By Mike Jensen

Most competitive scullers build a relationship with pain, finding out exactly when their body is telling them to stop. For novices, the plea can feel more like a demand.

“It doesn’t mean you’re at a limit,” Simeon John said over the phone between spring-break workouts. “To be at the top, you really have to be hurting.”

As a young single sculler on the Charles River, John realized he had the ability to push past his own perceived pain thresholds.

“It’s something every athlete can learn, and every top athlete does learn,” John said this spring, his last as a high schooler. “I like seeing how much I can make myself hurt. It’s just another game to play.”

You read that correctly.

“He’s a really bubbly kid. He just has a screw loose where he doesn’t view pain the same way everybody else does,” said John’s U19 coach at Boston’s Community Rowing, Inc. (CRI), Kevin McCarthy. “He views it as an opportunity just to see where he is. He’s excited by that. There’s no fear of the unknown.”

“He’s not scared of any moment,” John’s coach Kevin McCarthy said. “He’s just like, let’s see how this comes out.” 

That begins to explain how this relatively undersized young man from Boston who entered the sport as something to do outdoors during Covid set a course record in the youth single at his first Head of the Charles in 2024. For an encore, John broke his HOCR record by 25 seconds in 2025. If John gets back to the Head of Charles next fall, it will be as a Dartmouth freshman.

Word of warning to his college competitors: Underestimating Simeon John fits neatly into his race plan.

This was 2022, the world beginning to open a bit but outside activities still preferred, when Simeon’s sister signed up for a Learn to Row program available to Boston public schools through CRI’s Row Boston initiative. A new sport for anyone in the family.

“I was cooped up, just bouncing off the walls,” Simeon said of realizing this program could work for him, taking him to the Charles River from the city’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. “I’ve always liked the water, being on it or in it. I really enjoy being in nature and moving quickly along the water.”

Because of Covid, Row Boston was putting youngsters in singles.

“I kind of did everything intuitively at first,” John said of beginning as an eighth-grader.

An interesting statement that, since rowing is not the most intuitive of sports.

“Within two weeks, he was one of the better single scullers on the river,” McCarthy said of this guy who was maybe 5-foot-6 at the time. “He was off and going.”

Katie Toth, a former Alabama rower, got to Row Boston as an assistant coach soon after John began sculling. John was always in a single, partly because he’d be wasting his talents in a novice quad or even a double. When Toth became Row Boston’s head coach, she moved those novices into competitive racing and quickly realized that even after her four years of collegiate rowing, she had taught John all she could.

“He was so far ahead,” Toth said, explaining that Simeon knows more than she ever will about certain aspects of rowing, such as rigging. “Also, the racing opportunities we were able to provide, it wasn’t enough.”

His workouts, she said, also lapped the field.

“I can’t contain this kid,” Toth told McCarthy, so the eighth-grader moved up to the main CRI youth team, which meant he was facing the region’s best—and often beating them.

John’s realization that he wasn’t ordinary came during a practice in the summer of 2024 when he was going into his sophomore year. A coach told him and another single sculler to do a 1 x Head of the Charles—one time down the full three-mile Head of the Charles racecourse.

John finished the timed piece in 18 minutes and 45 seconds— that seems very fast—so he checked the results for recent youth singles at HOCR. That time would have come in second the year before, would have won it in 2022, and been second in 2021. Conditions change year to year, even hour to hour, so times are never an exact comparison, but John was stunned.

“Wait, I feel I could have done way faster, which was insane,” John remembers thinking. “Medaling at the Head of the Charles was not something I could imagine.”

The game had changed in his own mind. He didn’t make it through the lottery into the HOCR field that fall but the next summer at practice John did a 2 x Head of the Charles workout.

“I believe I had a cold and later that night I had a fever.”

None of that slowed him down appreciably.

“I did a piece; it was like 18:10. I was like, ‘Wait, that’s faster than the course [youth] record.’ That was when I was just learning how to head-race.”

He’s always put in the work.

“He might do a full two-hour practice with the eight, as many as 15,000 or 20,000 meters, then go out and do a couple of laps in a single,” Toth said, “So much energy. Then he says, ‘Now I’m going to run home.’ Like a six-mile run home.”

Racing older and stronger rowers in the spring taught more race lessons. Their baseline power and speed were so much faster.

“The only way to keep up was to sprint much longer than them,” John said.

How much longer?

“Basically the entire race,” he said.

If it was a 2,000-meter race, “pushing through larger guys at the 1K, it would give me a boost of adrenaline,” John said. “Just enough to get me to the finish line. If you do it once, the next time will be easier. I like seeing how much I can make myself hurt by the 500-meter mark.”

