WHOOP Podcast - Olympic bobsled silver medalist Lauren Gibbs shares how it's never too late to chart a new path in life

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

Olympic bobsledder Lauren Gibbs sits down with Mike Lombardi for a discussion on how it’s never too late to chart a new course for your life. Lauren started bobsledding at 30 years old, and less than 4 years later, she was representing the United States at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. She won a silver medal at those games with her teammate, Elana Meyers Taylor, and also won a gold medal at the 2020 World Championships. She discusses how she started bobsledding as "a joke" (2:35), finding your path in life (7:24), understanding your personal power (10:09), going "all in" (14:04), WHOOP and recovery (18:30), promoting parity in women's sports (25:34), body image and weight (31:32), how she found motivation on tough days (37:49), and how making little changes leads to major improvements (43:45).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

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the Whoop podcast, where we sit down with the very best, athletes, scientists, experts, doctors, and more. Learn what the best in the world are doing to perform and what we can do to unlock our own best performance. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of Whoop, and we are still on a mission to unlock human performance. We got a great guest today. But before we get to Olympic bobs letter, Lauren Gibbs, I'll remind you, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership. If you use the code will, WI-L, go to WOOP.com, check out the new WOOP 4.0, which has the latest and greatest in health tech monitoring, sleep, recovery, exercise, you name it. On this week's episode, Olympic bobsletter, Lauren Gibbs, sits down with Mike Lombardi for a wide-ranging discussion on how it's next.

too late to chart a new course for your life. Lauren's story is pretty incredible. She started bobsledding at 30 years old, and less than four years later, she was representing the U.S. in the 2018 Winter Olympics. She won a silver medal at those games with her teammate Alana Myers-Taylor and went on to have an incredible career, including a gold medal win at the 2020 World Championships. Lauren discusses her journey from college athletics to CrossFit and then ultimately the business world before discovering bobsledding. I mean, imagine that. You become an Olympic medalist just four years after learning how to do at age 30. Pretty amazing. What the road to the Olympics is like and just how much coaching, training, and financing it takes to support your Olympic dreams, the sacrifices it takes

to be an Olympian, how she uses Whoop to optimize her performance. And what it's like to be a woman in sport, including the hurdles and biases that exist and why she's advocating for greater parity. Okay, without further ado, here are Mike and Lauren Gibbs. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Woot Podcast. I'm Mike Lombardy, and today I am joined by Olympian medalist Lauren Gibbs. You know, I feel like you have such an interesting background. I would certainly not do it justice because it is so unique. So if you would, could you tell everybody, a little bit about yourself? So I am a 2018 Olympic silver medalist and 2020 world champion in the sport of Bob Sled.

I started bobsledding in 2014 at 30 years old. I tried out as a joke, and I guess eight years into the sport, the joke is now on me. I decided very early on in the process of trying out for Bob Sled that I would keep going until they were like, ma'am, this isn't for you. And that didn't happen until about a month ago when I didn't make the 2022 Olympic team. And I think that's an interesting like just conversation because everybody wanted to give me condolences. But man, have I had an incredible career that I'm incredibly proud of? And so, you know, it didn't end the way that I planned, but it ended the way that it was meant to end.

And I'm just so grateful for the past almost decade of experience in the Olympic space. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate you going there right away. My wife was an Olympian in 2012 and then just missed the 2016 team. And I know for us, watching the Olympics was very hard. It was a challenging period. How is this Olympic experience or, you know, the last few weeks been for you? I had a blast.

I had an absolute blast. I just had surgery, my right hip labrum. So I was watching my teammate Alonemeyer's Taylor, who I won Silverwood in 2018, compete in two women from a hospital bed, which is funny because she, watched me win world championships in 2020 from a hospital bed when she was giving birth to her son Nico. So it was like a little bit of a role reversal. It's definitely easier to compete in the Olympics than it is to watch your loved ones compete in the Olympics. I was laying there very early in the morning and I had a heart rate monitor on obviously as you do in hospitals.

