Lance Lanced - Thoughts on Doping

We like to believe, need to believe, especially when it comes to our champions. And no one, arguably, was a more iconic champion than Lance Armstrong. At least up until today, August 24, 2012.

Lance seemed to transcend sport. Precocious, brash, but above all immensely, often scarily talented, Lance seemed to defy all odds. If cancer was racking half his body, well, he overcame it, even if it meant nearly killing himself in the process. You see, he'd been defying odds all along.

If 15 year-old Lance got out of the water with the top pros in the triathlon, then he full well expected to stay with them on the bike. If 18 year-old triathlete Lance decided to have a go at the national championships in cycling, then he didn't expect to just hang with the pack at the front, he made a pack of one off the front and broke away in what would become typical Lance fashion. If 21 year-old now-only-bike-racing Lance took on the best in the world at the world road racing championships, he again expected, and achieved, audacity, even if the day's cold numbing Oslo rain might seem anathema to any other boy from Texas.

And, well, there were the seven Tour de France victories, the Olympic medal, the other accolades and victories too many to recount here. And let's not forget the books that gave the laymen, so removed physically and emotionally as mere mortals must be, intriguing insights into Lance's world, the foundation he started and which is nearing a half a billion dollars in raised funds to fight cancer.

Yet somewhere along the way, and probably longer ago than many of us can appreciate or care to know, Lance got lost. Fractions and smidgens can separate great performances; truly great champions are expected to win their competitions, especially when they're close. No one knows this better than the athletes who delight us with these infinitesimal gradations, often day after day, year after year, preferably at the top of the podium waving the bouquet and kissing the young ladies.
  
Obviously, there will be much speculation about the whys, whens, and hows of this sad tale. Was it after the fight with cancer, once he'd already stared death in the face and made it blink first? Did he feel that his new, slimmer, lighter body needed that extra edge to win the only race mere mortals care about when it comes to bike racing, the Tour de France, a race he'd never come close to winning before cancer? Did he feel that the poisonous cocktail of drugs and chemotherapy was already more than anything EPO and its chemical brethren could deal him? Or was it before that, perhaps at the behest of an older and cynical cycling curmudgeon who'd not been able to make it clean himself and figured, perhaps naively, that teenager Lance couldn't either? Was it that Lance, lacking a father, and perhaps craving a male mentor, and wanting to be accepted and included in his new-found sport of cycling, obliged a stronger, established rider on the US team and began a long and complicated journey most of us are only beginning to fathom today? Or was it even before that, which is to say before cycling alone dominated his life at 17, going on 18, when Lance was a triathlete in his mid-teens, when he was especially young and impressionable and yet already, clearly and unusually talented? 
  
If so, he would not have been the first triathlete to dope.  Scott Molina failed a post-race drug test in Nice, France, in the mid-80s and then was banned for life from the Nice race, at the time, along with Kona, one of only two standout races in the young sport. We know that Lance had access to this coterie of triathletes of which Molina was a leader and growing legend. Was Molina part of a larger performance-enhancing drug culture in triathlon? No matter, was Molina an early and poor influence on Lance? We may never know. 
 
Testing was all but non-existent in those early days of the sport. I know I was never tested, then or now, despite dozens of triathlon wins and Kona podium finishes in 1984 and 2012. Even today, and despite all evidence to the contrary, testing is shoddy at best. As the New York Times and other reputable newspapers reported just this summer, doping is alive and well in age group cycling. It doesn't take a huge imagination to extend doping's reach into a sport that requires similar athletic talent and even more training time and commitment.
  
No matter where Lance's ethical fork in the road occurred, whether during his triathlon or cycling years, he knew doping had to remain out of the script, tacit to all who knew cycling for the distorted beast it had become but never admitted to a naive lay public that wanted its champions served up readily, with a plot line easily understood. It was a well-worn path of a lie others before him knew well; it was a falsehood Lance was apparently only too willing to subsume as a means to cycling immortality.
  
Instead, immortality has given way to ignominy, fame to infamy, and again we are left scratching our heads and wondering, sadly, for what might have been.  

Many key ingredients in an athlete's life can lead to lifetime competitive success.  Surely, biology plays a role, but since it's pretty tough to choose your parents, altering their chromosomal impact remains (at least for now) the stuff of fiction.  When it comes to things we might modify over which we do have some control, most aspiring athletes seek answers through changes in things like riding miles, stroke technique, running shoes, or nutritional supplements - it's a very long list!  While improvements can come about through careful alterations to these sorts of things, an often overlooked area that can have a huge impact on athletic performance is just good ole lifestyle.

Lifestyles have changed rapidly in recent generations, and at no time has that change been more pronounced and accelerated than it is right now.  Technology is rapidly changing our world, and those with the greatest access to new technologies are arguably changing their worlds the fastest.  For a species that may have taken thousands if not millions of years to evolve, such rapid change can't be all good.  In general we are more sedentary than we used to be, have access to more food more often than we used to, are considerably heavier than we used to be and, because we tend to live longer, have more chronic diseases than ever before.  While it is easy to say that an Ironman triathlete's life is hardly in keeping with the norm - and almost by definition has to be otherwise - we are part of this greater, bulging, not so healthy world, and it affects us whether we like it to or not.

