WHOOP Podcast - From Pain Cave to Podium: Fintan McCarthy's Rowing Journey to Gold

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

On this week’s episode, WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed is joined by two-time Olympic Gold Medalist Fintan McCarthy. The Irish Lightweight rower has been dominating the sport for several years now alongside his partner Paul O’Donovan. McCarthy started rowing professionally when he was 15. He's won 3 European Championships, 3 World Championships, and two gold medals at the Tokyo and Paris games. Will and Fintan discuss how Fintan became a rower (1:45), breaking through the pain threshold (3:54), how to effectively train (5:03), training cadence as a pro (6:35), breathwork techniques (8:16), Fintan’s Olympic experiences (13:10), his WHOOP data in Paris (18:35), sleep tips (22:30), winning gold with his partner Paul O’Donovan (26:51), external factors while rowing (31:17), in-race communication tactics (33:09), Fintan’s guide to recovery (37:46), and winning a gold medal (40:55).Resources:Fintan’s Instagram Follow WHOOPwww.whoop.comTrial WHOOP for FreeInstagramTikTokXFacebookLinkedInFollow Will AhmedInstagramXLinkedInSupport 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

When you're at the top of your, you're like physical peak and your condition, you really feel it. And you can feel the difference from other races. And we got through that semifinal and we kind of both said to each other how excited we were to get going because we didn't need to dig into our energy reserves to win. And we won that semifinal by quite a lot. What's up, folks? Welcome back to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance.

If you're thinking about joining Whoop, you can try Whoop for free for 30 days. That's a great deal. Check it out, Whoop.com. I got an Olympian lined up for you this episode, gold medalist Finton McCarthy. The Irish lightweight rower has been dominating the sport for a number of years now alongside his partner, Paul O'Donovan. McCarthy entered the professional rowing world at the age of 15 and has since won three European championships, three world championships, and of course, back-to-back gold medals. at the Tokyo and Paris games.

Fenton and I discuss how Fenton got started in rowing, the mental aspect of embracing the struggle that is rowing, Fenton's unique breathing technique while racing and breathing techniques you can do, his Olympic experience in Paris, his whoop data and his sleeping tips, and then we look ahead to Fenton's pursuit for another medal in L.A. 2028. A reminder, I want to let everyone know that we've got our best sale of the year. that's right around the corner so please take advantage of that and if you have a question once you answered on the podcast email us podcast at whoop.com call us 508 443 4952 here is my conversation with

gold medalist finton mccarthy okay finton welcome to the wup podcast thanks thanks for having me no it's cool to be here we've got two gold medals on uh on the desk here so that's always a good stuff yeah well we'll definitely get to to the olympic golds but i guess i wanted to start with just, how did you first get into rowing? I guess it wasn't like a natural thing for me. I guess as a kid, I had a twin brother growing up. Well, I still do have a twin brother, but yeah, yeah. You know, that competitive sort of aspect between siblings is there.

And then once you're twins, it's just dialed all the way up. So I guess throughout our early years, I probably went down the more academic route. Well, he was quite sporty, especially in Ireland, the kind of traditional Gaelic football and hurling side of things is pretty popular. So he was very involved in like soccer and Gaelic football. And I guess I tried for a bit, but, you know, when your twins better than you're new at something, you kind of tend to let them have it and find your own thing. So that's kind of eventually what started happening to me. I just wasn't involved in many sports

and I think when I came to about 14 or 15 I decided like I need something physical. Obviously at the time I didn't think, I wasn't thinking about it this way but it really kind of gave me another community and another family I guess and I saw something there for me and the rowing is kind of one of those sports

where it's very honest like whatever you put in you usually get out from it and you can kind of see the correlation between working hard and and achieving results so i think that kind of drew me in really early and just the people around me as well that were really encouraging you know i had some really good coaches our coach actually um who coaches us now who's coached me for the last two olympics he's been my coach since i was about since i started really since i about 15 or 16 so I've been around rowers my whole life. I went to a boarding school called St. Paul's, which had a very good rowing program. And I went to Harvard, which had a good rowing program. And I would say the common characteristic amongst good rowers that I knew was this like very high pain threshold. Like rowing was as much about rowing as it was about struggling. And it was like, how good are you at struggling? And I'm curious if that was something. that you realized early on and getting good at it. Yeah, yeah.