There was a psychological component. Larger guys would see this flyweight going past them. Couldn’t let that happen. Meanwhile, John said, “I started playing with that. It ended up working.”

For longer head races, too. Whatever the limits were supposed to be, John began to see them as a starting point.

It’s not just John’s relationship to pain that sets him apart.

“I’ve never seen him not smiling on his way to the starting line,” said McCarthy, a former Cornell assistant coach. “I’ve encountered very few people like him. He just rows with joy.”

Now slow scullers also can row with joy; that isn’t what makes John special.

“He operates in a very disciplined way,” his coach said. “Instead of doing video games, he goes on a 25-mile ride. He’s like a kid from the ’40s. He hasn’t figured out TV and video games.

“He’s an outdoors guy. He likes to go out to Walden Pond. He soaks himself in the water. He hikes around the pond. He’s different from his peers, and he knows that, but he’s completely comfortable with himself.

“His father is Pennsylvania Dutch, from rural Pennsylvania. I think that’s why they’re so connected with healthy eating. There are a lot of unique factors about his family.”

Not technically Pennsylvania Dutch or Amish, John said, just from a line of German immigrant farmers who moved to rural Lancaster County in the 1700s. Meanwhile, John’s maternal grandfather was from the mountains of India.

All that’s cool, but it still doesn’t make you fast.

“Singles are really tippy,” Toth said. “They require an immense amount of trust in yourself. He’s the most comfortable I’ve ever seen someone in a boat.”

“His insights are elite,” McCarthy said. “He can think on multiple levels. There’s no one way Simeon rows. He adjusts the pins every time, depending on the situation. It’s all self-education.”

He’s not just in singles. He’s been in CRI doubles from the start, and in quads and now eights. When he first joined a CRI eight, McCarthy said, the veterans weren’t sure what to make of this younger and smaller sculler offering thoughts on how they could improve as a group.

“Whenever people finally shut up and listen to him, that’s when we have our best performances.”

McCarthy listens in himself. He says John has become unbelievable in an eight but chose Dartmouth partly because it has a sculling program, too.

“He messes around,” McCarthy said. “I was out with him in a single this morning. He’s triple feathering, feathering the wrong way to come out the right way, just for fun.”

Obviously, the boathouses around Boston are ideal for picking up knowledge from all levels, and John tries to take full advantage. One of his first CRI coaches, Maggie Fellows, a national-team sculler herself, once convinced him to try switching to Concept2 Skinny oars.

“I was really against it,” John said, but he agreed to give it a shot for a 6 x 1K workout. The first two, he said, he realized he wasn’t tired at all after 400 meters. This was three weeks before regionals. Could he really switch oars? He was already moving faster than ever. He didn’t want to change things so close to a big race.

“It was a really good change,” John said. “I realized the lighter the oar, the lighter rigged the oar is, the more energy you’re going to have later in the race as a smaller guy. I don’t know if that’s true as a larger guy.”

As he reached his current 5-foot-9 and 142-1/2 pounds (according to his last weigh-in,) experimentation became his friend. John remembers one Independence Day Regatta when he raced three different shells for the time trial, the semis, and the final. The first boat, too heavy. The next one, still heavy.

“I was in the final. I felt like I can’t row either of those. I’m going to get dead last. I want to at least medal,” John said. He switched to a middleweight boat, switched oars, got third place.

“It felt good,” he said. “It didn’t feel great.”

It also felt something else.

‘It felt fun,” John said.

“He’s just naturally curious,” Jeremy John said of his son. “He is mechanically oriented. The physics of a boat’s functionality—he just has an intuitive understanding of it. In that context, he has never stopped asking questions of himself: What if I tried this?”

“I like looking at different things and trying to find the advantage in them,” Simeon said. “If everyone has a wake or a headwind, you have to figure out how to make it so it’s an advantage. Being smaller, if you look at it as a disadvantage, it’s a disadvantage. But if you’re not expecting much of me, it’s easier to come out of nowhere.”

Of the power John generates, McCarthy said, “I don’t know how he fits inside of himself.”

For last fall’s Head of the Charles, Simeon wasn’t just racing the course in a timed head race. He was racing a person—his close friend and great rival, Tony Madigan of the Potomac Boat Club.

Madigan, the U19 USRowing male athlete of the year, had gotten the better of John in spring sprints and had finished second to John in the previous year’s Head of the Charles.

“I ended up visualizing the race a few times,” John said of the 2025 Head of the Charles. “Visualizing just every single possible thing he could do that would mess with me.”

John pictured Madigan passing him after 1,000 meters or crowding right behind him, making up the starting interval. John pictured himself getting out way ahead early, and what that would mean for the rest of the race.

