Go All-In

“Shove me in the shallow water, before I get too deep”
–Edie Brickell, “What I Am”

If you’re a regular visitor here, you’ve been subjected to five straight drug articles.

If you’re not a regular visitor, perhaps you stumbled here after doing a Google search for “celebrity breast augmentation” or “Amsterdam hookers” or “female Viagra”. In that case, um…you know this blog is mostly about running, right? I don’t want be mistaken for TMZ.com or The Smoking Gun or some online sex shop (find your own link).

Either way, the drug series got a little heavy-handed, and very long-winded. And as I told Rob, I think I peaked too early by talking about artificial breasts in the first installment – after that, the bar for stimulating interest was set pretty high, and I may have overreached a bit while trying to keep your attention.

Next time, I’ll know to build momentum gradually, and save the sex talk for later in the series. Obviously I still have a lot of things to learn about writing.

At any rate, it’s time to shift gears. I’m taking the easy way out, by posting our Herald article from last week.

I first wrote about the World Series of Poker in 1993, thinking it was a flash in the pop cultural pan; a mindlessly amusing diversion that would soon go the way of Joe Millionaire or the Macarena.

Instead, televised poker continues to be a huge draw, and thousands of new players appear out of the woodwork every year. Likewise, the throwaway article I wrote three years ago turned out to have some legs – I’ve tinkered with it and republished it twice since then, including in last week’s Monterey Herald.

Here’s the version that appeared last week:

***
Running Life 8/3/06 “Go All-In”

Without a doubt, poker is hot.

High-stakes tournaments are televised year-round on various networks, and it seems like everyone wants to try their luck and live like The Gambler. Heck, even the Monterey Herald now has a regular poker column to teach a novice player how to work his short stack into a huge pile. We’re pretty sure those are poker terms.

As we write this column, the World Series of Poker (WSOP) is underway in Las Vegas, with $12 million awaiting the winner of the main event. The WSOP is televised on ESPN, and it’s a unique glance into the world of high-stakes gambling that the vast majority of us are too poor (the entry fee to the main event is $10,000) or too terrified to enter.

The contestants make for fascinating viewing - it's the biggest collection of geeks and oddballs this side of a Star Trek convention. Harvard PhDs compete with uneducated laborers, mathematic whiz kids stare down vice peddlers, and fresh-off-the-boat immigrants play alongside old-school Texas oilmen.

There are high rollers, Jesus freaks, pregnant women, and LOTS of fat guys. If someone could invent smell-o-vision, we would even sense the cigar stench and the stale nachos and the B.O. (come to think of it, maybe we could do without smell-o-vision).

The main event of the WSOP is one of the most ruthless varieties of poker, called No-limit Texas Hold 'Em.

Since this is a column about running, we’ll pose two questions: 1) Can poker legitimately be called a sport, or its players be considered athletes? And more specifically, 2) Are there any lessons that runners and other recreational athletes can learn by watching?

The answers may surprise you.

Actually, question #1 is easy: no one would dare call card players athletes. Even casual observers can take one look and tell that these folks aren't the smoothie-after-a-workout types.

However, question #2 is more complex. No-limit hold ‘em does have some parallels to running. One dramatic similarity is the most exciting aspect of the game, when players decide to "go all-in".

In the no-limit game, anyone can wager their entire stack of chips on any given hand. If you have a higher chip count, you can go all-in against a lower stack to intimidate him off a hand, further building your pile. If you go all-in with the low stack and lose the hand, you're out of the tournament.

You would think players would reserve such a gambit for only a few premium hands, but in fact it's done all the time. Tournament rules require increasing chip bids for each hand, so the player who plays conservatively will slowly bleed his chips away before the ideal hand comes along.

Thus, going all-in is a necessity, as players are unable to win large pots or knock other players out without this tactic.

Think of going all-in as running a race. It represents a time to push all of your chips onto the table, reveal your cards, and see who comes out on top.

In poker, the decision to go all-in is partly based on your opponent: do you think he has a better hand? Can you get a read off of him that indicates what cards he is holding?

