My understanding is that the PED's needed to enhance endurance are far more complex than those needed to enhance simple muscle growth.

IOW the availability of steroids and blanket use of them is enough to be "buff" adn stronger. Te same use of the endurance PED's will yield much less results.

Again, from what I understand, which is not much.

~Matt

Matt,

The gym analogy was to illustrate how frighteningly common PEDs are if you look, not to say that tri folks use the same stuff.

I just figure is some jackass will suck wheel for 112 miles where the whole world can see he is a cheater he will also be a cheater where nobody can see.

Dave

No worries.



Hinds you make some very valid points about triathlon and PEDs. Triathletes are also notorious equipment fiends, they obsess about this new training plan over that, this technique over that technique, one position over another, energy bars, salt pills, Cytomax Met-rx, Endurox, Revenge, aero helmets aero trisuits aero waterbottles.......... Everything in triathlon is focused on shaving off a few seconds or mintues here and there by buying a timesaving piece of carbon, or rubber or titanium or ingesting some superfuel that will keep you going longer and stronger. In the eyes of some, PEDs are just another time saving device and they can justify taking them because its just part of the process, just one more step.

Running or swimming for example as stand alone sports don't have the blurred area between training and race day performance. They are very simple sports. There isn't a widget you can buy to make you run faster. Your performance on race day will be a reflection of your training not your equipment. Its much more black and white and the temptations, or at least the mental gymnastics required to delude oneself or somehow justify taking PEDs to oneself are much more difficult to perform.

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"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
John Sawhill

Matt you can go to any bodybuilding site on the internet and not only find where to buy anabolic steroids but how to administer them for optimal performance and where to inject in order to hide needle marks.

For endurance athletes steroids are useful not because they build muscle bulk but because theyboost muscle recovery. On roids you can go out on Sunday and run 20 miles hard, on Monday go to the track and run 10x1000 at 10K pace, on Wednesday 9 miles at tempo......you get the picture, no easy days. Steroids are not necessarily a shortcut, you have to train your ass off to get the full benefits, but thats their beauty...you can train your ass off every day and keep coming back for more.

EPO does require medical supervision for optimal results and minimal risks and there are plenty of unscrupulous doctors out there who will do it for a price....but you can do it yourself. Look at Irish runner Cathal Lombard, he was a decent club runner, mid 14s for 5K mid 29s for 10K...in one year of buying EPO online and injecting himself without medical assistance he "broke" Mark Carrol's national records and ran 13:19 and I watched him run 27:33 at Stanford and knew he was juiced...no freakin way this guy was that good.

Give EPO to a really good runner and you get sub 13 times and sub 27 times.

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"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
John Sawhill

I for one, resent the implication that good age-groupers, the ones winning and placing consistantly are using some form of performing enhancement drugs to keep doing well.

This will sound a bit harsh, but they are doing this because they are very good and they train hard. If you will notice, they are often vets who have been in the sport for many years. They have trained long and hard for many years and they have huge aerobic bases that don't go away very quickly. They are also benefiting from the fact that despite the fact that record numbers of people are getting into the sport, overall race times are getting slower! So you can still do the same training as you did years ago or less training and still do the same or better than ever. Not to brag, but how else to explain how I was able to finish high up, overall and in my age-group in a recent race despite little or no swim/run training and a bit of bike riding. Personally, that seems a bit odd to me. However, for 20+ years I trained at a fairly high level, but have not done much at all, relativly speaking for the past 5 years.

I say this with respect, but many newcomers to triathlon or endurance sports in general, don't realize that significant, sustainable improvements in performance don't come in measures of weeks or months, they come in years - like 5 year chunks of time. The good news is that once you get those 5, 10+ years of miles in your legs, it takes a long time for it to go away. There is all this gripping about Steve Larsen racing as an age-grouper. Fact is, he has put so many miles in the bank that it will be years before his performance really starts to drop off, even with light to modest training. So what is he to do?

Fleck

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

No doubt EPO etc can and does help. My question is not does it help but to what extent and to what availability etc.

here http://outside.away.com/outside/bodywork/200311/200311_drug_test_1.html
is the article I'm refering to.

Obviously the experiment was a great success but also notice that it was done under a doctors care and for thousands of dollars. I'd guess that typically these parameters are out of the reach of most average AG'rs.

Simply popping pills and injecting stuff probably won't yield this type of results.

Also as noted in the article alot fo the "Cheaper" products are not only not as effective but also considerabbly more dangerous.

Sure some people are going to take the risk, sure maybe some people are spending the cash and doing it this route, although I doubt it.

The lines that stuck out to me where...

"When I first began my quest, I'd assumed it would be easy to slide into the underground where performance drugs are bought and sold. But when I asked around, nobody, not even friends who were top amateur and professional athletes, knew where cheaters actually went to score. Their comments were always vague: "Well, they get it, believe me," they'd say, or "How about the Internet?""

I think many assume everyone using drugs but the actual usage rate is much lower. I'd also suspect that usage rates among pro's is likely MUCH higher than AG'rs. The only thing to gain by using for an AG'r is EGO.