And I hear alarms start going off, but I'm like so engaged in the race that I didn't realize it was me. And I hear a nurse outside being like, why is she in tech a car? And I was like, oh, shoot, someone's in tech authority. Only to realize they were talking about me. So my heart rate got up to 128, and my blood pressure was like something ridiculous as well. So I really enjoyed it. It's so much fun to watch new Olympians live their dream and, like, you know, experience things for the first time. It's also a lot of fun to see people who maybe struggled in 2018 come through.

Lindsay Jacob Ellis won three medals and, you know, that was her fifth Olympics. You know, Alana became the most decorated women's bobsledder and black winter Olympian. And so there was so much history made. There was a new discipline introduced in the monobobb, which is going to give more opportunities in the sport. And all of this going through, you know, COVID protocols and an Olympics in China and the complexities of that. And so I felt lucky to be able to be a part of it in some way. I talked to Alana every single day while she was there and tried to support her the best that I could. So, yeah, I had a blast watching it.

I can see how for some people it would be tough. But, you know, I'm just, I'm so proud of what I accomplished in the last eight years that I wasn't going to let not making the Olympic team tarnish any of that joy. That's great. You know, I think with the not traditional path, I guess, not that there's a traditional path of, bobsled, not getting to the sport until you were 30. Do you think that you've been able to actually enjoy the last few weeks, despite not making the team because you basically had the life or a life to build some business connections, get an MBA, know that there is a fallback plan, hypothetically when sport is over, as opposed to diving straight in? I think it's a few things.

I think one, I went in with very little expectations for bobsled. Like, I literally tried out because a friend of mine, Jillian Potter, who was training for 2016, was like, hey, I think you should bobsled. And I did some research on it. And there was a tryout. I was living in Denver at the time. There was a tryout being held in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. And I was like, how cool is that that there are entire centers dedicated to Olympians?

So I just wanted to go down there, tour the facility, eat in the cafeteria, and buy a t-shirt, which I did all those things. and then it was really weird to later become a resident athlete of that training center. I also think it was my third act in sports, right? I, you know, played sports my entire life growing up, played volleyball in college at Brown, had a great successful career there, did some stuff in the CrossFit space, competed on a team for regionals in 2012, and then, you know, was in business school, settled into the corporate world, was really successful by,

I like, you know, industry standard. I was making good money. I was climbing that corporate ladder, but I was miserable. I was like, this is boring. Like, this is not what I was expecting life to be like. And so for me, bobsled was really an opportunity to spend some time figuring out who I was meant to be. And I think so many of us think that once we graduate from college,

we're going to have that concept of who we are and what we're meant to do and our place in the world. And that's just, and it's that way for something. people and for those people like that's amazing that just wasn't it for me and so I guess I'm just so grateful that my third act took me to the Olympics won me a medal introduced me to some of the most incredible humans I could ever be lucky enough to call friends and family now and then kind of spit me out on the other side with a job and a really clear direction on who I'm meant to be and what I'm meant to do it's an amazing

path, I think it's one that people probably dream of that didn't necessarily have the courage to leave the success in the corporate ladder in that realm from my perspective and Sarah, my wife's perspective. You can't trade that experience for anything in terms of the Olympic, the training, going into the depths with a group of people. You never get it back. It's such a special experience. You said that you didn't feel like you had kind of figured out yourself maybe until you went on this third act. What are the things you felt like you really discovered through this last decade? I discovered what it meant to really commit myself to something and to do it for no other reason other than the fact that it was something I was interested in doing. And so to be more

clear, I think before when I would put my energy towards like a job or whatever, it was like so, okay, so what can I get out of this monetarily? What can I get out of this? And Bob's over is really like, I just want to see what I'm capable of. What would happen if I threw everything I had into this sport for the next three and a half, four years call it? Where would I end up? Because I was definitely a pretty lazy athlete growing up. I was athletically gifted, I would say. I climbed out of my crib at eight months old. Damn. You know, always been strong.

I was born with a six pack. Yeah. My mom was like, in the hospital room, you were lifting your head and looking around. So I'm a genetic freak. And I just like, I grew up with coaches that were always like, oh, you have so much potential. And finally, I was like, I want to know how much potential I really have. Are these people are crazy? Are they, like, are they for real?