In racing, we're often concerned with how we will perform in comparison to others. Some of us try to beat our training partners. Others try for age group awards, while some are simply afraid of finishing dead last.

Obviously, the fear of losing is the most nerve-racking aspect of going all-in for professional card players. In no-limit poker, any given hand could result in sudden elimination.

Similarly, with every race, runners risk failure or disappointment with a poor showing. But just as there is no way to advance in the WSOP without going all-in, there is no better way to improve our performances than by periodically putting everything on the line in a race.

Any of us who are concerned with PRs, age group places, and comparative times from year to year need to go all-in on a regular basis - not just when we have the perfect hand.

Without the motivation of the next race looming, many of us would tend to ease up on our training, gradually losing our edge and our speed, the same way a pile of chips dwindles away one hand at a time if never risked.

Don’t be afraid if racing gives you a major-league case of the jitters. That’s the nature of competition. For gamblers, this is the "juice" that draws them to the table - the panicky tension, the drama of exhilarating highs and gut-wrenching lows based on the fall of the cards.

Runners become hooked on racing in search of the same thrill. In fact, many coaches say that if you aren't terrified before a race, you aren't properly prepared for it.

So maybe runners and poker players have more in common than it first appears. Running also brings together people from disparate backgrounds. Some of us are oddballs. And although there aren't quite as many fat guys in our group, we know plenty of runners with B.O. issues.

Runners often use the phrase "go all-out" to indicate their maximal effort in a race. Next time, try this: when you are lined up at the start line, envision pushing a big stack of chips into the middle of the road, and commit yourself to going all-in.

Read more...

Color Me Sadd

OK – let’s bring things to a close. All this talk about drugs is just bumming me out. So I’ll use today’s post for some final thoughts before we shift gears.

The funny thing is, I feel like I’ve written extensively about the subject, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of angles to be considered. Like I said right off the top, the scope of this problem is enormous.

Yesterday I said that the way we look at sports has been changed. In many ways, it strikes right to the heart of our belief system: is it better to have full awareness of the corruption and dishonesty that produces memorable athletic performances, or to remain ignorant and celebrate the accomplishments as if they were legitimate?

Nothing can be taken at face value anymore. With all individual (as opposed to team) sports, any dominant victory or unexpected performance immediately and automatically casts suspicion – justified or not - on the athlete. Instead of appreciating such heroic moments, we’re forced to wonder whether the feats were attained honestly, and whether they will be overturned in the following weeks.

There will never again be another moment of pure admiration regarding an individual athletic accomplishment. Even if a “clean” athlete somehow manages to break a world record, he will be presumed guilty based on the sins of his predecessors.

Consider the case of Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell, who now stands as the sole 100m world record holder after the disqualification of Justin Gatlin. Before Powell had the record, it belonged to Tim Montgomery, who also tested positive. Are we as fans really supposed to believe that a clean sprinter could beat the best times of two world-class sprinters who also used drugs? It’s a notion that stretches the imagination.

Who was the last clean runner to set the 100m world record? Maurice Greene, or someone from the 1990s? Or do we have to go back further, to Carl Lewis or beyond? It’s become a parlor game. Powell may very well be clean, but there’s no way we’ll ever know for sure. Although he has never been implicated in any wrongdoing, he has an inevitable guilt by association with other sprinters that will always cast suspicion.

As spectators, we’ve somehow collectively decided whether or not to trust an athlete based on his nationality, his upbringing, or the image he has cultivated during his time in the spotlight, rather than evidence that appears contrary. Thousands of San Francisco Giants fans will still tell you they think Barry Bonds is an innocent victim of overzealous persecution. If Floyd Landis were French, would so many Americans try to give him the benefit of the doubt?

I'm one of the biggest Lance Armstrong fans you'll ever find, but if you ask me whether or not he used drugs, I'll tell you honestly that I have no idea. I like to think he didn't. It goes back to that belief system: sometimes it’s just easier to believe that our favorite athletes got where they are through honesty, hard-work, and God-given talent – because any alternative scenario is too depressing to consider.