You need to be able to sit in that paint cave and just ride it out. But because racing is so hard, it's nearly kind of embedded in the culture that, you know, rowing training is hard and you've got to push yourself every day. But, you know, sometimes it's not always the best thing to do and you need to, like, dial it back and look at where you can afford to maybe take things a bit easier and just get in that zone two kind of stuff and and sit there and work there which which is still hard you know it's difficult to to sit on a wrong machine for like two hours twice a day i remember like having breakfast with friends the days that they had to do the the two k test on the irk which nasty why don't you

describe what the two k test is for people who are less familiar with rowing so it's basically the the gold standard um measure of rowing like all our races you know the olympics the world championships they're all over 2k obviously when you're on the water there's sort of like a technical um aspect of it but when we're in the gym on the wrong machine usually the c2 it's kind of the the classic um instrument of of torture i guess so that's yeah it's basically the standard measure of how physiologically good you are at rowing yeah i mean it's 2000 and as fast as you can do it yeah exactly and you know depending on your level that's like a six minute or seven minute, just absolute.

Yeah, pain. Pain. Like, you get to a stage where obviously you have to pace it, you know, six minutes long. You can't be at your absolute max from start to finish. But it's because it's so in between like something long and something really short, it's pretty much you're riding that red line between just going too hard and and holding back.

So sometimes it can go like horribly wrong because you misjudge it. slightly and you get maybe 16 or 17 hundred meters in and you're finished so it is really about dialing in and kind of knowing what you're capable of i mean obviously there's a certain there's like a certain training cadence to rowing which is going to make you better i'm i'm interested on the mental side like what have you found effective when you're in that period of your body wants to stop your mind wants to stop and you push through that yeah well i usually kind of try and take myself out of it i know you obviously have to be present and in a race is what usually when you're hurting the most you know training you might hit that level you know in the last interval of a

of a tough session but it's kind of easy to to manage that because you're you know you might be in there for like 30 or 40 seconds for me focusing on the process of racing is really important just to distract. I'm pretty much just looking for distractions the whole time. What I usually do is break the race down into maybe quarters and then in each quarter I'll say, okay, well, this is going to take me probably 60 strokes. So I'll count like 20, then I'll count 10 twice, then I'll count 5 twice, and the 10 and 20 and then onto the next one. So you're trying to break it into almost like the smallest intervals you can. Yeah. Because it's it was easier to say, okay, one more than it is to say you've got, you know, 600 more or something, right? And sometimes

I'll like surprise myself during it and say, okay, well, we're going to, we're going to count a 50 this time. And just keep it fresh that way. But yeah, just focusing on on the task at hand and, you know, not how long you have left to go, but the next stroke and the next breath or something like that is usually my way of coping. how does breathing fit into this have you found that there's certain breathing techniques that have helped yeah definitely during you kind of have to breathe a certain way because the way it works is when you slide up this rowing seat is is on is on rails right so you have to it moves yeah so it's sort of a full body full body thing but when you're at the catch which is the front position of the stroke you're quite compressed so your your thighs are they're kind of up against your chest so you need to work the breathing in a way that you're taking a breath just as you begin the stroke

because if you arrive up at the catch and your lungs are full of air you don't have that braced affects your yeah yeah you need to be braced to take the load at the cartridge is where it's heaviest fascinating yeah i guess in racing for me it's usually like two breaths of stroke but it just becomes second nature you know you don't really two breaths of stroke so do that what would that look like for okay let me think about it when i'm doing the motion i'll get off to the catch and then i'll i'll breathe out quickly so you do two inhales yeah interesting quick ones yeah yeah like that yeah and at the end of a race obviously it gets pretty tough because your breathing's going off and you're you're just sucking in air like your your throat will be will be pretty

pretty raw just because you have to do it that quickly. I know some guys do one, like one of the, yeah, huge. During the drive, I guess. I remember watching, I think it's Mahe-Drizo. He's a Kiwi scholar. He's won many Royal Championships and Olympic medals. Sort of when I started rowing, I think he was a big one-breath-per-stroke guy. But I think I quickly learned that wasn't for me, you know, my lungs aren't probably as big as his.