I guess they were right. I learned what I could have. accomplish if I threw my all into something, which is so important. It's so important to know the power that you possess as an individual, that you can directly impact something. And I'm not hearing cancer by bobsledding or like world peace, but if I now know how to impact something specifically in this realm, how can I now shift that to change the world? I also learned the concept of Jomo, the joy of missing out. You know, I think in our 20s we have a lot of fomo and we do a lot of things that we only do because we don't want to be left out.

And, you know, going to the Olympics as your wife knows very closely, especially in a sport like rowing, man. That is, those are some grinders. Like I just am humbled by endurance sport athletes that, you know, you have to be so low. laser focus and everything that you do is either going to move you closer to your goal or it's going to pull you further away. And so it doesn't mean that you have to be perfect, but it has to be conscience, right? You can't just, I'm going to go to a party tonight and not think about what the ramifications of that time spent is going to do to the next day, two days, three days, week or month of your life. And then I learned to ask for help and share my goals. I'm really bad

it like asking for help. But it took a whole village of people to get me to the Olympics. And you know, I had to share my story to help fund it. You know, US Olympians and Paralympians are not government funded. And so it can be very expensive to try and go to the Olympics. The summer before 2018, I spent 20 grand on travel, food, training, coaching, facilities, supplies, all that good stuff and obviously it was worth it but not everybody has the ability to raise that kind of capital or even ask for it from people so I really learned that you can do bigger and better things with a village than you can do by yourself so those are a few things that I learned they're great lessons you talked about the balance and whether or not some things either driving

you towards your goal or away from it how head down did you really get and was there a period where you needed to potentially reassess and be like, okay, maybe I'm a little too in to my own detriment. Yeah, it was pretty head down, especially in the beginning. I definitely think in my first year, bobsled I overtrained. I thought, you know, I only have four years to learn this sport. And what do they say, it takes 21,000 hours to be an expert at something. But when you bobsled, you can't bobsled year-round, first of all.

And even when you are bobsleding, you get two minutes a day. And really for what I was doing, which was, I'm a push athlete, so I push, hop in, sit there for a minute, pull the brakes at the end. We get to train true bobsled at five seconds at a time, so 10 seconds a day. And so there was some like just over-analysis, over-lifting, over-training that I had to like reel myself fit back in from, which the nice thing about being 30 in starting a sport is that your body will just tell you real quickly, right? You'll get injured. and that's actually when I started using whoop probably like 2016-2017 that was really helpful in like understanding like oh I worked really hard today but I didn't recover as hard as I worked

and so learning that recovery piece of things was super helpful as you got into the sport you talked about okay I want to realize this potential did you have a sort of aha moment or you know training session, you're like, okay, this is it. I got it now. I'm investing in this. I think that I was probably invested from the start. I just, the idea of going to the Olympics, picking up a sport at 30, it just sounds so ridiculous. You know, to me, an Olympian was always someone that found their sport at four years old. And I have a lot of really good friends who are figure skaters and, you know, or skiers or swimmers that they started at four. So I think I was like, all in from the beginning because I only have one year which is all in or not at all but I never

actually thought being all in at this phase in my life in that in that phase of like the quad it was the beginning of the quad but uh would result in me going to the olympic so it wasn't until like the first two races of olympic season that I was like holy crap I could go to the games um what so yeah I mean, I was all in pretty quickly. Once I made the team, I quit my job to bobsled. So that's pretty all in. But I don't think it really clicked for me until that season where I was like, holy crap, we're really, we're doing this.

We're doing this. You mentioned that you're very athletically gifted. And just based on your sort of like athlete profile in terms of like volleyball, CrossFit, bobsled, more power-based. That's me guessing. What's the training sort of like? You mentioned how much time you actually get doing sports-specific training. What's the rest of the training like?

