in a near professional capacity over time? I had no idea. I basically was taking it one year at a time. I actually didn't even know if I was going to do sports in college. It's fascinating. It was a part of me back in high school where I thought, you know, I'm running in high school, but when I go to college, I'm just going to focus on academics and that'll be it.

But then I got into track and cross-country and now can't imagine having gone through college without that. Yeah, the experience of being a college athlete, I think, is a great one because it kind of creates a schedule around whether it was kind of a chaotic period of time in your life. Totally. You know, I found that I was least productive. Academically, the weeks were, it was like between the seasons, you know, and I wasn't running. I'd think, oh, I'll have all this extra time, but I'd actually procrastinate more and not be as productive.

And, you know, shortly after Harvard, you start your own company, right? Well, so yes. I actually, at Harvard, I started my first company. Oh, that's right. Okay. It was called date site. It was a dating site to match people up, kind of like tender with email addresses. Then right after Harvard, I worked in Boston for a few years at Bain and Bain Capital, then moved out to California for Stanford Business School. And it was after that that I started my first real company. Okay. And so did you always know that you wanted to go into technology longer term? I always was very interested in technology, and I thought it would be cool to start a company someday. So that was kind of my dream to do it someday, but I wasn't really sure.

So 2008, right? Yes. That's when you start Friendly. That's right. So tell me about Friendly. Yeah, Friendly was a, we called it a social question and answer site, but it was really another dating site in disguise. So you'd answer questions about yourself, ask other people questions. about themselves and use Q&A as a way to get to know new people.

And I worked on that with my team for about three years. We grew to about 25 million registered users, and then we sold the company to Facebook. It seems like pretty fast growth. It was pretty fast growth. I'd say growth is the one thing I kind of spent the most time on in terms of kind of figuring out the art and the science, behind user acquisition.

And unfortunately, I feel like I wasn't as good back then at the product itself. So I was able to make the product grow before it was that great of a product. You scaled before you necessarily had the product market fit. Exactly. One investor in my company explained it as I was building an airplane while it was already in the air. Yeah, right. Which, by the way, I feel like every startup is doing that to some degree. sure but um but that for me has actually been an interesting lesson along the startup journey because

when you're when you're early on as a founder you keep telling yourself i need more customers need more users like i want to grow faster but there's actually there's there's huge problems with growing fast if your product isn't ready for it oh 100 percent and i definitely felt that at friendly um you know it just it's a lot harder to iterate on a product that already has millions of users, especially if you're making some pretty major iterations. Totally. We spent a lot of our time just trying to scale the site and keep up with all the traffic, and that gave us fewer resources to actually do some of those core product improvements.

Well, you have been a great advisor and board member to Whoop, so super excited to have you as part of the team. Yeah, it's awesome to be involved. And for people listening who are trying to figure out where they are maybe on their own journey of starting a company, what advice would you give them around, like, hey, I know this idea is the right thing for me to pursue? Yeah, you know, I think a couple of things come to mind. One is when I look at all the great companies that have been started, I feel like most of them were not started with the founder.

intending to start a company. Yeah. It was more like, they're trying to solve a problem that they care about solving. And before they know it, it's become a company. Yeah. So that was something I didn't realize earlier on. But when I went to places like Facebook and Uber, I saw, you know, that's how Zuck started Facebook. That's how Travis started Uber.

And so I'd say that's one thing. And to also just know that there are going to be tons of ups and. and downs every day. And so you have to really be passionate about that problem you're trying to solve. Because if you're not passionate about it and you don't love it, then when you have those downs that are really low, it's going to be easy to give up. That's such a good point. You know, I tell people, too, like if you're not thinking about it in the shower or like when you're brushing your teeth or like all these weird times of day, you're probably not passionate and nothing about it. I mean, I don't have to tell you, but it becomes your life. Yeah, totally.

Yeah. So, okay, so you start friendly, it has this rapid ascension. Maybe the product's not as good as you would have liked. And next thing you know, you're at Facebook. That's right. So talk a little bit about your growth at Facebook and also exactly when you were there from a user context. Yeah, so I joined Facebook in 2011 and I joined the growth team and ran international growth there. So I was in charge of helping Facebook grow its user base in a bunch of the emerging markets, as well as some of the more competitive markets like Japan, Korea, Russia. And while I was there, we hit the one billion monthly active user milestones. It's badass. And so that was a pretty cool milestone to hit. And I remember Zuck said that day, this is the most proud day of my life.

You know, like more so than going public or anything like that. it was like hitting that milestone in terms of a billion people in the world are using the product every month. And since then, they had one billion daily active users and, you know, just kept going from there. So that's kind of what I was doing there. And I stayed at Facebook for two years. And then I moved over to Uber back in 2013 to start up the growth team there. And, I mean, obviously the growth that you oversaw at both Facebook and Uber is quite historic. I mean, it's really pretty amazing. So congratulations and everything you were responsible for both of those companies.

Well, I shouldn't take too much credit. I mean, the one thing that attracted me to both of those companies also attracted me to work with you at WOOP is it's just they're all amazing products. They're products that I personally fell in love with that. have that product market fit. And I feel like when you have an amazing product, it's a whole lot easier to grow. It kind of grows on its own. You always just have to not screw it up. And it also feels like a very important mission, right, to figure out how to grow this thing because you want like as many people to be using it as possible. That's right. It feels like it makes, I guess everyone says, make the world a better place. But it does. It makes a world a

better place to get more people using it. So what attracted you to Uber from Facebook? Like, was a lot of it just the user experience, or did you feel like this was a place you could have a huge impact? I'd say it was more that I felt like I could have a bigger impact joining an earlier stage company. So by the time I joined Facebook, it was already a fairly big company that there were thousands of people working there versus when I joined Uber, it was around 200 people, of which half of them were in their headquarters at San Francisco. So it kind of felt like it was still bigger than friendly when I sold friendly, but it still felt like a pretty early stage startup where on day one I didn't have a desk.