I mean, it's interesting. It feels like it's independent from how big your lungs are because if you inhale twice, you're probably pulling in more air. Yeah, that's true. It depends on, I guess, your rhythm as well, because the stroke rate is higher or lower, depending on how you've trained, how you've set off the boat. There's just so many variables and things that you need to get individually right for yourself. So when you erged, do you do the two breaths?

Yeah. Okay, so you always do that. Yeah, always. But when you're doing maybe an easier session or a longer kind of zone two work or maybe some threshold stuff, the cadence is going to be different. So it might be deeper breaths, shallower breaths. But it's funny talking about it because it's not something you get on and think, you know, I'm going to take two breaths for stroke and do it here and here.

It's just built in there. Yeah, it's probably a form. Yeah. it's just interesting to me though that the way you breathe is part of your form because if you compare that to most sports like you know the way a basketball player breathes isn't actually affecting or it isn't a way that he or she's thinking about their yeah yeah and it's you know it's like i said we're not we're not thinking about it too much but it definitely does affect how you move during the stroke and it's going to affect your technique and affect your i've found that that at that Athletes in, you know, what you might call more free-form sports, like the very best ones do actually find a way to breathe under certain situations. I was recently with Virgil Van Dyke and with Christiana Ronaldo, who are two like footballing stars. And they have techniques they do right before like a big kick or something. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in general,

I think that breathing is probably an underrated component to all sports and probably all activities, if you will it's just that it's explored less yeah and like those things they center you as well totally it's your whole mind body moving in the same direction yeah yeah and just prepares you for the you know the task at hand like i was saying earlier the process of of doing a race and and all that stuff you do need to be present and i find thinking about it can really bring you into just bring you into the moment and get you get you ready yeah i don't know if you're a golf fan but Tiger Woods I noticed would do this and I don't even know if he practiced doing it but everything would get really slow when he had to do something like huge like when he was under the most pressure

if you go back and watch like when he chipped in on the 16th hole at the masters or made like this really long put on the 17th hole at uh players invitational like everything gets super slow and his breathing gets really really slow and it's funny because no one really talks about it but it's something that I've noticed that the really top athletes have found ways to do. Okay, so you just won a gold medal. Congratulations. Thank you. Walk us through a little bit like sort of the build up of the Olympics and ultimately getting to win that event.

Yeah. It's been obviously a shorter cycle this year. The last Olympics ended up happening in in 21. So we didn't really have the usual four-year gap. So I feel like for me anyway, I was pretty back into training a month or so after the Tokyo Games with the goal of Paris being the last Olympics for our weight class. So in rowing, there's a lightweight weight class and an open weight class. So we have to weigh 70 kilos before, two hours before every race.

They're actually getting rid of that class now after. Paris. So we knew that this was going to be the final, final Olympic games for, for this weight class. What is that in pounds? 154. Okay. And what is your normal, like, walking weight, you know, if you weren't trying to be under a certain number? Yeah. I would say, I'm not sure in pounds, but, uh, in kilos. Yeah, maybe 76, 77. So that's probably like 15 pounds more. So, so what, you're normally like 167. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you cut to 154 yeah two hours before every race yeah yeah yeah I mean that adds like a whole another dynamic to this competition yeah it's a different sport yeah yeah um and

especially because the way in is two hours before it's not like you can go to extreme like dehydration yeah what wrestlers do and fighters do you know they'll do all these dehydration stuff and then the day of the fight they they weigh 20 pounds more yeah yeah because their way in really early right yeah their way ends like 24 hours before yeah yeah so for us like we still do use some of those techniques but we just need to be really careful because it is so close to the to the race and how often were the races in paris um every second day so every second day so what was your routine for training and eating when you're coming into a regatta office you're kind of tapering so there's not um you know

we don't have the usual five or six hours of training a day to do so you can get away with with a bit less food the way you have to manage it is it's totally different to a training day because you're trying to fuel around the training and also eat foods that are going to not sit in your stomach so you know the less fibre the better really so it's all a lot of kind of plain rice and and that kind of stuff just to get the carbs in Playing race, what else? Yeah, power raids. Powerades.