I remember when I was young, watching the Olympics and the Tour de France with a sense of wonder and awe. Perhaps it was childhood naiveté, but when I watched those events, there was always an underlying premise that Olympic dreams were available to anyone with the right ability and the dedication to work towards greatness.

Undoubtedly, my generation will be the last to grow up with this mindset. Because when athletes like Gatlin and Landis test positive, that idealism is replaced with this hard reality: the athletes at the top are all cheating. If you aren’t using something, you’ll just get beat by somebody who does. There’s absolutely no reason for any kid to think he has an honest shot at being the best without doing something illicit along the way.

I suppose that’s the lingering affect the drug stories have on me: they no longer surprise me, they don’t make me angry, and – somewhat surprisingly - they don’t make me less interested in athletics.

They just make me sad for the state of these sports, sorry that there’s no getting around the problems, and disappointed for the kids who’ll never know the way things used to be.

Read more...

Chemical Games

I’ve tackled some of the primary questions most people ask about drugs. What I haven’t done is say what I think should be done about the situation. That’s not an oversight – it’s an admission that I have absolutely no idea what the best solution might be.

One school of thought says that we should legalize everything for competition. If you want to use HGH or EPO, go right ahead. If you want to roll the dice and risk your long-term health, we won’t tell you otherwise.

Surprisingly, there is a lot of support for this idea amongst some high-level athletes. However misguided it may be, many top athletes would risk personal harm to gain a competitive advantage – to a disturbing degree. Several years ago, Sports Illustrated did a survey of US Olympic athletes, and asked them this: If you knew that taking a drug would ensure that you win a gold medal, but it was also guaranteed to kill you within five years, would you do it?

A shockingly high number – more than 50% - said yes. Death or Glory. Or in this case, both.

Clearly it’s not much of a moral dilemma for these athletes to use drugs, as long as the reward is large enough (a gold medal) and certain enough (guaranteed). In all likelihood, these same athletes would also turn to performance enhancing drugs if they suspected that any of their competitors were doing so.

You can see how this would quickly spiral into a situation where everybody’s juicing, because nobody would want to be stuck with the knife at a gun fight (from yesterday’s post).

So it’s not too difficult to envision a future competition where all the athletes are on some drug or another. One sport – bodybuilding – has gone down this road, to the point where they hold two separate competitions: there’s a Mr Universe for drug users, and a “Mr Clean Universe” for anyone else. (I don’t think the rules stipulate that Mr Clean has to be bald and wear a white T-shirt, but that would be a nice touch.).

In fact, many people will tell you this “everybody’s juiced” situation is exactly what we have in track/running/cycling today. The only difference with bodybuilding is that they don’t ask us to pretend otherwise.

What if our sports formally adopted such a policy? Instead of merely having the best athletic ability, competitors would also strive to have the most potent pharmacological cocktail on board before their peak races. They would be dependent on chemists and lab geeks to achieve their success. Imagine every sprinter’s posse with one skinny, bespectacled guy in a short-sleeve plaid shirt with a pocket protector roaming around trying to look cool with the rest of the group.

Such a situation could be hilariously ironic. Think about it – who got teased and beat up more in high school than the kids in chemistry club? And weren’t the jocks usually the ones doing most of the bullying? And now those two groups would be forced to pair off in oddball symbiotic relationships on par with Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley.

The chemists would actually have the upper hand in these partnerships. They would be too valuable to the sprinter to be fired – because the chemist could then go and tell everybody else what particular designer drugs the sprinter was on. And the sprinter knows he won’t succeed without the help of a good chemist.

I actually see the chemistry guys reveling in this: they could do all kinds of trash talking with the sprinters*. Between events at track meets, they can congregate on the infield to make fun of their athletes, draw formulas in the dirt and trade periodic table jokes. They might even encounter some kind of chemistry groupies wanting to make “covalent bonds” with them after the meets.

