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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

What will drugs give them though? As the article says, the perfect runner will be light, short, have long legs, insane VO2 max, good heat dissipation, low oxygen requirements. Apart from blood doping to increase VO2 max, what can one do to improve those other things?

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Basically what drugs allow you to do is recover faster and better - which allows you to train far harder than your clean competition and build all of these superhuman stats you enumerated.

A famous cycling reporter took drugs for a month to see just want the effect was and apparently it was like being superman. He would go out and ride 100 miles (something that normally leaves you in couch mode the next day) and be ready to do all again the next day like he hadn't even touched the bike the day before.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Doper-Next-Door-Performance-Enhanc...

HGH and EPO are the drugs we have all heard about but I'm sure there are 8 we haven't heard about yet. Also this book gives you insight into the violence we are seeing outside of the gridlines in the NFL. Apparently all of these drugs running around in you makes you crazy in a lot of cases.

That reporter was an idiot. His entire experiment was qualitative instead of quantitative. How did he know that his performance improved? Because he reported that he felt like he was going faster. Useless.

Are you seriously going to defend the proposition that the placebo effect is that large?

Science requires us to be more careful in our thinking than we are naturally inclined towards. It does not require us to pretend we have a lobotomy, nor does it require that we pretend that we must seriously entertain the hypothesis that large doses of steroids have no effect.

NFL players aren't particularly violent outside of the gridlines:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-viol...

I have to admit that it is depressing to think that NFL players are really the normal and not the outlier.

...relative to the income level (top 1 percent) and poverty rate (0 percent) of NFL players, the domestic violence arrest rate is downright extraordinary.

You've really misrepresented the article.

I don't think I tried very hard to pin the article down.

I did make the comment from the comparison to the general population though.

edit: I have to say, I'm pretty ticked off you accused me of being dishonest. My one sentence blurb is a reasonable response to the context from the parent comment to mine, where the NFL players are claimed as a group that is more violent than normal. There is certainly room to point out that they have cohorts where they don't compare well, but it is not outrageous to answer an assertion about how they compare to people in general with an analysis of how they compare to people in general.

Hmm, I wonder what the long term effects of these drugs are. Medicinal and therapeutic use may be very promising for average people just trying to stay in shape. If the long term effects aren't too terrible, say like that of coffee, then greater acceptance may be possible.

Also, as toward the 2 hour marathon, drugs that are psychoactive may be of as great a benefit as the physical ones. Not just caffeine and other placebos, but getting into the right 'head space' is just as important to breaking such records. LSD was an integral part of one of baseball's no hitters, a terrific feat of athleticism. Many feats of the mind may be broken in Washington state due to the permissive pot laws.

Here's a short film on Dock Ellis's no hitter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vUhSYLRw14

Speaking to your question about "what the long term effects of these drugs are":

My wife put together a together a pretty interesting video about the "faustian bargain" which is IGF-1 (used as a proxy measure for growth hormone)... video is replete with examples of the effects of low IGF-1/GH or high IGF-1/GH both in animal models and humans.

One of the more interesting points in the video is the fact that people with polymorphisms that make their IGF-1 receptor experience some slight loss of function actually live longer (in general).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY

The video also links to an article which has a bibliography if you're interested.

I viewed the video to a half and found enough difference with what I know that I cannot agree with her conclusions. It is more complicated than performance/longevity. Especially when we going to humans from animals.

For example, reaction speed correlates with longevity: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16079205 Reaction speed needs muscle power and neural signal power, both are supported by IGF-1.

Arm grip in midlife is stronger for centenarians: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21541735

Thus, while entertaining, the video of your wife is too quick to jump to conclusions.

Why I insist that humans are different.

Number of heart beats per life of regular animal is about 1 billion. Humans average 2 billions. We use different longevity modes than rest of animal kingdom, I think.

As I understand it the main problem with the androgen anabolic drugs is aromatization. The chemicals tend to wind up as estrogen. Professionals using the drugs pursue careful protocols to limit aromatization; amateurs not so much hence the shrunken dick and bitch tit rumors about 'roids. Contrary to the popular understanding of estrogen as "the female hormone," estrogen compounds are more usefully thought of as dangerous stress hormones. This is why xenoestrogens from plastics and so forth are so problematic. Estrogen replacement therapy in aging women turned out to be a horrifically bad idea that resulted in high rates of cancer and heart attacks.

HGH is also essentially a stress hormone that for the most part you want to keep as low as possible. It can speed healing and recovery but is tied to cancer and aging in general. Lowering growth hormone in lab animals makes them live longer. I think HGH supplementation is maybe a popular myth that in practice isn't much used. This is what the Balko guy has explained post prison release. He says it's pretty much all about the androgens and HGH isn't very useful.

I don't know anything about EPO dangers. Presumably it leads to thrombosis, strokes, and heart attacks.

Professionals use drugs that attempt to counter aromatization, eg arimidex, in their stacks. There will still be side effects. Serious bodybuilders regularly have their nipple glands removed. Gyno surgery is incredibly common.

Bostin Loyd is actually honest and discusses gear -- see eg [0:2].

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmPI_kX3oDE

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF4zL_BdePc

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2kJ6-mmjik

Anabolic steroids stimulate production of eritrocitos. That's how they help recovery and endurance and also that's why they can lead to trombs.

1 - coffee is not a placebo, caffeine is one of few ergogenic aids that's been often proven to have real benefits via double blind trials.

2 - if you legalize drugs then you require drugs (of anybody who wants to be competitive). Literally all professional cyclists use all the drugs they're allowed, and some they are not. On terms of caffeine this takes the form of a megadose towards the end of a race delivered via a "finishing bottle", which is a melange of caffeine, sugar, and painkillers.

1- Yeah, sorry, crummy writing.

2- Ewwww....

I think one of the main areas of interest would be raising lactate threshold to delay OBLA. That's the main limit/inhibitor for endurance events.

I'd expect the next generation of drugs will focus on things like improving monocarboxylate transporter throughput/efficiency.

Very interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactate_threshold

Quickly skimming the drug cocktails tour de france competitors take will answer your question.

But, as sibling answers say, decreased training recovery times is incredibly important. Steroids also protect your joints -- they are an anti-inflammatory. Runners' knees, ankles, and spines take a pounding.

Drugs like testosterone allow you to lose fat mass while retaining muscle mass. Drugs like clenbuterol help you shed weight and metabolize fat more quickly.

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