Yeah, I love a frozen powerade before the race, get the core temp down. The window of two hours, it's a funny one because not only you have to rehydrate whatever you've lost in the sweat down and then some to reach actual hydration. And then you have to also get energy on board, right? And then take all your supplements that you're going to take for racing. you know we're big um sodium bicarb users we're um we're big on on nitrates and and all caffeine you know all that kind of stuff so it's really hard to actually get that comfortably done within the two-hour period it's intense yeah yeah i mean in a sense the race starts three hours before the

race yeah so you have to actually train your body to be able to cope with that and to be able to ingest, you know, that amount of fluid and that amount of... So you would practice that? Yeah, yeah, big time. And what kind of caffeine would you take? It depends. Usually, some gels. Okay.

Yeah, some gels, maybe a tab. Some people have coffee, but I'm not a big coffee drinker, so I just like to get it straight in. And then the number of races that you had to do to get to the final? Yeah, two. two yeah which is you know sometimes we have four but because of the way the Olympics works there's 16 boats actually qualify for the Olympics so we'll go through a heat to get us into the semi-final but sometimes if you don't make it directly from the heat um you have another chance to make the semi-final which is called the repichage but we managed to avoid that one because you did

really well in the yeah because we won the heat so um the thing about that is though you'll have an extra race and an extra way in if you if you don't go to the semi straight from the heat so it's actually a lot more important for us to to make the semi-finals straight away than it might be for an open-way crew because you're putting an extra toll on your body by by sweating down again and racing again is it fair to say most of the winners of this division often go straight through Yeah, yeah. The bronze medalists from Greece actually went through the reposage, which was pretty unusual. Usually, yeah, the less races, the better. You've been on whoop for a while and you shared your data between July 20th and August 5th, which is when you were obviously competing. I mean, your data looks really good. I mean, it looks like the tapering works. Yeah. You know, you're resting heart rate. It was in the low 40s. You've got a recovery score on average.

that's in the 70s, HRV 122, which is a high HRV. Sleep performance 95% so you're getting a lot of sleep. Your sleep efficiency is very high, 90%. So that means you're getting a lot of REM sleep and slow wave sleep while you're in bed.

And then, you know, you're 50% green recovery is 50% yellow and you had no reds. Yeah. So you must have felt pretty good about that. Now, would you look at your data throughout this period? Yeah, yeah. in the lead up always yeah um and you know i have done since i think 2019 it's my first year on so just after my first world championships i kind of made the decision to you know go all in for for Tokyo so i got on and then uh you guys reached out to me i think after the olympics in in

in Tokyo um because i wore the i wore the bicep strapped so yeah i've been pretty pretty big we've used are since since then. So looking at the data during training is really important. For me, maybe during racing, I wouldn't look at it till the evening because at that point, you know, you can't do much about it. I guess it just gives an indication of how well I'm dealing with the training and how, you know, how sleep's going and all that kind of stuff. And we can adjust sessions then depending on how I'm feeling.

and also not just from like the recovery scores or what rupe is saying we we work a lot with the physiologists to just go into like the raw data side of things and look at the resting hurry trends and hrv trends and sometimes it's actually when i'm recovering not so well in terms of whoop but if if there's a certain trend with my hrv that um the training load is is high but i'm doing my body's working hard to recover from it yeah so we do a lot of um of looking at that and then we'll sit down kind of before the week is over to decide what we need to switch for for the next week and then after those big big sessions we have maybe two or three sort of key sessions during the week where we'll will um will really push the push the intensity and then all the other ones will kind

be about managing that low intensity stuff until the next big one comes around. Well, you actually are highlighting an important phenomenon. I think that's somewhat misunderstood at times about whoop and recovery, which is if you're in a sport where you're training to be like the pinnacle of fitness, when you're in that training phase, you actually do want to go through periods where your body's run down. Yeah. Like, because in a sense, that's the indicator that you're putting as much strain on your body as you can yeah and you don't want to overtrain to a point where your recovery won't come back even when you stop exercising but you you may want to see some yellow and some red recoveries like if you were only in the green during a training period

it'd almost be a sign that you were not putting enough strain on your body yeah during your workouts yeah for sure and it's just about managing it so that you can get to a day where you need to really go hard on a green and then survive the next few on a yellow it's like crush yourself yeah yeah yeah um but obviously it's easy to go to go too fair but that's why having something like wupisome is important for me anyway because we tread that line very very finely and it has it has gone too far in the past your data demonstrates that you're a good sleeper what are your what are your sleep tips for us like traditionally i'm probably not the healthiest when it comes to like sleep hygiene but I love the cold room and the dark room