(*Some examples of chemist-sprinter trash talk…
• Ring the bell – I’m taking you back to school!
• Don’t piss me off – or I’ll go all ionic on your ass.
• Dude, you’re looking heavy – what’s your atomic weight?
• I’ll crush you faster than I did Sister Diane’s 11th grade lab final.
• I own you, bitch – like Scandium owns 21 electrons.
And that took me about 30 seconds. These could get really funny.)

Over time, the chemists would get the same rock star treatment the athletes get. Some of the better ones would sign “exclusive rights” contracts with companies like Nike and become millionaires. Scores of little kids will dream of a career in chemistry, and of growing up to compete at the “Chemical Games,” where the torch is an enormous Bunsen burner. The best chemistry students coming out of grad school could be drafted by professional teams and awarded lucrative signing bonuses. If you’re a career chemist, I don’t really see the downside to all of this.

Realistically, we know this isn’t going to happen. I suppose that’s probably for the good. Sports have an inherently noble premise – that athletes are testing the limits of their bodies through nothing more than hard work and determination. And despite my jaded outlook, it’s a premise I’m completely in favor of defending.

Yes, the tests are light years behind the cheaters, but that doesn’t mean we should stop the effort. It’s just going to take a very long time before the priority (and money) given to testing is equal to the money that changes hands among the top athletes and corporations in every sport.

Until then, our sports will continue to have an anemic system of testing (one time per year for a baseball player? Oh please.), and they’ll continue to profess that they’re doing everything in their power to rid sports of doping. All of the top-level athletes will emphatically assert that they are completely clean, and fans will believe what they want to believe about each athlete based on his/her carefully crafted image.

None of us will ever know for sure, because the way we look at sports has been fundamentally, irrevocably changed.

That’s the biggest tragedy of this whole saga. In my next post, I’ll examine this angle further, and hopefully wrap this series up.

Read more...

Moral Relativism

Coincidentally, before I sat down to post part 3 of this drug series today, I saw Matt Lauer's interview with Floyd Landis. It was just painful to watch.

Lauer opened with his fastball, then repeatedly asked different variations of the same question: why should we believe you? Landis couldn't give a single straightforward answer and looked completely unconvincing. Heck, I felt myself squirming for Landis - I can't even imagine how defeated and ashamed he must feel. I actually felt bad for the guy.

On the other hand, maybe he's just getting the treatment he deserves.

I'm cutting the intro short, though - because this section is already over 1000 words long. I swear, sometimes I'm too analytical for my own good. Let's just move on to the next question...

Q: Would you ever use performance enhancing drugs?

A: This is the issue that prompts everyone to get on a pedestal and preach about the morality of athletics. Always play fair, don’t break the rules, don’t cheat, yada, yada, yada. But unless you’re Craig (an actual preacher), I’m not listening.

For obvious reasons, the most high-profile steroid stories revolve around each sport’s biggest stars. But for every superstar who may be juicing, there are thousands of younger (sadly, even down to high-schoolers), less talented athletes who confront the same question. Except in these cases, the outcomes of their decisions don’t simply pad the record books, but dramatically influence their livelihood in their chosen sport.

Imagine you’re a 29-year-old minor league baseball player making $25K per year and batting .240. You hit the weight room every day and train like a maniac, but your strength has seemingly plateaued.

You’ve played professional baseball for 10 years but never been called up to the majors. You don’t have any other significant career options that can support your wife and baby after you retire, because you’ve spent every waking minute working on your game. You know that if you don’t get called up before age 30, you probably never will be.

You also know teammates who started juicing and saw dramatic improvements in their performance. You realize that if you use the same types of low-potency steroids that many major leaguers use, you can maintain a higher intensity level in your training, and your strength will noticeably increase.

It doesn’t take much. A handful of those 350-ft fly outs would become 375-ft home runs. Send just one more ball per week into the bleachers, and your batting average could climb to .270. That would probably be enough for a call-up to the big team. And a salary increase to $300K. All with relatively low long-term health risk if done carefully.