Yeah, so bobsleders kind of train like Olympic sprinters and Olympic weightlifters. So we have to be fast because a bobsled start ramp is not flat. It goes downhill. So you're essentially pushing a 365-pound object on ice downhill. So you have to be fast enough not just to keep up with it, but to continually propel it. and then get into the sled in an efficient manner. So speed is really important, and speed right out the gate is really important. And then obviously strength so that, you know,

instead of focusing on the fact that you're pushing a heavy object, you can focus on your sprint mechanics and how you negotiate the ice with your feet and, you know, how you're loading into the sled. So a lot of Olympic weightlifting, but also just some power lifting as well for like a base and then a lot of rehab because 90% or 99.9% of our jobs are just like moving bobsleds around packing and unpacking. So we arrive in Europe at whatever time of the season and we're usually there for two to six to eight weeks and we just drive from spot to spot. So there's a lot of packing and unpacking of heavy awkward shaped objects. And honestly that's for most of my

injuries came from moving bobsled not crashing in a bobsled and I've crashed plenty of times but like moving a bobslet and slipping or like catching a finger or what I have you so yeah that's how we train the odd things are the ones that always get you and I imagine that's the most frustrating yep would you say that you can bounce back a little bit quicker than others in terms of recovery I do I think my I have a pretty big capacity I would say in Also, like, as I got further into the sport, I think my body was finally tuned to understand when I really needed to peek and when I was like when I was like in a building phase.

And so that was really important, I think. For me, the biggest thing is sleep. I have a terrible sleeper. Oh, it's so bad. I have a eye mask, ear plugs, pregnancy pillow. I'm not pregnant. That's what I traveled with. And at one point, I had, like, a mattress pad as well, but somehow after the games, it disappeared.

I think the staff was tired of me traveling with so much stuff. So, yeah, I just, like, I really leaned into sleep and hydration. Sleep hydration and proper nutrition is life-changing. And that's what I love about the whoop is that it would tell me, like, how much restorative sleep. And that's one of the ways I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I'm not overweight, obviously. so I had a CPAP for a while and then since then I've had my tons removed and my deviated septum repaired and so I sleep much better now but yeah like I think I was able to recover faster because I had more data I don't necessarily think it's a function of who I am I'm sure that some of it plays into it but for someone who's a crap sleeper the information that I have had was really important in that in that respect what were some of the other things you were doing you know knowing that okay Okay, my sleep is challenging.

What were some of the, if you had a top two or three practices that you followed? Yeah, one of the things is tough for me. Like, I got pretty good at falling asleep. I have trouble staying asleep. So one of the things I really focused on was planning my hydration, right? Trying to minimize the reasons I would wake up. So, like, you don't want to drink a ton of water right before bed, so you don't wake up in the middle of the night. That was huge.

Making sure that I could get my room as darkest possible. And if there was an opportunity for blackout shades, that was always a thing. I need white noise, even though I use earplugs, which is make no sense. So like having a fan running, but also having my ear plugs in was crucial. And then setting a bedtime routine, I actually, because the, you know, the whoop will tell you when you should go to bed, I just, I set an alarm on my phone for an hour before that so I can start shutting things down. but also, you know, setting up, you know, the blue light filters on your electronics and all that kind of stuff to try and do that, but also like get off of your electronics within a reasonable amount of time before bed. So I did a lot of things. I really leaned into recovery as much as I leaned into training because you can't train hard if you don't recover hard.

Facts. Speaking of getting off the phone, when did you realize that you had a knack for reels and TikTok? Okay. So I went viral on TikTok on accident. I'm 37. I still don't get it. Every once in a while, something will pick up. I don't know what I'm doing. I just sometimes I see things that seem funny. And my promise to people that follow me is that you'll always get the real Lauren. You're not going to get like the highlight reel. You're going to get all of it. So yeah, I don't know. I just, I like to make people laugh. Laughter is good for this. soul. I don't know. Just for those people that haven't seen the clip, could you just kind of explain what the prompt was that got you engaged with it?

Oh, are you talking about the D1 baby's post? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so there was this guy on TikTok. Poor guy, he just got destroyed. He was talking about how tall women always talk about how they're D1 athletes and

like as, I guess as like a proposal for marriage. Like, I can help you, which is just a weird concept in general. So he was like, all these tall women out here talking about, they can give me D1 babies. But are you even D1? Because the last thing I need is some tall mother effer who eats all my food has side 13 feet and trips over his feet. And so I did a stitch. So I was like, I was, I went, I was D1. But I took a little further and I was like, hey, you know, I went to Brown, played D-1 volleyball, started working in corporate, got my executive MBA at Pepperdine, and then at 30 years old, I quit my job.