~Matt

Couldn't agree more, particularly at the AG level.

Maybe the people starting are lost in the "new societies" instant gratification and expect to be "Top of the heap" after a year of what they would call hard work. When it doesn't happen for them they can't accept that others hav made it happen by years of hard work so "they must be on drugs".

I just have a hard time believing that the typical AG'r would seek out and spend teh time, money and take the risk that is involved with PED's.

Take a look at the posts here, are they not overwhelmingly "anti-drug"? That being said are we to assume that only ST'rs are "clean"? or that ST'rs are hypocrits?

~Matt

By the tone of the discourse here, I should have been apologizing as I passed people on Sunday during the race and I passed a few. "Sorry, I have not trained much recently, but did train pretty hard for about 20 years"!

Fleck

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Are you now willing to admit you're on drugs? You know we'll eventually find out...and if not well we'll make inuendo's anyway...cheater.

~Matt

Notice smiley's for humor impaired.

certainly in the CO 40-44 and 45-49 AGs which I observe closely, the guys doing consistently well have been doing so for years. Either they've been on PEDs for all those years, or they are working on years of consistent intelligent training.

In my experience as a runner, when running well at 5k and trained for a marathon, I'd run well at all distances. It's not hard for me to accept these guys could be doing well over all distances. When you're good, you're good. Racing every weekend isn't a problem if you train through C races and monitor effort on those races - can still perform well, just because your baseline is so much higher than the competition's (that would be me).

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"It is a good feeling for old men who have begun to fear failure, any sort of failure, to set a schedule for exercise and stick to it. If an aging man can run a distance of three miles, for instance, he knows that whatever his other failures may be, he is not completely wasted away." Romain Gary, SI interview

Reminds me - I need to see the doc about more asthma meds... Hinds, you racing next Saturday?

Hinds, you racing next Saturday?

Only if I can use your inhaler..............

Dave

These individuals have better genetics than most and have harnessed it through proper training.

"In my experience as a runner, when running well at 5k and trained for a marathon, I'd run well at all distances. It's not hard for me to accept these guys could be doing well over all distances. When you're good, you're good. Racing every weekend isn't a problem if you train through C races and monitor effort on those races - can still perform well, just because your baseline is so much higher than the competition's"

Great point. Many rec-endurance athletes don't seem to get this. They think that if you just focus on IM that that's all you will do well at. The bottom line is that any race over about 15 minutes of time is almost all aerobic for pretty much the whole race distance, so the well trained athlete should have good range from short races right up to the really long ones.

Fleck

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

No, I am not on EPO or HGH, but thanks for asking. I get that a lot lately.

If you're out there for more than 15 minutes you're participating in an endurance event. Training for one endurance event will help your preformance in all other endurance events. Unless you're already a finely tuned athlete Ironman training will help you in Olympic dustance events and even sprints. Marathon training will help you in 5Ks.

Endurance events are primarily about strength and endurance type strength and fitness transfers easily. 90% of the training for 500m and 10,000m runners is the same as the training done my marathon runners and its all strength building.

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"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
John Sawhill

"90% of the training for 500m and 10,000m runners is the same as the training done my marathon runners and its all strength building. "

Can you expand on this as it was my understanding that running was not very dependant on strength or power. In fact it was my understanding that of the three disciplines of triathlon it is the least dependant on strength and power. Biking being the most dependant, swimming then running.

~Matt

I have said this repeatedly here and elsewhere that if an IM athlete wants to REALLY improve, after doing a few years of focused IM training, what they should do is take a year off from IM and focus on Olympic distance racing or even shorter. Focus also on setting absolute stand-alone PB's for a 40K ITT and the 10K run. After doing this for a year, they will come back and most are shocked at how much they will improve at the longer stuff.

Fleck

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

In running when you talk about "strength" you are talking about the ability to maintain a certain pace or speed for a certain length of time - usually longer. How is this done? Well, the really simple way is just doing the same in training. Say you want to run a 10 mile race in 60 minutes. Start doing weekely race pace sessions running for longer and longer periods of time at 6 min/mile. Now if this sounds completely bizare, know that this is more or less exactly what the best distance runners essentially do in training.

Fleck

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Actually it sounds more "realistic" then the typical "train slow then go fast during a race". This concept never made sense to me other than to train the body to "keep running" for certain period of time.

Seems to me the only way to run, bike or swim fast is to train fast.

Although I've never tried this approach for longer distances I have done similar for shorter distances 5K/10K.

Typically I would run "X" distance at race pace with "Y" recovery. Over a period of weeks shorten the recovery distance to some miniscual amount prior to race day. Race day falls in as the final run of the cycle, just without any recovery.

When the race is over start again with a faster goal...

But I'm still not very fast...but then I never continued this process over a very long period. Usually just for one race.

Oh and added: " In running when you talk about "strength" you are talking about the ability to maintain a certain pace or speed for a certain length of time"

Is this not Muscular Endurance? Is "strength" used just for ease of use?

~Matt