Finally, you start seeing those aforementioned teammates - who may have less natural talent than you - getting called up to the majors. There is a trainer hanging around the locker room every day who has told you that he can easily hook you up - all you have to do is ask.

Are you telling me that you wouldn’t have that conversation with him some day? That you wouldn’t give steroids some serious consideration?

The closer you get to breaking through, the more tempting it is to bend the rules. If you’re a national-caliber 10K runner, a mere 45 seconds can determine the difference between missing the Olympic trials, and actually making the team.

Many sub-elite runners toil in obscurity and poverty for years, waiting for one breakthrough race on the national stage that will land them a shoe contract or an invitation to join a sponsored training group. Some runners get tantalizingly close: all it takes is a few seconds per mile over a 5K to make that kind of leap. But if it never comes, they have nothing to fall back on.

Now think of those elite athletes again. If you are a sprinter, what is the margin of victory in a major championship race? In many cases, it’s less than a tenth of a second.

If you could build your strength up enough to run one tenth of a second faster, that translates into significant tangible gain. You could win the 100m instead of finishing fourth. With prize money, sponsor bonuses, and appearance fees for future races, it’s literally a million-dollar decision.

But don’t worry, you won’t have to make your decision alone. Many young athletes are surrounded by like-minded individuals in similar circumstances. This circle of influence can be tremendously powerful, but not always in a beneficial manner.

This time, instead of a baseball player, think of yourself as a 23-year-old sprinter. You’ve never made the 100m finals of a major track meet. You’ve heard for years that the guys who are beating you (again, by a mere tenth of a second) are on the juice. Your longtime coach (who also happens to be your father figure since you never knew your own) has told you that your best chance of making a final is to level the playing field, to use the same weapons the faster runners are using. Otherwise, you’re constantly bringing a knife to a gun fight.

He tells you it’s safe. He tells you its effective. He explains that it's almost impossible to get caught. He tells you your teammates have done it. He tells you it’s the only way. And hey, if you just want to try it, he’s got some in his trunk right now.

I’ll ask again…can you honestly say you wouldn’t be tempted by this?

I’m absolutely certain that every single elite athlete faces this question at some point in their development. What I can’t imagine, though, is how I would respond if I were in that situation.

It’s easy to say, “These are the rules, don’t break them.” It’s much harder to consider all of the factors at play in making such a decision. As much as we like to believe in absolutes, all of us implement our own moral relativism in decisions about our careers and daily activities.

Are you reading this blog at work? Have you ever snuck out early or straggled in late so you could have a longer workout? Have you ever peed in a public area? Sure, these are trite examples, but the point is that nobody follows all the rules, and everybody creates an internal justification for those rules or laws they choose to violate.

For almost all of us, sports are merely a healthy outlet for our physical energy and competitive drive. Recreational athletes regard organized competitions as bastions of honesty and fair play. We wouldn’t think of cutting a corner in a road race, and we wouldn’t dream of contaminating our bodies in hopes of gaining an edge on our competitors.

But for a relative handful of athletes, the stakes are different. If we depended on our 5K time or our overall finishing place in order to support our families or to extend our careers for a couple more years, perhaps our moral compass would skew a few degrees off-center.

So OK, you have your principles. You don’t break the rules. Maybe you would be the one to draw a line in the sand and make the agonizing, career-limiting decision to say no to these ubiquitous temptations to cheat. And in the final analysis, maybe I would, too.

But the decision would be a lot harder than you think.

Read more...

Shades of Grey

First, the bad news: That whole breast business from the previous post wasn't really the main theme of this series - it was just an analogy to illustrate the point I was trying to make. But apparently the breast speculation was much more enticing than the discussion about doping, so I've made a mental note that the topic of celebrity breast augmentation could be further explored in this space at some point down the road. After all, this is a full service blog.

However, if you've come back today looking for more boob refernces, I'll save you some time and tell you there aren't any in this post. But I do mention Dutch hookers and shrunken testicles. Intrigued? Then read on to Part 2...