I think that's really important like I will I will probably sit on my phone a bit a bit too long before before bed but the non-negotiable is that it's dark and cold have you ever worn blue light blocking glasses yeah yeah I have um sometimes I forget about them you know I need to have them right there so that I can throw them on before. Well, if you use your phone before bad, I think you should wear them. Okay. Because it'll give your, it'll just naturally give your sleeper boost, and it'll offset looking at your phone.

Yeah. Because blue light glasses essentially block blue light, blue light produced by your phone or television set, or even some lights just have blue light in them. And blue light tells your brain to stay awake. Okay. And so if you just wear these glasses, it's like they get out of jail free card for all bad screen device behavior. Can I grab a favor before?

Yeah, we'll give them to you today. But we discovered that they were so powerful for recovery that we started designing our own. Yeah. And we did this whole research study on finding the right tint to make the glasses effective. So anyway, they do really work. So you like cold and dark. Did you sleep in the Olympic Village? No, we were in a hotel.

Yeah. I think that's smart. I mean, I get that it's like a whole experience. But when I see photos of those beds, and like that environment it's crazy yeah i think in Tokyo we actually did sleep in the village um but it was pretty good in terms of the AC there you know we pretty much lived in in our room between races because you could you know crank it down to 16 and it'd be freezing i don't know what that is at fahrenheit 16 celsius that's cold yeah

it's pretty cold i'd always try and sleep that cold um 16 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit yeah which is really cold yeah yeah you kind of just have to adapt to the environment as soon as you can right so we we arrive in Tokyo we arrived in the in the village I think five days before our first race so it was a pretty quick turnaround um so it's just about yeah finding well for us yeah getting into that routine of like finding out how the AC works or how you know if we need to put up um like bin bags or trash bags I guess you guys call them on the on the windows to um to block out the light and stuff um so just getting into that as soon as as soon as you can for paris we stayed in a hotel just because the course was so far out from from the village and especially for us sweating down it just wouldn't

have been feasible to travel 90 minutes to weigh in um and all that kind of stuff i mean if i were you I would stay in the hotel just because the beds are probably so much more comfortable. Yeah, they were pretty comfy. And I know the cardboard beds get a lot of hate, but they're not too bad. They're not as bad as the way. Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't, I'd sleep on anything, so I'm not too fussy. I think it's crazy.

I mean, it's like you all trained for four years, like every day, you know, thinking about this peak performance, and then you show up for the Olympics and you're sleeping on cardboard. I mean, you know, to me, it's just like the antithesis. of optimal. Yeah, I think there's probably not as much thought put into that side of things for athletes as there maybe should be. If you want to win, you have to find workarounds for those things, the things that are in your control, I guess. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out Whoop at

Wooop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain, and you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. You've won your gold medals with Paul Donovan. Yeah. And Paul, how did you get to know him? We grew up in the same rowing club, so he would have been a couple of years older than me. So he was, but he was really good when he was young. So he was kind of the poster boy for rowing in our club. We were always told to run like Paul and train like Paul.

So I guess him and his brother, Gary, they won a silver medal for Ireland in our event in 2016. So they were the first, they're actually the first Olympic medal for rowing in the country. We do pretty much the same training program because we're like the same coach. And, you know, down to the equipment, the facilities. We started doing a bit of training together in 2019. It was my first, I think that was my first, my final year in college. So I finished all the age group stuff and me and my brother, Jake, did a European championship. that year and we came fifth and after that we started kind of swapping into into the double

with Paul and his brother Gary and then from that this combination came about so you and your brother would compete against him and his brother yeah yeah yeah and then at some point you sort of said like well maybe we should team up yeah we should have a look and and kind of open things up and see if we could find maybe a quicker combination and that's how and how do you how do you how do you test something like that you know is it is it like a you know f1 driver getting into a car and it's like you go around the race the car's a little faster than before yeah basically so there is four of us right so we we have two doubles and we'll have two guys race against the other two guys and then we'll come in and swap race again and then swap again so you you will have rode with each of the other guys

