Anti-Döping

I gotta agree with Ric. Training errors and overtraining can lead to longterm or permanent maladies. I suffer daily from a twenty year old training injury. Drugs were not involved in my case, but the memory of your joints, ligaments, and bones is a lot longer than your memory of a marginally better athletic performance.

John

A thoughtful post – but I think you have missed the essential question – why did you decide to run and what was your goal for a personal best?

Are you guided by some notion of athleticism concerning the best performance of your natural body and how you can discipline your mind(a) and train your muscles, or do you have other goals (including like all of us digging up every bit of evidence that age is not catching up with you) ?

In this context I think you are wrong in your description of “the most reasonable argument for laws against performance-enhancing drugs, namely that they have bad long-run effects on athletes’ health”. Rather I think the best argument is around the aspiration of sport – in particular that if the goal of sport is the glorification of the capacity of the human body – then the sport should be based simply upon that and not the enhancement of the body other than through ‘natural means’.

If the goal is however simply winning (or achieving some personal best) then the rationale for restricting performance enhancing drugs (or surgery, or blood doping, etc) seems to be much less.

If the objective of these policies is just to protect athletes from themselves it seems a very narrow approach, why worry about drugs, but not excessive training and in the case of some sports excessive competition and the way in which many junior athletes get pushed into sport before their bodies are ready.

This however is all very pure, and in your case, let yourself enjoy your achievement (and of course the wonderful ego boosting idea of beating those aged half your age – while you only get better) – after all it was a fun run and if that isn’t fun what is.

(a) of course if you took the drug to block the pain – rather than reduce inflammation the further question is whether or not the purpose of your drug taking was to address your incapacity to discipline your mind to withstand the pain of pushing your body to its limits.

Typical lefty, high on drugs and trying to cheat the system.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/lance-armstrong-wants-to-tell-nation-something-but,17973/

Agree with Ric and Omega. I have an old (teenage) rugby injury to one knee and it’s never going away. (And as is typical, once one knee is damaged, you do damage to the other one as you develop a lopsided style.) I switched to cycling for fitness/recreation and feel better for it.

On the general topics:

– Training regimes have advanced in some ways, but not in others. Notably muscles are typically easier to strengthen than ligaments/tendons and of course, there’s nothing much you can do about cartilage etc. In total, I believe at the high levels we’ve reached the point where the training sacrifices long term health for short term gain. Many sportspeople end up physically damaged by the time they retire. Throw in the psychological complications – many sportspeople are unable to adjust to life beyond the sport – and it’s hard to see how the activity itself is “harm minimised.”

– As someone who grew up watching professional cycling – with the Tour de France as a canonical “non harm-minimsed” event – I have mixed feelings about the doping problem. On the one hand, heroes (and anti-heroes) have died from the drugs they used, so the problem is there for all to see. On the other, enforcement just fails time and time again. Athletics has maybe had more success, but the rumours are football (soccer) and rugby both have a lot of unsurfaced problems. So I think on practical grounds the current way forward just isn’t working… and I haven’t boycotted as a spectator and I don’t think I will unless something changed to make stopping doping more than just “Green Lantern theory.”

– On amateurs who damage themselves – that is their choice and I’m not giving up wine, so why should they give up running? However, I do think there’s still heavy ignorance about some of the substances that filter down from the pro arena – there are some people who run the risk of dying like Marco Pantani, but in the absence of the ability to be open about what they are doing are not going to get the help/advice they need. I’d guess many of them don’t even understand the risks they run.

As a side issue, the level of physical training required to compensate for our sedentary work lifestyles feels problematically close to the “often injured” edge in the first place.

Well, one factor is that the drugs in current use are most emphatically not selected or developed for minimal adverse side effects – they are, instead, picked for their ability to not show up in blood and urine samples. This is very likely to be a bad priority set..

The 1960s baseball player Richie (Dick) Allen said it all. “Your body is like a bar of soap. The more you use it, the faster it wears out.”

Drugs retard this truth, but they don’t halt it.

In the ancient Olympic games – bitterly competitive and at times corrupt – once the athletes showed up at Olympia they were medically under the care of the Olympiad’s staff physicians, not their own. Maybe you could fix the official doctor, but it woul have been both very expensive and very risky. People should be thinking more about institutional design of this sort and less about miracle technical solutions.

Tim Worstall 08.29.10 at 8:41 am

” That so many professional cyclists seem to die in their 30s and early 40s from heart problems would seem to be proof of that.”

That might say something about what, uh, ‘supplements’ they were taking during their peak years.

I far prefer skipping all the dangerous training and exercise, and stick to flavor- and mood-enhancing drugs.

Far safer.

I’m with Bill K.

