One of the toughest questions to answer is: “How accurate are Performance Enhancing Drug (PED) tests?” In other words, is it possible to pass a PED test but still be taking PED’s? The question is uniquely difficult to answer on two levels.

The first level is that most people who ask me the question have already made up their mind regarding the athlete’s guilt or innocence.  Their hope is my answer will help them defend their belief.  As an aside, I find it odd that most people who ask the question are only interested in defending their athlete’s integrity, but have little regard for the integrity of athletes outside of their passionate interests.

The second and more difficult level is that it depends upon the person’s understanding of the limitations surrounding the basic science behind PED testing.  This is critical because today’s athlete no longer uses a one-dimensional PED that can easily be identified and thus, the athlete could easily be found 100% guilty.

The basic science behind PED testing is an attempt to identify an “unethical” drug that has been proven to create a cause and effect relationship between the use of the drug and enhanced athletic performance.  Ironically, this basic science approach to identifying a cause and effect relationship has also been used to create a multitude of “ethical” performance enhancing training programs.

Photo Courtesy of Daniel Zeman

One of the original questions endurance athletes asked was: “Should I train for longer time periods at a lower intensity or shorter time periods at a higher intensity?” To answer the question it was necessary to design a study that controlled the training intensities of athletes across a defined period of time and then compare the cause and effect relationship between the two training programs.  Specifically, the athlete’s maximal level of oxygen consumption (VO2) and anaerobic threshold (AT) were measured both pre and post training and then used for comparison. This type of testing has been repeated numerous times across large sample sizes and continues to be accepted as credible performance-driven research.

The next significant performance question endurance athletes asked was: “What are the benefits of the use of nutritional supplements?”  To answer this question, the research combined the original VO2 testing and the ingestion of nutritional supplements (carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins) to determine a possible cause and effect relationship.  Results from these studies allowed endurance athletes to improve performance if they incorporated nutritional supplements before, during and after training bouts.  These types of supplement studies allow endurance athletes the ability to “ethically” gain additional performance enhancement outside of the benefits that are directly associated with the gains from their intense training program.  The inherent debate with all PED’s is in defining which supplements are considered “ethical”.

Another significant finding for all of these studies is they have provided great insight into the heart’s response to training, the range of VO2 max scores, the range of red blood cell count, the expected gains in muscle mass with strength training, the effect carbohydrate loading has on performance, the effect interval training has on blood lactate levels and the relationship between VO2 and effort. In addition, numerous other studies take into consideration technology, psychological states and gender.

As previously mentioned, an individual who is unfamiliar with the basic science behind cause and effect research can easily be confused as to how an athlete who is using PED’s can pass a PED test.  In essence, the burden of proof relies on the testing community as it must: decide which PED’s have been proven to enhance athletic performance; fund the testing research; keep up-to-date with the ever-changing “unethical” PED programs; be committed to removing PED’s from all sports regardless of the committee’s personal bias and still guarantee the athlete confidentiality regarding their testing results.

The following three examples offer some insight into the struggles of the testing community as athletes are willing to:

1. Use a drug that mainstream researchers would not believe to be worth the potential health risk of ingesting – It is common knowledge that the East German swimmers used anabolic steroids to improve performance.  At that time, most researchers could not believe swimmers would voluntarily take such high levels of steroids given the potential for disastrous health consequences; therefore, little research was done on the connection between steroids and superior swim times.  Even if the belief existed, the researchers would have been forced to give “unethically” high levels of anabolic steroids to a group of elite swimmers and then compare their swim times to another group who was given a placebo.  Eventually the catalyst for looking deeper into steroid usage was driven by the disturbing number of female swimmers who showed obvious secondary male sexual characteristics and was not that they showed superior swim times.  The final admittance of anabolic steroids was provided by the East German coaches some twenty years after the wide spread usage began.
2. Use a drug that does not cause any suspicion because it does not exceed the levels which are found in clean athletes – Early research had shown a positive relationship between hematocrit levels (red blood cell count) and levels of cardio-vascular endurance. It also showed healthy males had hematocrit levels between 42-46% while elite endurance athletes had hematocrit levels between 46-48%.  In addition, it showed that hydration states influenced hematocrit levels by altering the thickness of their blood.  This research was the reason for the widespread, yet still very dangerous, practice of blood doping as a means of increasing the number of red blood cells.  Prior to 1990 athletes who chose to use blood doping as a performance enhancement needed to manually remove and then later infuse their blood back into their body.  This cumbersome process became unnecessary in 1990 when AMGEN introduced the drug EPO to clinically treat anemia (low red blood cell count).  The major problem with EPO was it did not contain a marker that could be used when performing PED testing.  In an effort to curtail the use of EPO, a best-guess hematocrit level of 50% became the marker to determine its usage.  Unfortunately, this marker allowed athletes to continually use EPO as long as their hematocrit level did not exceed the 50% marker; in essence, allowing the athlete to pass the PED test and still be using EPO.
3. Use a drug that has yet to have published research showing a cause and effect relationship – Professional baseball provides the best example of this during its now acknowledged steroid era and its assault on the home run records.  Research has clearly shown the cause and effect relationship between steroid use and increases in lean body mass (LBM).  However, an increase in LBM had not been shown to directly enhance the ability to hit home runs as it was considered a hand-eye skill and not a strength task.  Once again, it is unethical for the research community to design a study that attempts to determine if a cause and effect relationship exists between steroid use and the ability to hit home runs as it would involve giving an unethical dosage of steroids to a large number of professional baseball players.  In this scenario, players could suggest their legendary number of home runs was due to a variety of other advances because there was no research showing steroid use directly enhanced the skill of hitting a baseball.