Three and a half years later, I went to the Olympics and won a medal. Oh, yeah, and I'm going to try and go to Beijing as well. And then I was like, but real talk, my man, are you actually even D1? And so that was the stitch. I put my phone down, picked it back up, and people were liking it. I was like, cool, it's funny, that's awesome. Put it down, picked it back up, and I'd made a few TikToks that night. And it just, like, every time I opened my phone, it just kept exploding.

And I think it got like 2.8 million views. So, like, in the world of viral, it's not, like, as viral as some. And then people started coming for him. He had to put, like, an apology post out, and it was crazy, poor guy. He was, he's probably part of a group that thinks similarly in terms of women, athletics, which is a lot of the work that you do with parity to combat and change the landscape. You know, personally, before we talk about parity, like as you are coming up at Brown, playing volleyball there, then with, you know, doing a little bit of competitive CrossFit, and then

going through the Olympic training process, what sort of biases do you feel like we're kind of there that we're challenging to any of those? athletic endeavors. Yeah, you know, I got really lucky that in sixth grade, I went to all girls private school for high school. And so I think that was really helpful because athletes, the only athletes were women. So that was really cool. But I think for me, and I've told this the number of people, sports were never like my main focus. It was always a vehicle to another opportunity because I graduated in high school in 2002, graduated college in 2006, there weren't a lot of opportunities for professional sports where you could actually

support yourself, right? And I just didn't feel like it was worth my time, unfortunately, to grind it out and, you know, play volleyball in Europe. Also, I'm only 5'10, so I'm not like Uber tall. I have hops for sure. I can grab the rim of a basketball hoop. But, yeah, so for me, athletics was always just a vehicle to a better education to a better life. And so definitely in college, like we had the small training room and the, you know, the closet size weight room and lower tiered gear. But I was just happy just to be at Brown that I was never so focused on the things that we didn't have. And, you know, I was, because I was such a good athlete, the fact that, I mean, I didn't start playing volleyball until my sophomore year of high school. So I was just, I was just happy to be

there. You know what I mean? But now, seeing it now, you know, um, Sedona Prince is a parody sponsored athlete. She really did a great job of like, really exposing the inadequacies in the March Madness tournament. Like, I don't know how you can justify giving people different quality of food. Like, I don't know how they justified that, but someone did. And so, yeah, it's It's a little crazy because I think women are incredible athletes. I mean, my teammate Alana had a baby two years ago and then just won two Olympic medals. Like, I don't know what's more traumatic than giving birth and then coming back. So you have to be pretty incredible to do that.

So, you know, obviously it's a societal thing that has to change. It's, you know, I always say that men's sports was an infrastructure has been created for men's sports, right? There was a time when the NBA was recorded and now it's played live. So we've created an infrastructure and a support system to create male superstars. So the same effort needs to go into showcasing these already present female superstars and women superstars. And the difference is these male superstars can focus on just being an athlete. These women have conditionally had to hold down multiple jobs. be full-time moms and be athletes.

And so as we shift to a culture of really investing in people's journeys, I think that women's sports will become more popular because people will be able to relate more to that journey because most people don't get to do whatever it is that they're best at in a vacuum chamber. Most people have other things that are influencing their abilities to be great. And I think that makes women athletes really relatable. And so my hope is that that's kind of how the focus goes. And then there's pay behind it, right?

And that's alluding to what I'm doing with Parity is, you know, I've switched roles a little bit because I also have another full-time job that I'm doing that I'm really excited to be doing and, you know, change the world with. But Parity is trying to close the pay gap right now. I think it's anywhere from 60 to 80 billion. dollars that is spent in global sponsorship and women capture less than 0.4% of that. So we're doing things to try and partner women with different brands for, you know, sponsorship opportunities, but also creating other revenue streams like we start an NFT marketplace.

