no pain, no gain
Endorphin release? An exerciser’s high? Nah, don’t you believe a word of it. It’s just a lack of oxygen to the brain caused by not acting your age and trying too hard to impress a member of the opposite sex. You can get the same effect by half-strangling yourself in some strange tryst (usually the prerogative of some such Tory or other) though at considerably greater risk of embarrassment or death, or both, a la Michael Hutchence. If getting high is all you’re after, drugs are quicker, and probably cheaper than gym membership. And whilst we’re on the subject of door-knobs and the INXS singer, sex is a way better high than exercise and God knows that’s neither cheap nor, for a five-foot-nothing ginga, easy to lay your hands on.
When you sign up for your next exercise escapade you’d also better get used to the fact that it ain’t going to be a barrel of laughs as training is pretty dull, essential yes, but dull nonetheless. The interesting bits are the performances, the adventures, the death-or-glory of competition, not the practice. You gotta feel sorrow for those athletes who’s sports come into our collective consciousness once every four years, only to return to the spirit-numbing river-bank, pool-side or velodrome thereafter.
But to win, to achieve the pb, to hit the target-weight, to get that six-pack, to impress and win the juicy prize, train you must. Or rather the fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of a beer-gut, the fear of getting old and everyone realizing it, forces you to train. And the worst thing is you can’t fake it. You’re either fit or you’re not. You either hit that weight or you don’t.
Another issue is the law of diminishing returns that comes with training. I personally look back to my first couple of half-marathons and it seemed ever so easy, with a bit of training, to knock ridiculous amounts of time from one to the next. Ten minutes between February’s Wokingham and April’s Reading? No problem, I’ll do a couple of extra laps round Virginia Water and let’s make that fifteen! But then it stops and there’s no more to be had; the well’s run dry. My personal targets of a sub-90 half and sub-40 10k are as far away now as they were five years ago. B*gger.
And then the reality dawns; it’s not about the training, the diet or the reps. Nah, it’s all out of your hands in any event as the greatest part of athletic ability is genetic. A very rough guide to endurance athletic ability is a thing called VO2 max: it’s a measure of how much oxygen you can use at full pelt, and it indicates the size of your ‘engine’. Obviously, some are blessed with a V12 that would impress Jeremy Clarkson, others a straight-six, I a gaspy two-stroke lifted off a seized Aprilia 125. And the difference all that training makes? The most you can expect is a meagre 15% improvement and that only if you take up the damn sport professionally, or at least obsessively.
Which nicely brings us back to drugs! Let’s make no bones about it: drugs work. If they can make you dance your t*ts off for days on end, does it not seem likely they can make you run a tad faster? Yep, thought so. But here’s the downside and it’s one worth taking notice of. In the end, most drugs that make you faster are more than up to the job of killing you. In the earlier posting ‘make mine a transfusion and make it a large one’ we looked at the new-ish drug of Human Growth Hormone but for many years the drug of choice for athletes and cyclists alike was erythropoietin, or EPO as it’s more commonly known. And with a promise of performance increases as much as 25% what a drug it was. Not so much a training aid, more like trading yourself in for the athlete you always wanted to be.
In the late 1980s, when riders first started using EPO there was an unprecedented series of ‘unexplained’ deaths who just conked out in the dead of night. EPO works by increasing the number of red blood cells and hence the amount of oxygen that the blood can carry to the muscles. The more oxygen available the stronger and longer the athlete will be able to go. The downside is that it also makes the blood thicker and when it reaches the consistency of your favourite Bonne Maman strawberry jam the heart ain’t able to pump it around and hence, ironically, there’s no oxygen going to your brain. Death usually came at night as the pulse dropped to its normal minimum level and the cherry conserve flowed most slowly. The solution? Stop taking it? Behave. The solution was to wake them up periodically during the night and put them on an exercise bike or treadmill for half-an-hour to keep the heart pumping, pulse high and blood flowing. You couldn’t make it up. Incredible but true.
Cycling and athletics have such a problem because drugs are part and parcel of the very fabric of the sport. There was never a golden, Corinthian age of racing and competition and even the ancient Greeks were at it with various plants and potions. Lest you think I’m stretching the truth I’ll leave the final word to the ‘Champion of Champions’, Fausto Coppi, who when asked if he ever used drugs, replied “Only when necessary.” To the obvious follow-up, when was it necessary? “Almost always.” Il Championissimo died in 1960 aged only 41 of a suspected cocaine overdose.