Q: Can’t we just ban all performance enhancing drugs?

A: This is the primary reason why I’ve never had strong feelings against the use of performance enhancing drugs: because it’s impossible to draw a consistent line between what substances should be legal and what shouldn’t be.

We have three major professional sports leagues in America (no, I don't count hockey anymore) along with the NCAA for collegiate athletics, and none of those four organizations have the same list of banned substances. If you're a 19-year-old playing single A baseball, you have a different list than a 19-year-old playing baseball for his college team.

If we're considering Olympic or international sports, who decides what is legal? The host country of the event? What if there is a track meet in Amsterdam – can athletes load up on ecstasy before the event and solicit a prostitute afterwards without any legal repercussions? (And in that case, what’s more dangerous to the athlete’s health – temporarily heightened sensation with sleep alteration, or an STD from the local brothel?)

For American sports, do we just ban drugs that are illegal? Then the government would have to keep up with rapidly changing, highly creative laboratories. That technology gap I mentioned yesterday would come into play again – except in this case, the guys with the slide rules and graph paper also have to deal with bureaucratic red tape and institutional inertia to implement any changes. The bad guys will always be light years ahead of the game. As soon as the Feds outlaw one group of drugs (like anabolic steroids), athletes can turn to something else that isn’t regulated (like HGH).

Plus, some of the most potent drugs are perfectly legal. For instance, EPO is a common blood-boosting medication provided to many cancer patients. Modafinil is the main ingredient in prescription anti-narcolepsy medication. And it’s certainly not against the law to own testosterone-boosting pills – in fact, there is a billion-dollar industry built around it, as testosterone is the primary ingredient in the rapidly developing field of “female vitality” (think Viagra for women) medications. Talk about enhancing performance.

So legality can’t be our litmus test. Do we ban drugs that are harmful? That becomes a personal liberty issue, just like alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. If someone wants to destroy his kidneys, shrivel his nuts, lose his hair, and have a back full of acne while experiencing constant rage and paranoia, that’s his Constitutional right (if not exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind). Major league baseball didn’t care that Mickey Mantle drank himself to an untimely death, and effectively looked the other way during the cocaine epidemic in that was rampant in the sport in the late 1980s.

Besides, it’s possible for any high school kid to walk into his neighborhood GNC store or surf the Internet and stock up on hundreds of products that are just as harmful as steroids over the long term. Think about Mark McGwire and androstenedione – Big Mac is pretty much considered a villain now, but that particular product was available over-the-counter at the time he used it. The farthest he had to travel for his juice was the local shopping center. If these drugs are so hazardous, how come they are easier for a teenager to buy than a pack of cigarettes or some sleazy skin magazine? Should players be punished for using a supplement they bought at the mall?

Finally, who determines what drugs are performance enhancing? Andro has since been put on the banned list – but what about creatine? Or Sudafed? Or the painkillers that many runners pop like candy? (Remember the commercial where a woman made it to the finish line of a 5K only because of all the Alleve she took? She even handed them out to other runners during the race. Could they make a similar commercial like that today with a bunch of women injecting testosterone into each other's backsides? I promise not to skip through that one on my TiVo.) How about caffeine pills or antacid tablets? All of those products provide a clear performance benefit, but are harmful if taken in high doses over a long period of time. How many of you ultra runners out there would like to have your Tylenol, NoDoz or Tums prohibited during your next 100-miler?

I once ran the Boston Marathon while suffering from a hellacious bout of the flu. If it wasn’t for the megadoses of Sudafed and Advil I took before and during the race, there’s no way I would have finished (or even started, for that matter). If the USOC had taken a urine sample afterwards, I would have failed, because most cold medications are on the banned substance list. While I obviously wasn’t trying to win the race, I definitely benefited from the performance enhancing properties of those meds. (Um...nobody from the BAA reads this, right? Because there’s no way I’m giving my medal back.)