You know, non-fungible tokens are really popular right now. Crypto is a big thing, but oftentimes this type of technology isn't introduced to women until years later because quote unquote there's no demand but I I am a bobsleder no one cares about bobsled in the grand scheme of sports and I sold my first NFT for $1,200 so obviously there's an appetite for it which we're really excited to capture it's amazing work and like you said it's it's going to require societal shift what do you think about the most recent let's call it a win I don't want anything other than that with the with the women's soccer her team. Yeah, I'm, you know, I'm so, like, soccer was my first love. I was at the 99 World

Cup game in passing in California behind the goal where they were doing the penalty kicks where the U.S. women won that World Cup. Yeah, and I got to later thank Brandy Chastain for that moment where she ripped your shirt off because I was like, I was the only jacked, you know, 10 year old or 12, I can't remember how old I was, 12 year old I was at the time and to see someone that looked like me, you know, being praised was so huge. I think it's incredible what women's soccer has done. You know, women's soccer, women's hockey. There's some really big pivotal sports that have really pushed,

and obviously women's basketball too, have really pushed, you know, people to wake up and be like, hey, this needs to change. My only concern is that it stops there. If it stops there, it's not really progress, right? We can't just say, well, these sports, these women are popular. They're famous. They won't stop. So we have to give them what they want. It has to be a full shift, right? And not just a one-off. So it's great to be the first, but it's really important for the movement to continue and not just settle because this momentous decision has been made. And it took them so long. Hopefully it takes less time for more organizations to realize that, you know, women need to be paid equally. And the nice thing about my experience in the Olympic space is that I was one of the more, I was one of the highest paid athletes

in my federation because for US bobsled skeleton, the women's bobsled team, we've won medals in every Olympic game since bobsled was allowed in the Olympics for women in 2002. And so I'm really fortunate to have been in an environment where my pay was directly, you know, impacted by my performance. And we outperformed the men. I find that actually happens a lot. I can say it in rowing. The men have been horrible for, well, relatively horrible, but basically no medals in a very long time.

And I think the women had the longest gold streak in the history of the sport. So people need to start paying more attention. And the two best college basketball players are both women. As an athlete, did you find anything within the media? As much as commentators and broadcasters should be moving away from, you know, how they talk about women in sports and body. and things like that, it seems like they're very far behind still. Was there any sort of experience like that with you or any of your teammates?

Yeah, you know, in women's bobsled, so I started in 2014, we had a, we had one set of weight rules. And then by the end of the season, they decided they were going to drop the weight limit. A lot of people don't realize that bobsled does have weight limits. And it's not like a wrestling or a weightlifting where you weigh in the day before. it's you go down your first run and then they put the sled on the scale they make sure the scale the sled's not underweight and then they put the athletes in and they make sure that the athletes with the sled aren't overweight so previously the sled could be 170 kilos which is about 365 pounds and we could be 340 kilos with the sled and ourselves and all our gear but they decided to drop it like 10 kilos and take that 10. kilos from the athletes. Well, I was already like 200 pounds when I started off so that I had to get down to 180. So that meant I had to get from 180 to 170 and stay at 170. So I've essentially

been starving myself for the past eight years. And at some point, I don't know, I'll write a book or an open letter about that and like how I've come out the other side, not completely having a messed up relationship with food. But yeah, I think that was a big thing. And I remember talking to to one of our announcers about it because I was frustrated. And he announces bobsled on more of a local level. And I said, you know, I was 200 pounds when I came to sport. I had to lose another, you know, I had to lose 20 pounds to compete that season. And then another 10 pounds to compete the next season.

Like, and now you guys are saying you want to drop it further. And he goes, well, I guess that was, that was good for you, right? Because, like, you don't want to be, you don't want to weigh that much. And I was like, as an athlete, I've never thought about what I weigh. So I started competing in bobsled. And so the thought that he was like, oh, well, this is great because now you look better in your speed suit was just weird to me and like just super off-putting. So I think, you know, body image, unfortunately, will always be a thing for women's sports. Well, hopefully not always be a thing, but is still a big thing.

You know, we saw it, I think, in the summer games with one of the women's handball teams that didn't want to wear bikinis. They wanted to wear shorts. and they got fined for it. So, yeah, unfortunately, it's still a big issue. And it doesn't make any sense because it should just be about how well you perform. Correct. And how hard you work. Yeah.