These examples point out some of the difficulties facing the research community as it attempts to continually fight the battle against the unethical use of PED’s.  The good news is that the professional baseball steroid scandal does offer insight into how the research community can make a further connection between PED usage and enhanced performance.  Quite simply, to compare and contrast an athlete’s legendary increase in performance (home runs) across a relatively short period of time (a single season) given similar training conditions should raise suspicion.  This practice should not be confused with a failure to accept a continued improvement in athletic performance because performance records are going to be broken due to ethical training regimens.  Record setting athletes should be applauded for their commitment to their sports and not be falsely judged.  However, regardless of the sport, once athletes stop using PED’s they have difficulty returning to the level of performance achieved during their times of PED usage. Case in point, the assault on the home run record in baseball has vanished since the players stopped taking steroids.  The same can be said about cyclists, runners and swimmers.

Further difficulties for the research community are due to the fact that each sport has its own physiological demands and thus, its own preferred PED.  For example, those that involve a single-day event mean the athlete must be in peak condition on a specific date for only a specific amount of time, while multiple-day events mean the athlete must be able to optimally recover from the previous day’s expenditures.  A possible PED red flag for single-day strength events would be when an older athlete’s level of lean body mass has drastically increased since earlier periods of competition.  For those athletes whose event involve sustained endurance tasks, a red flag would include the ability to maintain power outputs that overwhelmingly exceed work efficiencies given the highest range of VO2 scores.  While neither of these red flags should be used to condemn the athlete, the red flags should enlighten and motivate the research committee to devise new PED testing procedures.

The disturbing news for sports fans is that today’s exorbitant salaries in sports provide a significant financial enticement to take PED’s.  The financial rewards are substantial enough that it is naive to believe that athletes, and those who provide them with PED’s, are not extremely motivated to create inventive methods for passing PED testing.  Even more disturbing is that the athlete’s short-term motivation to take PED’s exceeds the potential for tragic long-term health consequences.  Ironically, it is neither the athletes or the fans who have been the most successful at battling PED usage, but it is the court system as it is generally considered illegal to buy, sell, provide or transport PED’s.

About The Author:

Dan Zeman is an Exercise Physiologist with thirty years experience in the health, fitness and sports medicine arena’s. He has worked with a wide variety of professional and recreational athletes including members of the Minnesota Vikings and Minnesota Timberwolves, as well as three-time Tour De France winner Greg LeMond. He has done research looking at the Aerobic Capacities of Wheelchair athletes, the amputee athlete and the professional mountain biker racer. Dan has appeared on radio, television, and newspaper segments including a year on a KARE 11 segment entitled Fitness Friday. He is currently writing a book regarding the effects of Aging and Automation on Americans and is also heavily involved with the health and fitness industry’s new computerized approach to making a healthier America.

I’ve decided to share a story that is not from my perspective, but one of someone who I love and who has been with me throughout this entire journey. As my wife, my best friend and confidante, Kathy LeMond has had a unique vantage point into the cycling world. Her perspective is not one of an athlete, but as a normal person privy to the trials, challenges and triumphs of the sport. Here she shares a personal story from many years past on how doping in the sport of cycling has impacted the lives at hand, not just the reputations, media or standings.