and then all that you know you take all that data you can can do it a load of different ways you can pick whoever went fastest but that is sometimes not the best because it's an outdoor sport so all the conditions are are variable um so basically all those things get taken into account and compared and the coach then decides what the best the best two guys for the job are and then you go to competitions now there's some aspect of like i mean you tell me but there's some aspect of like learning how your partner rose isn't there or becoming in sync yeah so couldn't some of that be a little misleading it's like if the two thoroughbreds haven't figured out how to row together they might not actually look as optimal on paper yeah yeah exactly

but it it's nearly a bonus if they're still going fast while not looking great because then there's improvements that can be made so you'll you'll also have some kind of video analysis Just your coach's eye will be like, okay, I can tell that the form wasn't perfect, but you still had this speed. Yeah, and even, you know, would come down to biomechanics in terms of like how the boat moves when the two guys are in it, but also what you're doing in the boat. So you look at like forces on the, on the gate, which is where the ore sits in the boat. You look at like stretcher forces. So how much force you're putting through your feet, how much is going through the gate. and yeah it's you can you can look at all that stuff too now would you and paul talk to each other

before races about how each of you are feeling and this and that or is it just sort of like hey i assume you're great let's go do this yeah that's pretty much it like it's pretty chill i think it can get over complicated sometimes and um we might take it too far in terms of like we don't usually have a plan we kind of just react to to what's going on in the race but i think because we do so much training together and we've raced together so many times before we usually will come to the same conclusion

within races without having to without having to say anything and I can sort of feel I can feel what he's doing and he can feel what I'm doing so if there actually doesn't need to be that much communication between us whereas it's different for

you know it's different for different crews but I think for us yeah it's pretty straightforward what would be something in the race that you would be reacting to it would be maybe conditions so if there's some wind uh that we weren't expecting or if they're you know a competitor does something completely different like they come out faster yeah yeah so usually because you can't affect when anyone else is doing we're quite internal and the best way to to go fast and wrong is just focus on yourself and try and get from the start to finish as quick as you can't but There are some tactics, I guess for us, we try and do a lot of work in the middle and the end of the race and not start too hard just so, you know, we're coming into the line at like top speed. But some of our competitors sometimes will go off quite hard because in rowing, you can see who you're beating. Like you can't, if you get ahead, then you can see everyone ahead of you and sort of watch them make moves and try and stay on top of them. So I think psychologically that's something that a lot of our big rivals go for. So like this, Swiss and the Italians usually have a pretty good start in there are our sort of biggest rivals.

The Greeks as well had a really good start in the Olympics. And we're usually known for being a bit slower out of the block. That would be something that we wouldn't take too much notice of. But just be aware of. You know, you don't want someone going ahead and then all of a sudden they're. they're two or three lengths off and you don't know what's happening. It's an interesting point about if you're in first, you can see where everyone is behind you.

I mean, it's the only, I'm trying to think of another sport where your back is to the finish line. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of a funny concept of itself. So it's why it's interesting thinking about how you position yourself throughout a race or how you know when to push harder. Now, will you ever speak during the race? Yeah, sometimes.

but it's just words you know you can't really go or now yeah something like usually it might as good good yeah I'm just like

we're good we don't really need to communicate yeah but I just like to let Paul know that I'm there with him and he can go

and I'll be there and if I don't say good then he'll he might know to just keep it steady to the finish but yeah I like saying stuff like that I don't know if you'd call it

adrenaline But from saying stuff like that, you get sort of an emotional reaction even. Like if I say, even to myself, like, we're good, this is good, it kind of triggers something in my brain anyway. And it'll sort of help. And, you know, it's a bit of a bit of a distraction for 10 strokes anyway. So I don't have to count those ones. You don't have to count this. Yeah.

