On three pints, three bottles, and one very confused algorithm
Somewhere in WHOOP’s engine room, buried under the sleep architecture and the HRV modelling and whatever produces that particular shade of accusatory amber, there is a feature called the Journal, and inside the Journal there is a single, humble tag: “Had alcohol.” Yes or no. That’s it. No further questions. And it is, I have come to realise, the single blunt instrument my WHOOP owns for understanding what is, in fairness, two quite different lives.
In Rufford, life is three pints of Moorhouse’s White Witch, a proper Lancashire ale brewed about twenty-five minutes up the road in Burnley, drunk at a sensible pace over the course of a football or rugby match, usually finished by half nine. Most likely place to find me is The Hesketh Arms in Rufford. In Alcossebre, life is three bottles of Alhambra, drunk colder, considerably later, and with the sea in view, sometimes with a glass of red wine wandering in afterwards uninvited, the way a glass of red wine does. The most likely place to find me, el Clan.
Now it has not yet experienced a Six Nations Game Live. It has experienced plenty of National League Rugby; however I wasn’t paying much attention to what WHOOP thought about it. So this upcoming season I will be reporting on how WHOOP assesses tiers 3 and 4 of English Rugby. Some games with alcohol others without.
So back to WHOOP’s current confusion.
To me, these are obviously not the same evening. To my WHOOP, they are both just “Had alcohol: Yes,” logged with the enthusiasm of a bouncer checking IDs who genuinely could not care less what’s actually in the bottle.
This bothers me more than it probably should, because WHOOP is otherwise so precise about everything else. It knows my respiratory rate to the decimal point. It has opinions about my skin temperature. It once flagged my heart rate variability over what turned out to be a Wimbledon tiebreak. And yet, when it comes to the actual question of what I drank, it shrugs. Ethanol is ethanol, apparently, as far as the algorithm is concerned; a pint of 4.1% Lancashire ale and a 6.4% Spanish lager get filed in exactly the same drawer, which feels like a real missed opportunity for a company otherwise obsessed with nuance. It sort of asks how many drinks but doesn’t specify bottles, glasses, shots or units.
What it does do, with real conviction, is the aftermath. The next morning’s Recovery arrives looking personally wounded, generally somewhere in the region of 8% lower than a dry night, and the Journal starts quietly building what it calls a “Behavior,” waiting for enough logged evenings, apparently it wants five yes’s and five no’s before it’ll commit to an opinion, until it can tell me, with the confidence of a man who’s done this many times before, that alcohol negatively impacts my recovery. Thank you. I had wondered.
Where it gets properly confused is timing. WHOOP is very keen on the idea that a drink four hours before bed is a different proposition to a drink one hour before bed, which is true, and reasonable, and exactly the kind of thing it should be telling me. The trouble is that in Rufford, three pints across a match finishes at a civilised hour and everyone goes home for their tea. In Alcossebre, three Alhambras and a stray red wine finish at whatever hour the football, tennis or rugby happens to finish, which this summer has ranged from perfectly sensible to genuinely nautical. So the same three drinks, in two different countries, produce two entirely different verdicts from the same tag, and my WHOOP has no earthly way of explaining why, only of disapproving of both.
I did try, briefly, explaining all this to the WHOOP itself, in the way you explain things to an inanimate object when you’ve had a couple of Alhambras. It did not respond. It never does. It just sat there on my wrist, quietly counting ethanol units and forming what I can only assume is a very flat, very undiscriminating theory that connects all of it; England, Spain, ale, lager, wine; into one tidy, damning category: me, having a nice time, somewhere, again.
And honestly, at this point in the summer, with England 1 & 1 at rugby union, into the semi-final of the FIFA World Cup; I think that’s a fair cop and this week I have rugby versus Argentina and football versus Argentina – what could WHOOP possibly think after that!!!
Seniormash Reflections on Substack