I was sitting in between two other people sharing a desk, and we didn't have meals in the office. we just would eat chips for dinner and that kind of thing. So it definitely felt like a startup that was still like just growing already at that point. A lot of stuff was happening every day, but it still felt very small. And I like that. And I felt like I could really add value to that, especially after having learned what I learned at Facebook. What were some of the things that you helped uncover while you were at Uber? Or like what would be some interesting examples of growth that you were able to drive?

Well, let's see. I'd say, you know, back in the very early days when I first joined, I started up our growth team, which originally was five people. And our CEO at the time, Travis, said, here, five people to work with start a growth team. Yeah, right. And I mean, so in those early days, the first thing we had to figure out is what's our North Star metric? You know, at Facebook, it was monthly active users. But we had to take some time to try to figure out what was the right metric to use at Uber.

Was it monthly active riders? Well, no, because that kind of ignores the driver's side. And in a two-sided marketplace, the drivers and the supply is just as important, if not more so, than the riders. And so our monthly active metric, sorry, our North Star metric we started to focus on was weekly trips. how many total trips are happening every week because for every trip to happen, you need a rider and you need a driver. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Therefore, to improve that metric, you have to improve both sides of the marketplace. And then another thing we discovered pretty early on was actually the bottleneck to our growth was more on the supply side than on the demand side. So by focusing more on acquiring drivers, that was a bigger driver of growth for us, no pun intended, then folks

you know, the riders. So, I mean, that's a really interesting point. Like, people probably underestimate just how complicated it is to build a two-sided marketplace, you know. That's right. So many people think of Uber as this thing where you just download an app and it's all magical, but you forget that there's these drivers that have to be there in order for the whole thing to run. That's right. And they have to love the product too.

And they have other options if they don't. So they've got to, you know, it's got to be easy to use, flexible, and a good way to make a living. Now, by the time you left Uber, how many people were under your umbrella, so to speak, or reporting to you? So I think in my direct org, it was around 500 people, and then including the engineering team that was working on it, I don't know, over 1,000. It's amazing, isn't it?

So, yeah, from 5 to 500 or 1,000. So what do you feel like you learned about managing? people in that process? Gosh, I learned a lot. So what would I put at the top of the list? Because I basically started out from not knowing much at all, so I had to learn a lot by trial and error. But I'd say one of the biggest things I learned

was just how important it is to hire great people and to hire people that know how to do things I don't know how to do. and then to do everything in my power to make them as successful as possible. So that was just kind of, that was how I tried to grow the team, was hire people that were smarter than me who were passionate about what they were working on and help them succeed. And then they would do the same thing. And it just kind of became this machine that kind of grew itself

and turned into something, you know, much bigger than I ever thought, you know, would happen. It's a cool moment when you realize that you've hired people who are now hiring people. Yeah. Like, that happens. I still try to meet almost everyone in the interview process, but now it's happening where I don't. And so I'll walk through the office sometimes and I'll bump into someone I've never seen before.

And I'll be like, oh, nice to meet you, you know? And it's like this sort of, and of course they end up being really smart and turned to earth and whatever. But it's, that is one of the cooler moments. for sure that you don't necessarily anticipate as a manager it's just this idea that you can build a team that creates a team that's right and then really empowering your leaders to to run their teams and to feel you know feel that ownership i think that's really important too and to not micromanage to make sure there's having that clear um kind of this is what success looks like and on the growth team for us that was i think especially clear because we had that

North Star metric. We knew this is the number we need to grow. So by having that clear metric of success, it was almost easier to say to the leaders on the team, this is how we succeed. Go do it. Come to me if you need help, but you probably aren't going to need my help. Now, you've worked for two famous, infamous even CEOs in technology in Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick. What are some things that you've learned from them or found fascinating about? Let's start with Zuckerberg. I think Zuckerberg is an amazing leader.

I think, gosh, where do I start? Well, first of all, I remember being surprised pretty early on that he just had this ability to remember everything that was said in any meeting we ever had with him. it's a good skill yeah it is he did a show he was really listening um even when uh so the example i was going to give was there was a meeting uh the the growth team had with him and we shared a lot of pretty detailed stuff in that meeting and then a few weeks later at our weekly Friday Q&A he was asked a question about something that was actually discussed in that meeting and it almost seemed like he said word for word what we had shared with him in that meeting. And I was just, I was thinking to

myself, he has meetings like, he has tons of meetings like this every day. And for him to then be able to recall that with so much accuracy. It was really impressive. And then I remember even when he was interviewing me before he acquired our company, he was just asking so many questions and and really listening and trying to absorb everything he could from that interaction with me. And I was thinking, if he's doing this in every meeting he has with people, which I'm sure he does, he must just be absorbing so much. And I think that's part of what's made him such a great leader. Yeah, I get the sense he's done an amazing job internally within Facebook and having, obviously,

people like you within the organization who believe in him. You know, I feel like maybe where where he hasn't focused as much of his attention is just what his public persona is now that, you know, it's sort of, it's probably surreal for him how big Facebook is and how important it is now in politics and all these things that he probably didn't necessarily think about. Yeah, yeah, you're probably right. And I left Facebook before it kind of became this center of attention that it is today. So I can only speculate what it's like these days. but back then I think he didn't have to kind of necessarily think about it in the same way as he does today. And you were there for some of these notable acquisitions too, right? That's right. I mean, that's probably been one of the best things Facebook has done is acquiring these

businesses like WhatsApp and Instagram and friendly, of course. That doesn't belong in the same group, but I do remember when we acquired Instagram and at the time, I remember a bunch of friends saying, can you believe Facebook paid so much money for Instagram? Which is now, like, considered maybe the best acquisition ever. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So it's kind of funny to look back on that and see what's come of that.