What about drugs that allegedly improve mental function? Should promotion and tenure committees take note?

Drink strong coffee before all of your runs:

>> Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine’s effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes and yes and yes and yes.<<

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/health/nutrition/26best.html

Also, add fish oil pills to your daily diet for the anti-inflammatory effects.

no one linked to the SNL all drug olympics sketch?

Ric@1: I wanted to respond to this as well. Painkillers are probably not good for you. But not all ‘painkillers’ are just painkillers. Ibuprofen partially functions by reducing swelling in problem areas. A steroid injection can do the same thing. The body’s natural response to injuries is not always optimal and these are used clinically to help your body recover from certain injuries and actually exercise muscles, tendons and joints to get healthier and stronger when your bodies natural swelling response would be counter-productive. This is a great example of the benefits of drugs used properly that applies to people of all ages.

Btw why the strange spelling “Anti-Döping” ???

Two points here. First off, the USRowing rulebook begins (well, when I last read it, it began, I assume it still does, though I haven’t rowed competitively in a long time) with a statement to the effect that all the rules of the sport are designed with two aims in mind: first, safety; and second, fairness. Anything not covered by a specific rule would be judged on those grounds. I’ve always found this a very useful starting point for questions of things not covered by the rules.

Second, Fat Cyclist has some very cogent thoughts about cheating, especially in an amateur context: “When you race, the main thing your entry fee buys you is the right to compare yourself to other people. And if you cheat, you’re screwing up the yardstick for everyone.”

And a bonus thought: For God’s sake, man, it’s ibuprofen! On the shelf, on the approved list, what more do you want? Anything more is holding yourself to a higher standard, which is fine, but you’re not cheating if you’re obeying the same rules everyone else is. Don’t beat yourself up over it.

Think of it this way: you can race, and train, with no painkillers at all. You could also train, and race, vegan. Or (like I do) race on a single-speed bike against gearies, or run your marathons barefoot, or exceed the consensus agreement of “what’s fair” in any number of other ways.

The whole point of sports is that you don’t use every available means. That’s why you fly-fish, rather than dynamiting a stream, for example. When you do a sport, you play by its rules, and if you want to, for whatever reason, limit yourself in some other fashion, that’s totally cool. If you think that the spirit of the rules should disallow something that it doesn’t already, and so you refrain from that practice, that’s cool, too. Sports is the most openly and transparently constructed social construct out there: the rules are clear, the committees that make the rules are known, the enforcers and penalties are specified. Let’s not try to make things more complicated than that!

Chris caught me: Fatty’s thought (my point two) and my bonus point are somewhat in opposition. I’ll stick with my own, though his might well be wiser.

And yeah, the idea that the crowd is the yardstick for everyone’s performance is weird if you take it seriously. (Most ideas are weird if you take them seriously.) The overridingly important thing in most amateur athletics is whether you’ve given it your all; the crowd is there to motivate you and to keep you honest. If you cheesed out by doping in amateur sports (you’re a freaking tool) and nobody will know it but you. And yes, the person you cheated most was yourself. But again, Fatty’s got an important contribution, especially for those whose ethics require consideration of others: you don’t know what you’re cheating others out of.

I got it too, now that you mention engels. It is obscure.

I’m disappointed nobody has bitten on my remark 29. Should we downgrade the artistic relevance of Jim Morrison, Vincent Van Gogh and many others, knowing that they used performance-enhancing drugs? This reminds me of a really good joke about doping in this 1992 Titanic title:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomhintner/1358951304/

Titanic is a German satiric magazine (http://www.titanic-magazin.de/postkarten.html) and that was one of the best titles ever. If need be, translation will follow.

‘Just make two categories – One – absolutely drug free and if you want to get a place in this section you have to have a test during build up, and before and after the event and another second, open section where you can imbibe anything you want – no tests ever.’

An old professor of mine who did a lot of cycling once had a variation of this (it’s a lot funnier when said in his thick Northern accent).

‘Yeh, yeh…’ (he would say) ‘lets have two races. In one, you can take anything you want, and it will end up like the WWE or something. In the other for the real athletes. Random doping at any time. And make the penalty…yeah make the penalty death. By public hanging. Or crucifixion. So one kind of sport looking like wrestling, and the other with people cycling past rows of crucified ex-sportsmen, like the last scene of Spartacus’.

First they came for the triathletes, and since I was not a triathlete, I said nothing.
Then they came for the marathoners, and since I was not a marathoner, I said nothing.
Next they came for the fun runners, and not being one of those either, what could I say?
Then they asked for ibuprofen, and I had none, nor Tylenol, aspirin, Aleve.
“You’re a lazy shit, aren’t you?” they asked, and I had to agree.