Now, I think this is an obvious question. But if you're pushing at a slightly different intensity than Paul, will that affect? the boat like would it affect the form if if it was like drastically different then then yeah but you know i think if we're in you know if we're in maybe 20 or 30 watts of each other it won't be it won't be too bad just the main thing is to move move together move together yeah and usually that won't be affected too much because we're both going as hard as we can in a race so there's not too much difference. The issue there comes when

one of us might have gone a bit too hard at a certain point in the race and not have enough gas at the end of the race to finish and that's when the discrepancies in power comes and you can start falling apart and sometimes you see crews totally

just lose it in the last 10 because they've spent all their injury or someone has so it's it can be tough to manage but I think because we're so well drilled at this point and yeah we know ourselves so well I don't think that's happened to us in a long time

at the end of one of the interim races or like the semi-final would you and Paul like post-game it and be like oh I felt good at this point or not so good at this point or is it again just sort of it happened yeah yeah no a lot of the time I remember after a semi-final

we were both pretty excited about going into the final because it felt really good yeah yeah and feeling it's when you're at the top of your your physical peak and your condition you really feel it and you can feel you can feel a difference from other races and we we got through that semi-final and we kind of both said to each other how excited we were to get going because we didn't need to dig into our energy reserves to win and we won that semifinal by quite a lot against the swiss guys who had actually beat us a couple of weeks before well not a couple weeks I think it was six

maybe six weeks before so I think that was just like we were just proud in our training block and the fact that we got it right and we were able to turn that turn that around so when we do kind of dissect it and post game like that it's it's usually to do with

what we did coming coming into it and whether we need to include that again or leave it out and then during the race yeah it kind of just happens I think did you almost follow the same exact routine for the final races you did for the semifinal given how good you felt yeah but um we actually would have dropped maybe one session so because the race is a week long or the regatta's a week

long yeah um we try hit the earlier rounds a small bit fatigued so that when we start resting peaking yeah we can peak for the for the finals so we're still doing some some pretty unusual sessions in terms of like intensity in between our racing which i think might be something that i don't know if other if other teams do that what would be an example of an unusual session i don't want to give away all our secrets here we're we're hitting quite high intensities in between races so we'll go into you know zone three or four session in between races sometimes um not not a full one you know you won't be getting into like the 60 minutes of work but definitely yeah substantial amount given that like it's a race week and a workout like that will have some lactic as a buildup in

your in your body yeah yeah how do you find the most effective way to flush that um i think it's it's just cooling down properly right like you have to spend the time um checking for one because i think a lot of people will do the sessions and you think all that was really good that was great but you're trying to train your body to deal with lactate and to clear it. So part of that learning how to clear it is doing those cool downs and measuring because there's no point doing it and then being cooked for the race the next day. So you do need to just learn how to fuel during and after so that you recover and benefit from those sessions.

I don't think you can get around clearing lactate without doing that. sort of whatever it is 10 or 15 minutes of low intensity like there's no other way i found of clearing it like you can't sit in an ice bath or sit in recovery groups like it'll still be there yeah you find you have to do like the the cool down workout yeah or exercise and will you do a cold plunger or anything like that yeah yeah we usually it would be after uh a sweat down before the race so that you're not going into the race with your course temp, you know, so elevated. And this is the day before?

This is the morning of. Morning of, you'll do a cold punch. Yeah, yeah, two hours. Well, it'd be more than two hours before because we were weighing two hours before, but yeah, pretty early on the day of the race. That's interesting. Is that common amongst the sport, or that's something you do? I don't know.

I think cold plunging is common, but the timing of it will be different. I think a lot of people go after as well to bring the the temperature down now will you do cold plunging after training sessions or not not usually maybe more heat stuff yeah um after training it's interesting like a lot of the research is showing that inflammation actually has a benefit to yeah gains yeah and so if you're taking a cold plunge you're actually you know obviously suppressing that inflammation and there's some evidence as well that taking a cold punch before exercise or before weightlifting in particular can boost the effect oh really yeah i didn't even know that or there you go and so maybe you've already been a step out

ahead of this without realizing it yeah but it is an interesting piece sometimes you do want that obviously during during racing you want less inflammation but you actually need the inflammation to to get better and make the gains from training so um yeah during during training i try and avoid that stuff you try to avoid cold plunge but you'll stay warm yeah yeah yeah which just to say is not necessarily conventional wisdom in a variety of sports like a lot of sports will encourage you to do cold plunging after our training yeah so uh anyway the scientific research is still out what's the feeling of winning a gold medal a lot of relief to be honest yeah I think a good thing, crossing the line is the best part.