And talk a little bit about Travis, who I know you got to know well over the course of Uber. Yeah. I mean, I learned a lot from Travis as well, and he's also a really smart guy. I actually met him before he started Uber. He used to have these, he just like hang out with a group of entrepreneurs at his apartment in San Francisco. We call it the jam pad. Yeah, right. And we just hang out on like a Friday night or Saturday night, have a few beers and just brainstormed startup ideas.

And so I just was always impressed and inspired by his kind of creativity. and desire to always want to come up with new ideas and that kind of thing. So, I mean, he's a true entrepreneur. He also, clearly as Uber became a bigger and bigger company, also started to face a lot of these external issues. So it's been interesting to see both Facebook and Uber going through some similar things as a result. Yeah, there's definitely some parallels there.

Yeah. But I think back when Travis started Uber, I don't know if there's anyone else who could have gone through everything he went through back then and kind of got and made it through all of it. There were so many barriers along the way when they were first getting started. And he just kind of constantly would get through those barriers one after the other. Well, it's amazing, too, just the growth that Uber and the work that you did there. So what made you realize, like, okay, maybe now I want to dial it back a little bit and go down this new career path, which has been, you know, an amateur athlete competing against professionals? Yeah, you know, I, for the 10 years or so that I was in Silicon Valley doing my own startup, then working at Facebook, then working at Uber, I pretty much put all of the athletic stuff on hold. And I missed it. And I think as I was getting closer to becoming 40 years old, I felt like, okay, if I'm going to get back into shape, now is the time to do it. And so it was in 2017 that I decided to leave Uber and actually also moved across the country back to Boston with my wife and family.

It's good to have you back. My wife, Sarah, and I met in Cambridge 14 years ago. Oh, cool. And so it's been fun to be back on the East Coast. And I decided, you know, some people call it. My wife in particular will sometimes refer to it as my midlife crisis, but I decided to get back into shape and felt like triathlon would be a good sport to see what I could do. And so now you've been, well, first of all, let's back up for some.

second so how often were you exercising when you were say at uber and you know it was on and off uh so i was at uber for almost four years and uh the first year i was trying to stay in shape and then things just got busier and crazier and i just couldn't couldn't keep up with it so there would be like a few weeks at a time where i decide okay i'm going to try to get back into shape now and i'd be good for three or four weeks but then i would just go another few months without doing anything so So you'd actually go weeks without exercising. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Well, because there were weeks where I was getting not nearly enough sleep where I felt like exercising on, you know, five hours of sleep a night just wasn't going to help. Totally. It was better to spend that extra hour sleeping than exercising. Well, that's a whoop mindset in itself. So, okay, so now explain a little bit where you are in your career. And then we'll talk about your training.

Okay, sure. So in my professional career or athletic career? Athletic career. Okay. So in January of last year, I decided to start working with a triathlon coach, Matt Dixon, at Purple Patch Fitness. Yep. And I told him I wanted to do the triathlon. I said I'd been a runner my whole life.

I had after college running the Olympic trials for the marathon and had run a 221 and that I was starting to learn how to ride a bike and I was starting to learn how to swim and uh he decided to agree to work with me and um he said but you know in your first year I'd say just focus on the half iron man and then maybe if you're still around a year later we can move up to the iron. Sounds like he was a little skeptical how committed you were. I don't know he just told he just said you know I told him I wanted to do an iron man in my first year and he said wait wait until the second year. So this is 2017. That's right. Okay. January of 2017.

And I started working with him. He started coaching me. And just to put it in perspective. So like now April 2019, you are placing first place in your age group, completing it in just over four hours. That was the Leo Joe Half Iron Man. Thank you for pronouncing that for me. In China.

I went four hours one minute. So I didn't quite break four hours. but that race happened a week after I did the Oceanside. Yeah. Oceanside, which you get first place overall amateur in. I mean, that's, you know, that's no longer a joke. And you're beating professional Ironman competitors. Yes, yes.

I'm not sure how many, but I definitely beat some pros. And those were my first two races of this season. So, okay, so the point being is you've gotten very good at this very quickly. And what I want to try to unpack with you is what are you doing from a training standpoint to be so great? So let's think about just a week, over the course of a week, what will you do from just purely exercise standpoint? So a typical week when I'm in real training mode and I am recovering from an injury right now, so I'm not quite back there yet. Yeah, totally. I'll get up to about 20 hours of training per week.

split across the three sports, swimming, biking, and running, and what that usually means for me is swimming five to six times, maybe six times a week, about one hour each swim. I swim with a master's team in Cambridge. And then on the bike, I will do a mix of workouts, but at least one longer ride per week where I'm going up to five hours and I do most of my bike training indoors on Zwift so five hours on the indoor trainer is kind of at times a bit tough but yeah that's long gets me in shape and then running I actually I of the three sports I spend the least amount of time running partially because I feel like that's my strength yeah and partially because as I as I get older I just um try to limit the pounding on my joints yeah it's funny I just had I just had

