WHEN SENATOR CORY Booker stood for over a full day—25 hours and five minutes, to be exact—to give the longest speech by an individual in the legislative body’s history, he was wearing an Oura Ring. The device is a fitness tracker that provides wearers insights on their health using sensors that collect biometric data like heart rate, heart rate variability, and sleep. The rings havebeen embraced by everyone from endurance junkies to the wellness-curious to (as we now know) members of Congress.
When I speak to the 55-year-old New Jersey Senator two days after his record-breaking address decrying the Trump administration’s policies, we look back through his Oura Ring’s data log. He’s mostly trying to determine exactly how to label the endeavor within the connected app, which automatically registers bouts of physical activity. “I was just laughing because it clocked three or four workouts,” Booker says. “And I went through to try to figure out, okay, how do I categorize this? It had no category for standing up and speaking.”
In 2016, Booker stood for 15 hours in solidarity with his colleague Senator Chris Murphy during a filibuster speech against gun violence after the Pulse nightclub mass shooting. Even discounting this past experience, Booker is about as well-suited as a legislator could be to take on a task as daunting as a continuous 25-hour speech. He’s made health and wellness a focus throughout his time as an elected official; he’s known as a runner and cyclist, adopted a vegan diet in 2014, and in recent years has taken on challenges like cutting out sugar for months at a time.
Thanks to Booker’s office, which provided MH screenshots from his Oura app, we can share exactly how his body responded as he stood, paced, and spoke, providing an intriguing look at the real-time health effects of an historic political moment.
Before jumping into the graphics, we should note that as a consumer product, the Oura Ring shouldn’t be held to the same standard as lab or medical equipment for accuracy. The greater value here is being able to track trends over time, thanks to continuous monitoring, and to access data we’d never be able to obtain otherwise.
Booker went into the speech after a “Good” night’s sleep according to Oura’s algorithm, having logged seven hours and 31 minutes (experts recommend adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep).
As his Vitals readout shows, however, Booker’s Activity Level (measuring movement throughout the day) was high, as he began the speech on the evening of March 31.
Booker’s heart rate spiked right around when he took to the Senate podium at 7 pm.
Booker’s heart rate hovered over 100 bpm throughout the address, then dropped when he finally ceded the floor after 8pm on April 1.
Booker’s heart rate and Stress score (an Oura measure that considers heart rate, HRV, motion, and average body temperature) was elevated throughout his address, and he had considerably less “restorative time” and more stress as the speech stretched on.
Booker started the speech the evening of March 31. This likely considers some of his movements before taking the podium, along with the first hours of the address.
The bulk of Booker’s speech saw him move the equivalent of almost 7 miles on foot.
Even though he stood for much of the speech, Booker’s ring picked up a ton of movement. Between March 31 and April 1, Booker’s ring tracked him taking over 20,000 steps, with 12,000 alone on the second day. After he hit a wall during the third hour of the speech and felt his feet go numb, Booker says he knew he needed to start moving. “I just started shifting back and forth a lot to try to get blood flowing through my legs,” he says.
Sleep? Not during a 25-hour speech.
One surprising key measure missing, according to Booker? “There’s a lot of movement, but there’s just no sleep data,” he says of the app’s feedback from the period. “I thought they would put something on there.” As you can see from the image, the app didn’t even bother to log a zero.
The 25-hour effort threw Booker’s vitals out of whack.
The extreme nature of the address is clear in Booker’s “Vitals” measures: No sleep, no “Readiness Score”—Oura’s “holistic” snapshot of health taking taking into account your recent activity, sleep patterns, and biometric data—but a massive Activity score. Also notable: Booker’s heart rate ranged up to 131 bpm, far higher than what his average appeared to be from the data.
Booker’s sleep following the record-breaking speech.
Since the real toll of the effort would be felt after the speech was done, we also have data from the days immediately following the address. Booker followed his zero-sleep April 1 with over six hours then next night.
The night after that? Not so great. Booker only got just over four hours of sleep. “I just haven’t done enough sleep,” he tells MH.
THE PHYSICAL TOLL of staying on one’s feet for this amount of time is tremendous, and speeches like Booker’s have been compared to incredible feats of endurance, like the days-long efforts of ultramarathoners. But the level of soreness he’s feeling in the aftermath makes him think of an entirely different sport: football.
“When I played football, Oregon State had the worst turf in the whole Pac-10,” he says, recalling his collegiate days as a tight end at Stanford from 1987 to 1990. “It was like they just spray painted concrete. And the next day, everything ached from running on what was like a parking lot.” Following his Senate speech, “I woke up after getting a little bit of sleep after the 25 hours, and felt that way. Today, I feel the soreness even more.” Booker says he’s feeling the pain in his hip joints, but mostly his feet, which “are really in bad shape.”
“I think of how it’s comparable to a race car driver,” Ryan Bolton, the Director of High Performance at USA Triathlon and founder of Bolton Endurance Sports Training says after reviewing Booker’s data. High-level drivers that Bolton has trained experience extreme levels of stress and elevated heart rates as their bodies stay relatively still while seated in their cars. Booker’s time at the Senate lectern, as he mostly stood or shuffled from one foot to the other, mirrored that as his heart rate was elevated from his resting average heart rate was 68 bpm on March 31 to 131 bpm at the top end of his exertion on April 1.