The week of the race, John remembers waking up in the middle of the night. Not unusual in itself. He often wakes up and gets something to eat. This was different.

“I was panicking,” John said. “I was like, why am I panicking? I love racing. I don’t ever give up and not row fast because I’m scared. Most of the stuff at this race is in my control, unlike the year before.”

The order of the race is set by previous year’s performance for the top half, but since John hadn’t raced, he started 38th in 2024, which presented both challenges and a specific opportunity. If he was moving fast, he’d have to pass boats. What if they clipped oars? What if a boat flipped right in front of him?

“All these things could happen,” he said of that mid-pack positioning.

None of them did. And the opportunity was that nobody ahead of him could have any idea how fast or slow John was moving.

Madigan started fifth based on his previous year’s performance, and had the second-fastest time to the first split, just over four minutes in. As it turned out, John had the fifth fastest, so they were both in the race. Madigan moved up to first, 10 seconds ahead of John at the Weld Bridge checkpoint, 10 minutes into the race, just over halfway through.

At the last checkpoint, John was second, five seconds behind Madigan, who then had a final split of 3:04, enough to put over 10 seconds between himself and the rest of the field—until Bow No. 38 came roaring through, with a final split of 2:56.

John had practically blacked out near the end, he said after the race, but he had the record, and now a target literally on his back. Bow No. 1 in 2025.

“Nothing can happen unless Tony passes me,” John said. “I just can’t let him pass.”

In the weeks before the race, thoughts became obsessions.

“I was panicking,” John said. “Panicking is too small a word for it, I was so nervous. Tony was going to be right behind, and there’s a huge chance he crowds me and passes me and there would be nowhere to go.”

A conversation with his parents helped.

“They were like, what are you afraid of?” John said. “It’s not the end of the world if you lose. Nobody is going to give you crap for losing, for coming in second to Tony.”

He remembers the whole morning precisely.

“I show up at the race, I was like super chill,” John said. “My parents told me they were worried I wasn’t locked in. I was locked in. I was forcing all the panic down. Whenever I panic, I don’t enjoy the moment as much, and I wanted to enjoy this.”

A minute before the race, he realized he hadn’t checked his oarlocks or taken off his sunglasses.

“I was panicking because I wasn’t panicking,” John quipped. “I got myself together.”

The race unfolded about as he expected. Both top contenders got past the first checkpoint within half a second of each other, and their times were several boat lengths ahead of the rest of the 45-boat field. Madigan closed on him early, which meant Madigan was winning the race, although it was very close past the first checkpoint, four minutes in. Ten minutes in, Madigan had almost a three-second lead.

“I was worried,” John said. “It looks like he’s five seconds ahead. I’m going to throw Tony under the bus—he missed a buoy, and they didn’t catch it.”

In John’s mind, this meant he was in good shape. An inquiry after the race would likely add five seconds to Madigan’s time.

“I was in a ton of pain but I was feeling pretty good,” John said. “I’m thinking because I know the river I think I’ve rowed 50 meters less. He’s got to be in more pain. It was a lot like a sprint race because every step of the way we knew who was winning, give or take a second.”

Madigan’s lead was back down to less than a second at the final checkpoint, almost 15 minutes in.

“At that point, I was not feeling great, pretty tired,” John said. “I also was struggling to steer, to see the buoys on the last turn.”

He nailed it in historic fashion. His last split, which was just the last three minutes, was over seven seconds faster than Madigan’s, who was almost six seconds faster than anyone else in the field. No inquiry necessary.

“If I don’t flip, I will win,” John told himself late in the race. “In the final stretch, I just put my head down and sent it.”

His last split of 2:53:054 was less than half a second off the winner’s final split in the championship single raced the day before. The winner of that race, Finn Hamill of New Zealand, had beaten both an Olympic champion and bronze medalist to finish second in the Diamond Challenge Sculls at Henley.

John’s winning youth time of 17:41.305 would have placed fifth the day before in the elite championship field, even though the 18-year-old was nine years younger than the average age for the top 10 championship finishers. His time would have won the men’s club single and the men’s lightweight single easily.

So here is where the variables have really changed for Simeon John—there’s no more coming out of nowhere.

He’s grown used to that, too.

“He’s not scared of any moment,” his coach McCarthy said. “He’s just like, let’s see how this comes out.”   

MIKE JENSEN wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 35 years and was named Pennsylvania Sportswriter of the Year in 2023. He covered rowing on the Schuylkill River and at the Beijing Olympics and wrote the weekly Merion Mercy Academy crew newsletter for seven years while two of his daughters were champion rowers at the school. His book, Philly Hoops: How Philadelphia Transformed Basketball, will be published later this year.

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