I had Bob Arnott on the podcast, who is the best paddleboarder, world champion paddleboarder for his age. And he was saying that the thing you want to really avoid as you get older is things that have high impact. So any sport that creates like a surface between the surface. So swimming being the exception because that's obviously good. But swimming and cycling, paddleboarding, cross-country skiing, right, like all these things. So that actually seems really smart. Oh, cool. So when it comes to, I mean, the interesting thing about triathlons, for me at least, like outside looking in,

is you've got these three different things that you're trying to optimize around. Yeah. How do you decide what you're going to do in a given day? I basically do whatever Matt tells me to. Whatever my coach tells me to do. So I'd say that that's one of the big benefits of having a coach is that I can let him say today do this. and I just do it. And in the past, when I tried to coach myself just with running,

it actually added quite a bit of stress to try to figure out what to do. To think about it. And I feel like when you're in the middle of it, you can't be super objective about yourself and what you should be doing. So it's been helpful to have a coach who can tell me what to do. That said, he's actually pretty flexible when I tell him if it's something like, oh, today I don't have time to do this, so can I swap today's workout for tomorrow's workout, and he'll usually say, cool.

Or another thing I've done with him more recently since I've been a Woop user is I'll say, hey, my recovery score is low today, I'm going to take it easier, and he'll be like, cool. So that is one thing that's been a more recent thing since I've started using WOOP. So you've been on WOOP for how many months now? How many months has it been? I think it's probably been about six months. Cool. Something like that.

So what are some things that you've found in using the product? Number one, it definitely is making me sleep more than I was before. Yeah. I guess I just always assumed I was getting enough sleep, but it wasn't until I started wearing a whoop that I, well, first of all, understood time in bed does not equal sleep. I know. That's such an important misconception.

Yeah, that was like a, I mean, it's obvious, but it's something I never really thought about. And then once Woop actually showed me, okay, you were in bed for, eight and a half hours but you actually slept less than eight hours yeah um suddenly i'm like okay maybe i should go to bed half an hour earlier right um so that's number one i'd say is just getting more sleep um number two is what i mentioned before that on days where i have a low recovery score um i'll sometimes adjust how i work out that day and um maybe not push myself quite as hard as i otherwise would have i would think in in your sport overtraining must be like the biggest problem oh for sure because like just by virtue of getting fit as an iron man you're you're overreaching your body all the

time right and yeah i would be almost scared doing it without whoop knowing how much i'd know about the body now yeah it's um it's definitely something a lot of triathletes especially long distance iron men triathletes will overdo the training and my coach is actually known as the recovery coach because one of his his things is all about not overtraining and he was he was a swimmer back when he was younger and he overtrained and I think now realizes like the importance of taking the recovery but yeah the whoop's definitely been helpful in terms of like showing me quantitatively which days I may be pushing it, or I maybe should, like, just reduce the power on the bike just a little bit so I can, you know, keep the blood flowing, but recover today and then hopefully be

green the next day. What's the highest strain you've gotten on WOOP? Oh gosh. I mean, when I went to the Purple Patch Pro training camp earlier this year, I think for a week straight, I was at 20.5 every day. Oh my God. That's like insane. So for those of you not on WOOP, those scales out of 21. And if you're at a 20.5, I mean, it's exponential, so it gets increasingly hard. So that's really intense. And then the amazing thing about you and I'm sure other people who are at a near professional level is like the rate of recovery is really impressive.

Like when I ran, I don't know, the Boston Marathon, I knew I didn't train for it properly because I was red for the next three days. Like my body was crushed. Whereas you probably were doing 20.5s every day, and then, you know, one of those days you probably woke up even with a green recovery. Yeah. No, it's been interesting to see that. Probably that week I was mostly yellow, maybe a couple of reds. Yeah, okay. But yeah, but then if I, what I found is if I just take one recovery day, that will usually be enough to bounce me back into green. To bounce you all the way back up, which is cool, too. It's cool to see your body respond. Totally.

What are some things that you've done from the standpoint of, you know, optimizing around recovery, just lifestyle decisions, diet, anything like that? Yeah. So, yeah, I'd say probably the three main things would be number one sleep. Yeah. So I definitely get better recovery scores if I sleep more and sleep better than if I sleep less. On sleep, do you have anything specific that you try to do before bed or? You know, I've been, like, getting pointers from you and your podcast and everything. I know, I've gotten really weird about it. I don't know if I have anything to add beyond what you already know, since I get most of what I know from you guys. But I have found that going to bed earlier and consistently help.

So I have four little kids after I put them to bed around 8 o'clock. Yeah. I try to go to bed after that. If it's a good night, I'll just try to go to bed right after that, not look at my computer screen between their bedtime and mine. Also, I try not to drink too much water right before bed because I do find that otherwise I will wake up multiple times at night. Also, like, turning the AC on a bit more has helped me in my room.

I get warm really easily, especially when I'm training a lot. I just find my core temperature rises when I'm sleeping. That's actually a thing, I think. If you're training really heavily, your core temperature will drop and you'll emit more heat. Yeah. So I found at the times when I'm training, almost over training, like the week at the training camp, sometimes I'll even get a little bit of the night sweats. And that is definitely a sign like, okay, you're training a little bit too hard. Yeah, die it back. Yeah. Okay, so that's sleep. You said there was two other things. Oh, yeah. So I'd say number two, nutrition. So I try to make sure I mean, overall just eat a lot. You probably eat a lot.