More importantly, we can see his heart rate remained elevated above 109 bpm for the majority of the speech. Booker’s heart wasn’t pumping out Ferrari-level numbers—which Bolton says can hit 165 beats per minute average “for two hours straight,”—but the Senator’s output was still significant. We don’t have a comprehensive look at Booker’s all-time data to establish a true baseline, but an average 55-year-old has a max heart rate of 165 bpm according to the American Heart Association (AHA). To hit the recommendation for weekly physical activity suggested by the AHA, Booker would need to log 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity (in the case of the average 55-year-old, that’s about 83 bpm). With his heart rate well above 100 bpm for the duration of the address, the New Jersey senator did beyond the equivalent of a week’s worth of workouts for someone his age without performing a single dedicated exercise.
During his Senate speech, Booker was also dealing with even more extreme circumstances than he ever did during his time on the gridiron. Most athletes never face the level of restriction the Senator placed on his body ahead of the address. Due to Senate rules, he could not even pause to go to the bathroom without ceding the floor. So, when Booker entered the Chamber on March 31 with hopes to last longer than the 15 hours he stood with Murphy nine years prior, he tells MH he had been fasting for three days and had not had a drink since the night before to avoid bathroom interruptions. This was a strategy he developed thinking back to what he learned during the 15-hour effort in 2016. Even ultra runners on the toughest terrain can stop to pee (and even eat and sleep at aid stations, too), and Bolton says race car drivers take shifts ranging from two hours (and sometimes up to eight) during long haul races, so they can rest and refuel during breaks.
Booker says that in the lead-up to the speech, as he began to fast and prepare to take a run at the Senate record, he was in contact with his family. But they weren’t just checking in on his health—they were negging him. “They were sending me a lot of David Goggins content,” Booker says, laughing. Goggins, a former Navy SEAL, endurance athlete, and author is a motivational figure who somewhat straddles the manosphere for his no-excuses, get-it-done motivational rhetoric. His was one of the last names I expected to hear from the Democratic Senator, but it makes sense given the context. “They were razzing me. They’re like, ‘Suck it up, look what this guy did!’”
(For anyone concerned about Booker’s health and judgment during the attempt, he did have his cousin, an emergency room doctor, in the Senate gallery to keep an eye on his condition as the hours wore on.)
There’s another aspect to Booker’s monumental effort, though, that goes beyond the physical. One of Goggin’s tenets is “knowing your why,”—in other words, finding purpose to motivate you through everything from extraordinary physical challenges to day-to-day stressors. Booker recalls that when he met his physical breaking point at the Senate podium, he leaned on external motivation to power him through the final leg of the speech. He mentions stories of constituents who told him about working triple eight-hour shifts at restaurants and farm workers on their feet, harvesting in extreme heat. That was his why. “About the 20th hour, I think my body might have met its limits—but at that point, the [Senate] gallery had filled up,” he says. “The floor had filled up. My staff was handing me notes about what people were saying—we were really focused on elevating the voices of Americans, the voices of people from my state.”
That brought Booker back to his football career again. “The high of the energy that people were sending me the last three to five hours was beyond anything I ever experienced as an athlete,” he says. “And there were some really high moments—from beating Notre Dame in 1990 when they were ranked number one in the country, to high school championships. This was a spiritual level.”
“I still need a good 12 hours to just not be doing anything.”
Once Booker ceded his time, though, his immediate focus wasn’t exactly what you’d expect.
“I thought that to take 25 hours, you’re gonna have to rush to the restroom,” he says. “But the problem was I was so dehydrated… That’s why at the end, I started just dumping water in me in the last two hours. When I got done, I just needed liquids and electrolytes,” Booker says.
Bolton agrees, recommending that Booker needed, “rehydration, recalorie, and [to] take in some supplements and get electrolytes back in the system.” The coach would have suggested that the senator have gone into the speech with a plan to “load” his body with the electrolytes ahead of time by ramping up intake ahead of the effort, or even planning to consume a non-liquid source like gels during the speech to stave off cramping. But the extreme nature of the effort makes it hard to predict how Booker’s body might have responded.
For now, Booker needs a break. “I still need a good 12 hours to just not be doing anything,” he says. While the Senate is in session, he likely won’t have that chance. This goes against Bolton’s best advice to get on the road to recovery. “I would say 99 percent of physicians or even performance specialists would say just get off your feet,” the coach says. “You’re gonna have to sleep.”
Before Booker’s speech, the record was held by Strom Thurmond, a Senator from South Carolina, who stood for 24 hours and 18 minutes to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957. “It puts it all into perspective that right now a lot of folks are focused on a guy who, in the bright light of hundreds of millions of views on social media, with lots of people cheering him on… [and] encouraging him to break a record of a segregationist,” Booker says. “So that started to lift me and affirm the ‘why’ I had going into it was working. I think when my body hit its limits, the spirit of others really kept me up there.”
Brett Williams, NASM-CPT, PES, a senior editor at Men’s Health, is a certified trainer and former pro football player and tech reporter. You can find his work elsewhere at Mashable, Thrillist, and other outlets.
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