To further complicate things, why are we merely focused on things that go into our bodies? What about all of the equipment changes that have revolutionized nearly every sport? Is it safe - for the server or the recipient - to swing a racket that sends a tennis ball 130 mph? If you are a blood doper riding a bike that is capable of going downhill at 80mph, are you more likely to suffer from kidney failure, or a career-ending spinal injury in a crash?

How about oxygen-deprivation tents that can boost someone’s red blood cell count over a period of months, just as effectively as blood doping? Why is doping wrong but living in a $30,000 high-elevation tent acceptable? At that point, we’re merely splitting hairs based on the method of blood cell production.

The point I’m making (over and over) is that banning various substances is a very slippery slope, without much consistency or logic driving it. You can’t simply have a blanket zero-tolerance policy. Even assuming - which we can’t - that these drugs could consistently be detected, there will never be agreement on where to draw the line.

As for this post, I’m drawing the line here. To be continued next time.

Read more...

Suspicious Mind

Imagine me sitting here wearing suspenders and giant eyeglasses, speaking in a raspy voice – I’m in Larry King mode.

Me: Thousand Oaks, hello. What’s your question?

Thousand Oaks: I was wondering what your take is on the whole drug situation in sports.

Me: Oy vey. Pull up a chair.

I’ve been terribly reluctant to tackle the whole drug issue, for a few reasons:

1. It’s simply exhausting in scope. Asking someone to address the drug issue is like asking Anderson Cooper “So how are things in the South since Hurricane Katrina?” It’s just an enormous story that constantly evolves from one week to the next, with countless angles and thousands more stories than can ever be told.

2. Far better writers have written much more eloquently about this issue in magazines and Internet columns. Believe me - there are a lot of sportswriters I admire, and nearly every one of them has analyzed the drug issue from one aspect or another. In other words, if you want to read drug stories, you can probably find 10,000 good ones from Google in about 0.034 seconds.

3. On many levels, I don’t know how I feel about using performance enhancing drugs. It’s fashionable to take a moral stand against them, but the boundaries can become very blurred. I think equally good arguments can be made either way.

Honestly, I planned on staying out of the whole mess. But then Floyd Landis happened. And Justin Gatlin happened. And it just felt like a good time to say something.

So I started typing. And typing. Before I looked up, I had 1500 words down. And I was just getting rolling.

Now instead of one post, this is going to be a series – maybe three, maybe five, who knows. (I reserve the right to interrupt the series if any Beyonce-related musings spring to mind. You know how this blog works.) There’s no way I’ll cover every facet of the issue here, but hopefully I’ll put some observations on the table and highlight a point you hadn’t considered before.

Here’s the format I’ll use: Each post will start with a common question, after which I’ll discuss why the answers aren’t as obvious as you’d think. If you want to post follow-up questions here, feel free to do so – that could easily lead to another post.

Enough preamble. Like the Black-Eyed Peas say, Leeeeeet’s get it started!

Q: How many top athletes use drugs?

A: There’s no way of knowing. My runner friends and I often speculate about which athletes are “using” in the same manner that college guys muse about which actresses have fake breasts. For every case that is overwhelmingly certain (like Barry Bonds or Pamela Anderson), there are scores of people who appear enhanced but may just be naturally gifted (Lance Armstrong, Lindsay Lohan, Deena Kastor, Tyra Banks, Bernard Lagat, Courtney Cox…I could go on and on. In fact, this could be a whole separate post, comparing famous athletes to famous breasts. I’m filing that thought away for later.)

Unfortunately, there will NEVER be any way of knowing for sure which athletes are using drugs. If you think Hollywood plastic surgeons are secretive, try uncovering information on a BALCO-type lab (there are probably hundreds out there) without any tips to help you.

Rigorous testing doesn’t clarify the matter. Sure, Marion Jones can say she’s never tested positive, but anyone with basic laboratory knowledge understands what a low threshold that is. For every drug that can be specifically tested, there are probably ten other drugs that can mask the presence of that first drug. The technology gap is enormous – the testers are like a handful of guys with slide rules and graph paper trying to keep pace with Microsoft and Intel.