I do eat a lot. And then after any hard workout, I'll try to make sure I consume protein pretty quickly after the workout. And like how would you describe your overall diet? I mean, obviously there's so many different strategies out there. Yeah, my strategy so far has just been to eat a lot of everything. And I tend to, you know, I think I tend to eat pretty healthy stuff, but I also don't, like, count calories, I don't try to think about it too much. Oftentimes, I'll just listen to my cravings and then just consume a lot. Yeah, right. I think that endurance athletes, I could be wrong

about this, but my sense is that endurance athletes can worry a little bit less about calorie consumption than, say, like, bodybuilders, professional crossfitters, things like that. We had Katrin on the podcast earlier on, and she was talking about how she literally will weigh all her food. And because she's so, this is the woman who won the CrossFit games, she's so focused on making sure she gets exactly the right amount of food. But I feel like a lot of the endurance competitors have spoken to, like, yourself, it's somewhat similar where it's like, I just want to eat as much as, like, my body's craving.

And, and, you know, it doesn't seem like you have to be quite as focused, too, on, like, the tradeoff between carbs and protein. Right. Because you're just burning so much. many calories. That's how I feel. And I know there's some long-distance triathletes out there who really believe in the high-fat, low-carb or no-carb approach. But I haven't ever done that myself. Yeah. And then a lot of this is what's right for you. Yeah. Yeah. Now, with protein, are you eating meats or are you actually taking protein powders? I'll do both. So I like to make shakes after my hard

workouts just to quickly get some protein. Get something in the system. Yeah, I'll put a couple of scoops of way and then, you know, some ice and almond milk and avocado and a banana and some blueberries. Wow, sounds great, Ed. Yeah, it's, it's, it's throwing some almond butter. It kind of, it's, uh, I kind of have been testing out different proportions of different things to get the right consistency and everything, but I've come up with a recipe I kind of like. And, uh, something like breakfast what do you eat in the morning breakfast i try to eat um eggs almost every morning yeah and it depends if i'm if i'm doing like a 530 a m swim practice i'll have um maybe like a granola bar or something right before i go swimming and then i'll have uh like a three three eggs and avocado sandwich that

kind of thing nice nice and then and then you'll do something again closer to noon yep i usually we'll have lunch depending on my training schedule i tend to eat lunch on the earlier side like 11 o'clock um after whatever morning workout i do and then uh so you'll actually have had two meals before your next workout well no i'll a lot of times i'll do something between this i'll i'll do swim breakfast some other workout lunch okay and then another workout so you'll sometimes do three or four days usually two to three yeah two to three yeah wow And is there any weightlifting in this repertoire? There is.

A lot of it's body weight stuff, but strength training is something. I didn't realize how important it was for triathlon until I started working with my coach. And it's like actually a pretty important part. Pretty fundamental. Pretty fundamental, yeah. In what aspects? I'd say a big thing is just injury prevention actually. Yeah.

And especially as you get older, doing the strength training can help just with stability and that core strength can just help prevent injuries that might otherwise happen. That makes sense. Now you were saying there's a third thing. Oh, so the third thing I'd say is active recovery. And by that I mean if you need to take an easier day, it's actually better, I think, to do a little bit of easy exercising than nothing at all just so you get the blood flowing and so well like this morning for example i got on the bike and did an active recovery session where i was just on the bike for

45 minutes just easy spin um you know just getting the blood flowing and with something like that like how i guess how focused are you on your numbers during all these different workouts because i know it's like in some cases you want to have a lot of information because you want to see how you're improving but if you're doing this three times a day too it's like you also don't want to be like overwhelmed and putting too much pressure on yourself totally i'd say for the recovery sessions which um actually a majority of the workouts i do are recovery sessions totally um the way i think about it is if i'm on my indoor trainer i should be able to watch Netflix and really enjoy it and be able to pay attention to what i'm watching and not think too much about you know the power

numbers that I'm generating or the heart rate numbers. For me, that's active recovery. That's the more qualitative way of thinking about it. I guess the quantitative way would be, I want to make sure my heart rate doesn't go above 140 beats per minute. And even if it's at like 120, that's good. I know that above 140, I start to build up some lactate and start to get closer to that threshold and everything.

So your max heart rate's why, Lorena? 200, maybe a little less? I think it's probably in the more like 190. Right. I'm not sure exactly. Yeah, so you got to figure 140 is like 65% max, something like that. I guess, yeah, I haven't done that math exactly. But actually, the way I came up with the 140 is when I've done lactate threshold test, you know, where they prick your blood.

You want to be below your anaerobic threshold. Exactly. And it's right around, for me, like 150. is where I start to get to like two millimoles of lactate. That makes sense. And so anything above that is not really sustainable for a long period of time. So I feel like 140 is far enough below that where I can just be going at that heart rate for hours and be okay.

That makes a lot of sense. So, okay, so we've talked about some of the things you do for recovery. Where does stretching fit in? Are you pretty obsessed with it or are you kind of just getting into it? I used to be pretty obsessed with it as a runner, and I haven't been as good with stretching as I probably should be recently. So it's been on my to-do list to really figure out the right stretching routine. Yeah. I think, though, one of the mistakes, or one thing that's different these days than back when I was a runner in college is having the stretching be kind of more active and less just like static stretching.