100%. Could not be more true. I've heard of the conversation of weight in strangely women's sports and not men's as kind of like how you're sort of judged in your performance, right? You know, like bands of if you're in this and you need to go this fast or lift this much weight. Was that imposed by the coach, or is that like a governing body of all of bobsled saying there's this max load? Yeah, that was a governing body decision. I think they did it under the guise of like women's bobsled isn't as popular as men's bobsled. A lot of athletes

for bobsled come from track and field. A lot of track and field athletes are on the like sprinters are on the smaller side. So we want to lower their weight to, you know, know, increased participation. And, you know, maybe that plays a small role into it. But at the end of the day, the real barrier to entry for women in bobsled, especially in smaller, you know, Eastern European countries is not every country prioritizes women's sports. Also, bobsled's really expensive.

Bob sleds can run anywhere from 50,000 euros up. And so if I'm a small nation and I have a men's bobsled team that has been competing, for years in a program that's already in the works. Am I going to spend money to now try and introduce a new discipline of women's bobsled that isn't proven? Or am I going to put all of my spend behind this team that we've been working to improve upon for, you know, decades? Because, you know, women's bobsled is only 20 years old in the Olympics.

So they tried to fix it by just changing the weight, but not addressing the financial, you know barrier to entry for the sport of bob sled so it's just it's a very expensive sport like we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just on shipping sleds to year up and back and not everybody can do that and then also sled technology has evolved one thing i really love about monobobb is all of the athletes compete in the same sled and they're very strict specifications on what you can and can't do to the sled so you'll notice the people who want in monobobes Bonob were very different than the people that won in two, man, except for Alana, because she's a G. Maybe if all sleds were standardized, it would grow because you can't outpace a country like Germany where Bob sled is just as big as, you know, football is for the U.S.

So it's really hard for countries to keep up. I was unaware of the differences in the sleds. So it's basically you can buy better technology to increase your speed. You can buy or develop your own technology. Yeah. Why do you think they don't standardize the slits? Oh, because, I mean, every country would have to agree to that. And I don't, I don't.

Just too much work. Did you see what happened in the Winter Olympics? No. Germany went one, two, three. I mean, like, the German program is amazing, but Germany swept the program in four-man, podium in four-man. They got first and second in women's two-man. they got first and second in men's two-man.

That's competitive advantage. Countries would have to agree to giving away some of their competitive advantage. Interesting. Well, I just learned a lot more about Bob's life. But we know what happened in women's figure skating that even if it's not fair and it's against the rules doesn't mean it's going to change, right? A 15-year-old tested positive in December. I feel terrible for her because I'm sure she's getting good.

villainize but they're potentially not going to pull her from the Olympics because she's because of a rule that says if you're under 16 you can't be held accountable for it no system is perfect not in the Olympic don't get me wrong I still love the Olympics it is incredible to compete I will always wear it with pride on my chest that I'm a US Olympian it's just like everything else it's you see behind the velvet curtain it's not as perfect as you thought it was when you were a kid growing up watching you know Michelle Kwan skate that's Michelle for sure the more you know is the more you get involved with these types of things so yeah you're really like kind of like a peak performer in all aspects and it seems like you you sort of welcome the big stage

how do you sort of process and handle pressure or do you not really feel it the way I process and handle pressure is I just prepare for it if when I was training for 2018 when I I was unmotivated and I didn't feel like getting up to go train. I would think to myself, well, what if this was run for at the Olympic? So just to give some context, in bobsled, you have two days of competition at the Olympics. You have run one and two on day one and run three and four on day two. And so run four is it. That's your last opportunity to make an impact.

And so I've always felt like if I do everything I humanly can to prepare myself, then it becomes just another competition. And so I take that in all of my life. Like, it's just working harder. That's it. Or smarter sometimes, right? I'm not saying I burn the candle at both ends and I don't get any sleep. I got a fully hours last night, according to my whoop.