So clean test results are pretty much useless. On the other hand, what else can an athlete do besides take test after test after test and pass them all? In Every Second Counts, Lance Armstrong describes in painstaking detail how the testers knock on his door at all hours of the day and night, any day of the year. He’s the most frequently drug-tested athlete ever, and he’s never tested positive. Why shouldn’t we believe him?

The main reason guys like Landis and Gatlin get caught is because they or their “handlers” do something foolish, like getting greedy or forgetting to cover their tracks. It doesn’t mean they are they only guys out there using – it just means they were the only ones who screwed up enough to get caught.

Let me put it this way: among high-profile professional athletes, there is nobody – NOBODY – whose name I would be surprised to hear as a drug user. Especially with runners. Any sprinter or distance runner at the world-class level could be Demi Moore (fake, but impressive) or Teri Hatcher (real, and spectacular). Cyclists and triathletes are fair game, too. To think otherwise is simply ignorant.

It’s just part of the landscape of sports now: if you are the best at something, or if you do something unexpected, you automatically come under suspicion.

And we’ll leave it at that for today. Look for Part 2 tomorrow.

Read more...

My Josie

“Yeah my girlfriend…
she’s so smart and independent, I don’t think she needs me –
quite half as much as I know I need her-
I wonder why there’s not another guy that she prefers-
And when I feel like giving up like my world is falling down…-
I see her pretty face, and it takes me away to a better place and –
I know that everything, know that everything, know that everything, everything’s gonna be fine.”
Blink-182, “Josie”

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked in comments or e-mails is whether my wife reads this blog.

The query typically isn’t asked in the context of “Wow, you’re a talented writer - she should be proud to have you around.” Rather, it always seems to have an unstated implication like “Dude - you have some strange issues. You could get into big trouble if she knew the things you write about.”

You know, like the way I’m enthralled by Beyonce videos, or how I’ve said training for a triathlon is very much like having an affair, or why I feel compelled to stay up past midnight watching seven recorded hours of the National Spelling Bee. Things like that.

The answer is yes, she’s very aware of everything that goes on here. Truthfully, there’s no way on Earth I could do something like this without her knowing about it. She’s wicked smart. And I’m not good at being sneaky. So there’s not very much that gets past her.

Thankfully, she’s about the most understanding and supportive person I’ve ever known. She always goes along for the ride, even when she sees me travel down one crazy path or another.

I figure it must be something like watching your kids play on the high bars at the playground: you realize you can’t keep them away, and you know there’s a decent chance that things could turn out badly. So you just stay close by and provide help if they ask for it, and figure if they fall and hurt themselves at least you’ll be there to help pick them up and comfort them afterwards.

She had every right to ask for a refund after we got married, because in many ways – athletic and otherwise - I barely resemble the guy who stood at the altar with her. When I trained for my first marathon in college, it was basically a lark. She had no indication that for the next dozen years she’d have to put up with me traveling to several marathons a year, running up and down the sides of faraway mountains, or waking up in the dark every weekend to train for ultras.

Yet that’s the course we’ve charted: me coming up with some wild idea, her keeping me grounded and realistic. It’s very much a give-and-take thing, except, um…well, I’m usually the one doing most of the taking. But I absolutely need her to keep me under control – because if she gave me enough rope to do all the things I imagine, there’s no question I would end up hanging myself. And then you wouldn’t have this blog to read.

Which brings us back to the question at hand. This girl has known me for about 15 years now, and like I said, very little escapes her. So do you think there’s any way she didn’t already know that I was a brooding, obsessive/compulsive, idiosyncratically scatterbrained idiot before I launched this blog? Me neither. But she puts up with me anyway, which seems increasingly amazing as the years roll by.

They say that behind every good man, there is a woman. Sure, that’s true - but any woman can support a good man. It’s the woman who supports a bizarrely flawed man who really deserves special recognition.

I think about that every year at the end of July, as we celebrate our anniversary. I consider myself very lucky. And I know that everything’s gonna be fine.

Read more...