You know, we used to do a lot of static stretching, which I, and I'm not an expert in this area, and it's something I want to learn more about, but my understanding is that's, like, not actually as good for you anymore. As stretching with some degree of movement. Exactly. You know, if you're, like, stretching your hamstring, lie on your back and, like, get a rope and kind of... Kind of lean into... Yeah, kind of pull in, and, like, move back and forth. Back and forth a little bit, that kind of...

That's what we would do in college with Squash. Like, we brought in this woman, Beth, who was really terrific. at that type of stretching because I had been used to where you would just sort of like sit still and try to touch your toes type stuff and and she was all about yeah trying to create like a little bit of movement yeah with every stretching position yeah that makes sense and I've done some yoga and some Pilates I guess Pilates is more strength than stretching but yoga I find is also a pretty good way to loosen up yeah what type of yoga do you like to do I There's a company called Jazz Yoga.

I don't know if you've heard of it, but the founder has made all these videos, and it's yoga for athletes. Oh, interesting. And she has a whole series of videos for triathletes. And it's like, these are the yoga poses for before you go swimming or after you go swimming. And these are the poses for before and after a bike

or before and after a run. So it's, I found those pretty useful, actually. That's cool. So for you, like, if you, you think about uh if you think about your career right now within within um iron mans and competing in triathletons like what do you look back on as being the um the biggest success that you've had um well i mean probably the biggest so far was my first iron man race which was in lake placid uh back in july of last year and so this is where you literally win you

won the Ironman. I won it, yes. So it was, I think I had the benefit of having never done one before. I probably didn't realize how much it was going to hurt. So I went into it without being as afraid of as I probably should have been. So you think that you were able to push yourself harder on some level because you were fearless? Maybe a little bit. A close friend of mine who's done a bunch of Iron Man races, who was also a runner back when he was in college. That's what he said to me. He's like, you're lucky because you don't know how much pain. You don't have a memory of the pain.

That's right. So I guess is there anything to back that up? Like, after the race, did you feel a lot worse than you now feel after races? Oh, yeah. I definitely hurt a lot more after that race for a couple of days than the other races I've done since then. So that's interesting. So, yeah, there's... Although, so that was six months into your training.

That's right. That was July of 2018. Whereas now you're, I don't know, closer to 18 months in. So you would think that you would be somewhat better at it now, right? Yeah, I think... I guess my point is you can't... Better at pushing myself harder, you mean? Well, I was just going to say your fitness level may have been improved over 18 months.

No, I think it definitely has. So the idea that your body was more... run down after that first race would make sense independent from you winning it right like independent from you like really pushing yourself right it just seems like you would be more run down sure and i think also my body just wasn't it had never been through you know nine hours yeah it's a shock to the system yeah i'd never ever worked out for nine hours straight in my life before what are the quick stats on the the stuff that you do in an Ironman just for someone who's not familiar? Sure.

So it's a swim bike run in that order. The swim is 2.4 miles. The bike is 112 miles and the run is 26.2 miles or a whole marathon. Yeah. So like anyone listening, that's, you know, each one of those is an enormous endeavor in its own. You're doing three of them over the course of like nine hours. Right. So my body just never done anything for nine hours.

Like probably, I don't know when I had ever focused on any one thing for a nine hours. nine hours, nonstop. No, that's crazy. So, just mentally. So your coach, was he just blown away after that? Like, you just won this thing? He, like six months later when he was like, hey, maybe we'll do a half this year? One thing I like about my coach was he's like, yeah, that was all right.

Oh, good. He keeps you going. Yeah, yeah, he does. I like that. You know, he's, he never, like, tells me how great I am. He always reminds me how much more I have, you know. Has your, like, on the day, race routine evolved at all like the sorts of things you'll do right before what you'll eat yeah it has um

i've uh i mean i've gotten into kind of uh pre race routine where you know i'll do some running and swimming before the race on the you know the morning before the race and then um i've also been experimenting with nutrition during you'll actually run and swim before yeah just like uh just warm up so like do a 10 or 15 minute run And then, you know, when you're at the starting line and you have some time before the race, I'll hop in the water and, you know, swim for 15 minutes and do some different, you know, drills and that kind of. That's kind of a fascinating concept, like running and swimming before. Yeah, just to warm the body.

Yeah, but that's a sign that you're, you know, a stud, right? Like, you're in a position to be warming up before. I don't know about that. It's just a sign that, like, I feel like I need to be doing something. Yeah. So I don't start out cold. And then from a nutrition standpoint, are you just banging goos the whole time, or what's your policy there? Yeah, so, and that Lake Placid Iron Man, which was my first one, I actually made rice cakes that I took on my bike, and I'd eat one of them every hour during the bike.

You have to turn this into a side of business. I read about it in this book that basically talked about how to make all these different types of things you can eat while training. and so I made some of the rice cakes with egg and some with peanut butter and banana and honey. Oh, cool. And it was nice to consume some real food because, again, if you're going to be out there for nine hours, just having goo for nine hours,

like I didn't like the sound of that. And will you be having caffeine as well? Caffeine is something I more recently have introduced, I think. During the race. During the race, yeah. In your day-to-day life, do you drink caffeine? I do now. Okay.

I didn't for the first 35 years of my life, but the last five years I've gotten into it. So I'll have like one or two cups of coffee every day. Okay. I find it does help with training. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a stimulant. It definitely is. There's no question. It's interesting, though, like the less you drink caffeine, the more powerful of an effect it has.