And so it's just being really focused. And it goes back to that, like what I was talking about before, right? Everything you do either moves you closer to your goal or pulls you further away. and so it doesn't mean you only focus on your goal but you're really cognizant of your actions and your activity when it's such a clear goal like going to the olympics or having a time standard or this is what we think we're going to need to be in the metal contention obviously you can measure that how do you kind of measure progress on something like parity now or your new role or really kind of anything that is a little amorphous. Yeah, I think it's important to start off by putting together some just like basic

goals of what you think you're trying to accomplish. And then course correcting is always necessary. So like when I started with parity, my sole responsibility was recruiting athletes. And so I gave myself a target of how many athletes I wanted to recruit in a certain amount of time. And then I dialed in like how that process worked. I sent, you know, people a DM followed up and then figured out, well, if I send, just to give some clarity, my background is in sales when I started off selling Keko and I was 18 years old. And so it's always like progress is always a numbers game. You figure out what your end goal is and then you then you work backwards, figure out what, how much needs to go into it to reach that goal. So it was the same with parity and my roles have changed a few times

with parity. I started off in recruiting and like athlete education, then move to external sales because it's a startup. And so we needed somebody that could, had sales experience, I could reach out to brands and explain what parity was and why it was important to be a part of it. And now in my new role, I'm kind of a spokesperson for NFTs because that's kind of like our new product. It's a great new opportunity for women and it's something that, you know, needs more education. And then now in my new role, I'm working for a new startup called heroic.us. It's essentially an app that helps helps take you from where you are to the most heroic version of yourself by focusing on, you know, 10 daily targets that you can do that are going to incrementally make you better

every single day. So it fits in line with exactly with who I am and what I've been doing for the past almost decade. So I'm the VP of partnerships there. And I guess everything that I do, I try and like see how it fits into my overall goal of trying to change the, the world for the better. And so as long as the work that I'm doing is moving me into a place that allows me to execute on that, then I know that I'm in the right spot. And I've gotten a lot better at saying like, okay, this was where I needed to be now, but this role either doesn't serve me or has, you know, moved away from what I'm trying to accomplish or, you know, I've outgrown or they've outpaced me. You know, I try and do a lot of

self-reflection too which is important absolutely i mean that those are great keys there really for anybody where can people find out more about heroic at us or parody now or any of the things you're working on yeah so parody is uh the website is parody now dot co uh we're also on instagram at parody now heroic dot us you can just go to heroic dot us the app launches april 9th people can sign up now as a founding member and get a lifetime discount. It's actually really, it's, it's really cool. It's basically, you know, focusing on the journey instead of focusing on the end result. You know, we've, we've become part of this like social media culture where everything

is about, you know, the end result and the highlight reel. And this is really about, you know, uncovering who you're meant to be. and I, for a long time, felt stuck. I felt like I was floating in this space between, like, who I am now and who I really wanted to show up as every day to make an impact. And I didn't know how to get from point A to point B. And that's what Heroic does. It fills in that gap of, like, okay, so this is who you want to be.

This is who you are now. Let's focus on 10 little things you can do every day. And it can be as simple as, like, meditate for, 30 seconds a day, right? Because sometimes the idea of meditating for an hour or even 10 minutes is overwhelming. Sometimes it's as little as can you drink one more glass of water a day? Can you shut your phone off one hour earlier? Can you get 20 more minutes of sleep? It's really about just small incremental things that you can do on a daily basis. And then the next thing you look back and you're like, I'm a completely different person than I was six months ago, right? And that's how I got to the

Olympics. I ran from running a 4-10, a 30-meter sprint to a 384 in three years. And it was all from just doing little things every day. Obviously, there's some genetic, you know, makeup in there, too, but it's all from, like, just really focusing on the little things that went into sprint mechanics and perfecting it. And so that's what heroic's about. So I definitely recommend that people check it out. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today and all the time. Really appreciate it. Talk soon. Thank you. Thank you to Lauren and Mike for coming on the WOOP podcast.

If you enjoyed it, please remember to subscribe, leave a review. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed. And don't forget, you get 15% off a WOOP membership if used the code Will. That's just WILL. Check us out at WOOP.com. Okay, folks, that's it for now. wishing you a very green week. We'll be back next week. Stay healthy.

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