It's not the perfect race, but, you know, a pretty good race. You have to have a pretty good race to win an Olympics. And the feeling of doing that and being the best in your sport, it's obviously really rewarding. Like, I don't know how else to describe it, like emotionally and physically, it's, I hope everyone has something. in their lives that you can feel that way from because it's it is really cool and then the rest of it is kind of it's just nice to see your family and and you know see the national anthem and it's you feel proud um but definitely crossing the line is is the best part i think if i'm not mistaken the the lightweight division is not going to be in 2028 yeah yeah it's gone yeah i think it's

it's been taken removed from the Olympic program like indefinitely now yeah so that kind of piss you off i mean um or you're over it yeah i'm i'm over it now like i've got two in the lightweight category so i think that's that's plenty but i think the idea behind it was to make the sport a bit more inclusive because traditionally there's been a lot of you know tall guys who get sort of I guess talent ID'd and they generally are better at rowing because, you know, longer levers and

all that stuff. But now I think maybe one of the reasons that the event got cut is because we are getting pretty close to the heavyweight guys and when you talk even to other countries you talk about we train against our heavyweight double a lot and all other countries will and you know the differences aren't huge and we do beat our guys sometimes.

Which is amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of opportunity to explore what actually works for those people who don't have as, you know, the height advantage. Which you don't have just to say. Yeah, yeah. Just claim to. Yeah.

I'm not tall. Yeah. Yeah. So it is a cool opportunity to kind of try and find ways around that, whether it's like fitness or strength. or setting up the boat in a different way. Yeah, excited to try and find some hacks. So what do you think you're going to do for 2028? I really like the double as an event.

It's pretty personal. You know, there's two people. And it's a lot easier to manage than bigger boats. But it does depend on what the coaches want to do. So you kind of just have to show. up and go your fastest and then hopefully that will put you in a good position to win Olympic medal. Yeah. So you kind of hand the keys over to the coaches. Yeah. In a sense. Yeah. And they'll try different combinations and different bolts. They just go with what is

probably going to have the best chance at an Olympic medal. Well, this has been fascinating, Fenton, and I'm stoked for you that you've got two gold medals now. What's your? should we know about these metals that we're looking at on on the desk oh um i think they've probably passed through like thousands of of rubbing i see this one's got a few ding dings on it can i take a look at this yeah yeah have a look i think they're both probably pretty banged off at this point but um i will say i don't feel worthy holding this it's like it feels like it should just be in your possession at all times oh no i think it's nice one thing that you realize they're really heavy yeah yeah i think I mean this is heavy like I'm I feel some weight to it I think they're both am I

right in saying a pound is that like 600 grams maybe that sounds like that sounds like what this I mean this actually feels like it weighs more than a pound yeah maybe 1.3 pounds there you go yeah glad to know I'm calibrated up my biceps terrific yeah I think it's nice to share them around though like it's pretty cool seeing um especially like young kids holding them and it's because they've got like the event um yeah it's got written on the bottom yeah so so no one can steal it and then this one's nice too it's got a piece of um piece of the Eiffel Tower in from Paris yeah so that's um that's some iron from the original Eiffel Tower I think and I noticed that they did the Eiffel Tower in the background on yeah on the Paris one yeah

which is different I think I'm not sure they've done that before so yeah nice it's it's personal touch any favorite athletes that you met at the olympics didn't meet many um but i love um like i love endurance events so you know the ingobritzons or heroes of ours um and a lot of rowers too i know they're not um they might be as famous in terms of like the olympics but for us um there are some guys that have won even more Olympic medals than us

and it's really cool to just like see them constantly doing just grinding yeah these guys from Croatia the Sinkovich brothers they've won I think they won

they won like four four now four medals so yeah and they're four medals really good pals with them so it's it's pretty cool to see people

like that just consistently delivering and like it's cool to learn from them as well so well it's been great learning from you finton we're stoked to have you on on whoop and um wishing you nothing but continued success thanks thank you thank you big thank you to finton mccarthy for joining me on the show today to recap his gold medal performance reminder our biggest sale of the year is coming right around the corner. Stay tuned for that. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Don't forget about the all-new cloud knit band. Three great colors. That's our new Kashmir band. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you're a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. If you think about

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