True, true. That's like the catch-22, right? Yeah. So, like, I know some athletes who don't drink coffee for the sole purpose that when they then consume caffeine during specific events, it gives them this massive, you know, jolt. I see. For me, as a triathlete, I find that having that cup of coffee, either before the morning workout or between one workout and the next will just give me that little extra boost to keep me going. Yeah, it's interesting. it starts to also then affect sleep for some athletes, right?

So, who I'm thinking of, so Marcus Saul, who just, shout out, Marksale just won an NBA championship with the Raptors. He was saying that he would drink, he drinks these pre-workout things before a game. But if you've got like an 8 p.m. game and you're like slamming this caffeine, not to mention you're in a stadium with 20,000 screaming people, that's going to start to affect how you sleep later. Oh, totally. Now, I would think because you're doing this throughout the day and you're training so much, it probably has no effect on sleep. Yeah, I mean, I try not to drink caffeine past noon or 1 o'clock at the latest. So you're fine. Okay, so that's cool.

So what kind of recommendations do you have to someone who's listening to this who's thinking, like, yeah, I've always been interested in triathlons. I've never done one. I'm a decent runner. Yeah. I'd say give it a try, you know. it's it's really been for me an extremely rewarding thing to do and I just I love the I love the fact that it's three different sports too you know it's just more interesting I find then I was a runner my whole life and I was doing the same thing every day and it's nice to be able to mix it up and say

today I'm going to swim and run and tomorrow I'm going to be on my bike all day so you can kind mix it up that way you know that said um i had my first major accident seven weeks ago broke four bones yeah it's crazy two ribs and transverse process off my spine and um that was a bit of a wake-up call for me yeah right yeah so and i'm just just now kind of getting better from that um so what's it been like recovering from a serious injury you know the first four weeks i basically did nothing other than a lot of sleep and it was interesting to watch my whoop recovery score too yeah like you're a different person yeah i mean the day after my injury it was red but then i started sleeping like 10 hours a night for a while and i was like i was green i was just like all and i wasn't

training at all so i didn't really have strain other than the strain from my bones being broken And I was kind of like all green for a few weeks. You probably recovered a lot faster from your injury than you otherwise would have. Probably. Just by, you know, sleeping so much and like being well-behaved. I think the sleep must have really helped. So it was cool to see the whoop day to reflect that. And then when I finally got back to a point where I could start training again,

at least on the indoor trainer at first and just this past week started running and swimming again, And now my recovery score is like been yellow every day in some reds. And I haven't seen green in a while. Yeah. You'll miss the green. Yeah. And, you know, I've read a little bit about, I mean, there's all these different points of view on being injured, but the most positive, which I like, is that when you, when

you're injured, it helps you identify other things about your game or your sport. And you kind of start to unlock different potential, you know. Have you read the book The Art of Learning by Josh Whiteskin? I have referenced this book all the time. But this guy was the kid in searching for Bobby Fisher, you know, like the super talented chess player. And then he goes on after being one of the best chess players in the world. He goes on to becoming the Jiu-Jitsu champion, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion.

So you'd never expect the chess champion to become the Jiu-Jitsu champion. And his whole point was that he was really good at learning. He wasn't actually gifted at chess or fighting. He was just gifted at learning. And so he talks about all these different strategies. But one of them is when you're injured to try to really focus on the aspect of your body that's injured, whenever you're doing other things to try to channel energy towards it. And then he also talks about how as a mindset you'll identify these different things that maybe you wouldn't have thought of

because you're out of that sort of simple norm that you'd been living in in your normal training. This happens especially with sports that have like specific, very specific discipline. So like a quarterback, for example, if he injures his shoulder, all of a sudden is going to like get better at his footwork or something like that. So it gives these examples. It's really interesting. But I was just wondering if you've found anything like that in the process of being injured to sort of turn as a positive. Yeah, actually a couple of things. one is my

hip has been nagging me for the last several months actually and I probably should have given it time off and I never did and suddenly this is the first time in a long time I haven't had any hip pain and it's probably because I took four weeks completely off so I'd say that's one thing

a second thing I was in the pool last week with my swim coach and it's my first time back in the pool since the injury and I said look I just want you to look at my technique, let's make some improvements now that it's like I'm relearning it to some extent. Yeah. And he pointed out that my right arm recovery looked better than my left arm, even though the right arm's the one that had the broken shoulder. Interesting. And he said,

what's probably going on is because it's weaker, you're actually using less, less energy to kind of move the arm as you're recovering. Huh. And so your body's probably going to that minimal kind of energy state, which is the state you should have when you're recovering, because the recovery when you're swimming is all about not using any energy. You want to use the energy when you're pulling, not when you're recovering. Oh, interesting. And so he said my injured arm actually looked better than the one that was. So there you go. Fascinating insight from being injured, right? That's really cool. So for you now, like as you head back into your next event, what do you think will be your next event or have you not put it on the calendar yet i haven't put it on the

calendar yet because i i i want to be fully recovered before i yeah before you put it up yeah but hopefully soon hopefully within the next few weeks i'll figure all that up talk a little bit about the mindset of being of competing in an iron man you know like how do you push yourself through the pain right like and and and by the way do you do any techniques like around meditation or visualization or anything like that? I don't do too much of that, although I think I could benefit from it if I did. I do enjoy listening to Headspace sometimes, so that's been cool. That also, I find, I know you're not supposed to do it right as you're falling asleep,

but I find it does help me if I can't fall asleep. Well, actually, Headspace, I think, has a sleep component now. Oh, that's right. That's right. They do have that. but um so um but uh sorry the pain you know oh yeah the pain so i imagine it's excruciating yeah so i find one way i deal with the pain and also just the kind of length of being in an iron man race yeah for eight to nine hours is um i really look at the numbers and i i focus more on

the metrics and i know um this is the power of the power of the number of the numbers and i know um this is the power I need to be averaging on the bike in order to, you know, hit the split I want to hit. And if I just really focus on, okay, I've got to keep my power above this number, or look at the, sometimes I'll also look at the pace that I'm riding, and, you know, this is how fast I'll go based on this pace. Then it kind of turns it more into this, like, real-time game where I'm just constantly trying to... So it keeps you focused on the moment. Exactly.