So here's my thesis: the results of a life lead fairly intentionally probably had a bigger impact on my recent return to Kona and a 5th place age group finish than did the specific training I did in the months leading up to the race.  Sure, the swims, bikes and runs helped get me on the podium once I was at Kona.  But what got me to Kona in the first place?  Or, looking back just a few months earlier, what allowed a 50 year-old American male to make a rapid and successful transition from mid-life to world-class?  No one factor predominates; in no particular order, these might be the underlying habits that paved the Road Back to Kona:

• Avoid the car.  Better yet, if at all possible, since so many of us commute to our professional lives, combine your commute with exercise and bike commute.  I've never let a job tie me to the daily grind of car commuting.  Instead, I've used getting to work as a means of exploiting some combination of car-pooling one way and cycling the other, bike commuting both ways, taking public transportation- bus, subway, ferry - and using the connecting walks/rides as exercise.  Of the more than 100,000 miles of riding miles in my legs, my nearly 20 year-old commuting bike can claim nearly 50,000 miles of them.
• Avoid "labor saving devices."  Use a push mower.  Wash dishes by hand.  Knead your own bread.  Chop your vegetables.  Rake leaves.  Sweep with an actual broom.  Essentially, do your best to make your body the power source so often provided by engines.  This past summer I gave a short talk at my 30th Carleton College reunion on the importance of an active lifestyle.  We've allowed technologies and other putative conveniences to mortgage our health and consign us to the sofa.  Instead, stay more fit by reclaiming your active self.     
• Avoid the car again.  If it's true that at any given moment most cars are within five miles of home (and I'm told it is), then by extension it must be true that many if not most car uses are at least arguably unnecessary.  The bike remains the workhorse of the world because of its utility, efficiency, and comparatively low cost.  When we lived in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, most all of our errands and quick trips were done by bike, even though we owned a car.  A willing pair of legs, a good set of panniers, and even a trailer, can alleviate the need for a car just about every time.  Make the bike the go-to vehicle, not the car.
• Keep your weight steady.  Through good genes and, increasingly, careful habits, since 1980 when I stopped growing, I've been able to keep my weight a fairly steady 155 lbs., +/-2%.  By avoiding mindless snacking, eating only when hungry, keeping the diet balanced and, above all, maintaining an active lifestyle, body weight tends to fluctuate less.  If recent studies are correct, and it's the sometimes tremendous fluctuation in weight that comes with the weight gain/weight loss cycle that is unhealthy, then keeping your weight steady is a doubly good thing.  Additionally, maintaining steady weight and a good Body Mass Index allows a person to more readily transition back into serious sports with fewer health risks.
• Stay strong.  After 40 years of age, most males begin losing about 1% of their muscle mass per year.  Being active and fit can surely help forestall some of this normal pattern in aging, but the truth is that the seemingly automatic muscle strength and tone of the late teens and twenties becomes more and more of a rarity as we get older.  That said, I decided early on in my Road Back to Kona that I'd make a regular core exercise and strengthening regimen part of my overall training game plan.  In part, living and training in Saudi Arabia like no other Kona-bound triathlete was, I knew that I'd be spending a fair amount of time indoors anyway due to summer conditions leading to October's Hawaii race.  But, like it or not, I also knew that I just wasn't as strong as I had been in my 20s and that, unless I wanted to increase my risk of injury, once the training volume started kicking in I'd better complement the tri-sport component with careful attention to strength, flexibility, coordination, and even balance. 
• Don't overtrain.  I'm old enough to remember the days of wanton over-distance training.  Sadly, it was a distance-addicted cross country running coach who turned me off to collegiate running in my first months of college in the fall of '78.  One week my mileage topped out at 128 miles - and I was just 17 years old!  The previous season, in high school, I'd maybe been running a third of that mileage; the change was just too abrupt.  Probably from that moment onward, I gained a healthy distrust of adding mileage for no real reason other than bragging rights.  Even in the '80s when I won two dozen triathlons and placed 7th in the Hawaii Ironman, my mileage was always embarrassingly puny compared to those of, say, Scotts Molina, Tinley, and certainly Dave.  Being in graduate school during those years was a tempering influence to mindless mileage and overtraining, but there is possibly no greater antidote to over-training in one's mid-life than being a husband, father and full-time teacher.  Rather than worry about training too much, quite the opposite is true when sports take a back seat.  When I look back on my Road Back to Kona training log and add up the entries' hours, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that high volume weeks topped out at 15 - 17 hours, nothing more.

   Other non-swim/bike/run factors certainly played a role in my Road Back to Kona, but the above six represent the most significant ones.