How to start this?
I hope I'm not writing this from the perspective of someone who is jaded. I don't race enough and certainly don't train hard enough to be particularly worried about being beaten by nefarious means... However, there is something that has been bandied around between friends for a good few months/years now which probably needs to be written about.
It is the unwelcome subject of performance enhancing drugs in marginal sports such as fellrunning and long distance FKTs etc.
The first question: is it actually a problem? Brutal honesty: I have no idea. This is purely hypothetical as far as I know. But is it a possibility?
I think it is, which is why it is worth mentioning. We know that people use PEDs in things like sportives- which aren't even races, so why not in a sport like fellrunning?
There are some people out there in the world who just want to win - or to get as high a position in a race/championship as possible. It doesn't matter if you win a bottle of wine, a set of toilet rolls or a kids head torch, that isn't the point. The point is the winning, or doing better than someone else that they are comparing themselves against.
Now put yourself in the mindset of someone who is a driven competitor, and has the legs and lungs to be a pretty decent also-ran. Not necessarily a position in which they enjoy being. They have already spent £160 on a pair of shoes, £100 on a state-of-the-art t-shirt and another £100 on a pair of shorts - then, what, £150 on a race vest?
All these things are pretty cool, but unlike buying an expensive and lightweight bike, they don't actually make you go any faster (I'm not talking about vapourfly's here... they don't help you in a bog).
What is to stop them from going online and bagging a load of EPO ($89 for 5 vials, apparently) which give a significant boost to the system- apart from the consideration of stepping over a moral boundary? Or how about going to your doctor in you mid 40s or 50s and saying that you just aren't feeling as good as you used to- could you have a testostorone patch, or something to "pep you up a bit for the wife" kind of thing? (I presume you need to be tested for low testostorone/HGH, but I might be wrong).
No testing in competition/out of competition, no-one will ever find out, your times look amazing, your power goes up, you get a load of kudos. Awesome.
These guys are probably not going to be troubling the leading lights of the sport, they might not be about to start posting record times or nailing 2:15 marathons, and so their chances of ever being tested are next to nil. Even if they were, you can be pretty intelligent about dosing and not get caught.
Do these people exist in our sport of honesty and integrity?
I really wouldn't be surprised if there were a number of fairly decent runners who would test hot for at least some of the year. It just seems a bit easy to do if you are that motivated - so easy that it would almost be silly not to at that level.
Am I saying this out of spite because I've been beaten by others who I suspect are taking drugs? No. I'm nowhere near fast enough to believe that people need to take drugs to beat me. They just need to train harder.
My point? I'm not sure. There are records from the 1980s which are only just being broken - and they are being broken by those at the very pinnacle of the sport. Let me make this VERY clear, they are not the ones I would suspect to be using PEDs. They train hard and have real history and pedigree within the sport.
It is most likely to be the ones like me, who think they should be better, who train hard, but think they want an edge... and that edge could well cost less than their next pair of shoes.
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