So it keeps me focused on the moment. I think that is a big part of it, where if you think too much about the fact that you're going to be in pain for hours and hours and hours, then it's easy to, I think, just slow down. But if you're just like, no, for this next minute, I need to be averaging this power. You know, that's so interesting. I find that when I go for a long run, and the best analog here I have is running the marathon, Boston Marathon, like I feel like I was spacing out so much. And so it's interesting that you're able to stay that present.

Which obviously is a reason probably why you've been so successful. Like I almost, I feel like sometimes I'll go for a run and I'll be a little surprised where I even am, you know, as I'm sort of like coming to the run. You know, like I realize I'll have taken a, you know, gone this way and like all of a sudden I'm in Cambridge or whatever. And sometimes I'll often do that on training days, especially recovery days. But if I'm in the middle of a race, I've kind of just locked into that number. Yeah, in that moment, like what does my number need to be? If it starts to drop, have that kick me back up. Look at my heart rate, look at my power, know where those should be.

Yeah, you have to stay super focused on that. Now, will you use ibuprofen or creams or anything like that? I don't use any of that stuff. Have you ever had issues with cramping? Not in any race. I've cramped a few times, you know, during training runs, but it's not common. And will you take any supplements around that stuff, magnesium or salt tablets or any of that stuff? I don't, no.

Good. Good for you Cool Anything to add on the Iron Man front We're glad you're recovering from this injury That was scary Feeling good to finally be able to run and swim again Do you do anything around

Foam rolling or Norma Tech Or some of these tools that are used for recovery? I do like to use the foam roller Just to roll up my calves my hamstrings, quads, that kind of thing. I've used the normatech a few times, but not consistently. Trying to think what else. Yeah, not really, not much else.

Well, I mean, congratulations on your career, everything that you've done, both technology and this new foray into being, well, almost a pro. Are you going to technically go pro, or what's your take on that? Explain amateur status versus professional status. Well, I think the main difference is once you're a pro, you pay one fee and you can enter any races you want that year without paying each time.

And you're also eligible for prize money if you're one of the top finishers in a race. Oh, and I guess the third thing is you start the race. The gun goes off for the pros, usually like 10 minutes before the amateurs. So, whereas, like, as an amateur, you pretty much, you're still in the same race, you're starting 10 minutes behind the pros, but so far for me, that's, that's been fine, and I've been enjoying it, and I can still, you know, kind of see how I would have placed among the pros if I'd been in the pro race, but I, I don't know, I'm just turned 40 years old, and I'm not sure if many people go pro, pro at age 40. And my coach, who also coaches a bunch of pros, he said to me, you know, being a pro isn't necessarily fun. So if you want to go pro, you know, we can talk about it. But, you know, there are not a whole lot of reasons to go pro if you can have fun as an amateur. No, that makes

a lot of sense. What got you interested in working with us here at Woop? Well, So like I said, I fell in love with your product, and it was one of your investors who first introduced me to the company and the product, and then I, you know, Eric Paley. That's right. Eric introduced us, and I met with you. You gave me a whoop to try out, and I thought to myself, okay, I'll give it a try, but I didn't actually think I would, I didn't think I'd fall for it, but I did. And for me, just seeing the recovery score every morning, seeing how much I'm sleeping, it was just really addictive. And then I got one for my wife, and then my brother and his wife got them. And they're not, I mean, they're all active, but none of them are like serious athletes, but they all got hooked too.

That's cool. And so when I realized that, I thought, okay, these guys are on to something. Yeah. Well, we're super excited to have you as a member of the team, and we're going to continue rooting for you in all these Iron Man's, Ed. Thank you very much. It's great to be here today, well. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Thanks again to Ed for coming on the show, and we're excited to have him working with us here at WOOP. If you're not already a WOOP member, you can join our community for as low as $30 to begin. We provide you with 24-7 access to your biometric

data, as well as analytics across strain, sleep, recovery, heart rate variability, and more. The membership comes with a free whoop strap 3.0. We offer 6, 12, and 18-month memberships. The more you sign up for, the more you save. If you enter the code Will Ahmed at checkout, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, will give you $30 off a membership, just for listening to this podcast. For our European customers, the code is Will Ahmed E.U. And that'll give you 30 euros off when you join. And for our current members, you can upgrade to the Woopstrap 3.0 and get access to all the new Woop Live features by following the link in your Woop app. If you're out of contract, you'll literally get the 3.0 for free when you commit to another six months.

Check out Woop.com slash The Locker for show notes and more, including links to relevant topics from this conversation and others. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Whoop podcast on iTunes, Google, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. We'd love to hear your feedback. You can find me online at Will Ahmed. I try to respond to everyone who reaches out. And you can also follow at Whoop on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

You can email The Locker at Whoop.com with any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions you may have. Thank you again to all our listeners, to all. our Woop members, we love you.