Kathy’s Story:

It was pitch black in our bedroom as I reached for the ringing phone. I was already panicking because it is never good news that wakes you from a deep sleep. I thought it might be my parents and something had happened at home in the US. No one called us in the night, everyone knew Greg needed to sleep.

I finally found the phone and answered. All I heard was screaming and crying. I totally panicked. I yelled to wake Greg up. I didn’t even understand who was on the phone. Then I got it. Anna-Lisa Draaijer was sobbing that she had tried everything but,” he was dead.” He was cold when she touched him. She was waiting for the ambulance and what should she do?” He’s dead! He is cold, he is cold. I am so afraid! Oh my God, oh my God!”

I could not even process what Anna-Lisa was telling me. Johannes dead. She had tried CPR but he was already cold and she was alone. We stayed on the phone until the ambulance arrived. Greg and me trying to wake up enough to process what was going on in our dark and cold bedroom and Anna in the hallway of her house in her nightgown alternating between sobs and screams of pain.

We were not close friends, we were casual friends with our bond primarily being our husbands’ profession and our language. I was another American wife. I was older and had my children and she was a newlywed. Johannes and Greg had been on PDM together and we’d had dinner together as friends once, at least that’s what I remember now. They were young and very in love and a joy to be around. She was smart and working as an accountant in Holland.

Just a few years earlier, we were all in our kitchen getting ready to leave the house to go out with the Draaijer’s. While waiting for the babysitter to arrive Anna-Lisa started telling about how tired Johannes had been and that PDM had decided that he had a testosterone deficiency. Both Greg and I reacted the same, “What? Of course he does. He’s racing. Greg is depressed most Mondays after a long race ends and it is totally normal to be low on testosterone after a big race.” She informed us that Johannes was now on a hormone supplementation program. The young couple had been told by team management that he needed it.

Now, this is where it all ended up. A young man dead in his bed and his sweet young wife a widow. She got in her car after leaving his body at the hospital in Holland. She came down to stay at our house in Belgium. We all sat and cried and cried. She could not believe that he was really gone-nor could we. We’d forget at times and it felt like he was at a race. We were used to our husbands being gone. She stayed for days and we tried to help her get information and just help her stay alive.

Sometimes I imagined how I would react if I lost Greg. How would I possibly live through it? I always thought I would just die too but was now witnessing that things don’t work like that. The one left behind is still alive. The grief doesn’t kill you, as much as you wish it would.

This was a entirely different type of death. A death with a component of dishonesty and shame. As though Johannes wasn’t the amazing young man that he really was. That her grief should be hidden and his death not talked about. That was clearly what the cycling world wanted.

Anna-Lisa was told that an autopsy would be performed It was a traumatic week for her with constant badgering by all and her waiting for his cause of death. She was so grief stricken that I placed many of the calls to PDM management asking for information. They wanted to talk to her, alone. I was very protective because I knew each of these men. We had a past.We left that team for their promotion of doping and it had been bitter.

I was like a protective mother and so angry witnessing her grief. This was all so wrong.This was so stupid. This was only cycling.

Anna-Lisa finally agreed to go back to Holland by herself to meet with PDM management. She left the house shaking and nervous and a bit disconnected.

She said she’d call me when she knew what was going on.

She called that night. She told me that Johannes had died with the heart of a 70 year old man, it was “shredded.” She had made an agreement with PDM but did not share the details with me.

I have not heard from her since then, but Greg and I have never forgotten her or Johannes. This young and vulnerable couple persuaded by team management to do unethical and illegal activities that they would never dream up on their own.

Our first experience with the gravest possible outcome of a life of doping. It didn’t end there and Greg lost other teammates to doping and depression. It is not an activity without consequences. If there is an outraged energy that we both carry to the fight against doping it is because we have this experience. How shallow is any victory when compared to the love of your spouse and the joy of a family. They missed out on it all

I’ve written a couple of stories in the past few weeks for Cycling News’s Tour de France coverage. The stories talk a little bit about my 2010 Tour projections but mostly cover my past experiences in racing and the cycling culture. Here are some links and excerpts to a few articles I’ve written. Stay tuned for more!

The Art of Peaking for the Tour de France (July 2, 2010)

“By the start of the Tour, I would typically have had 70 to 80 days of racing in that year. My training during the final month before the Tour was planned almost a year in advance. The goal was to do most of the hard training well before the last month. More often than not this ended with the Giro. The goal was almost to over-train and then taper off during the final month. The hardest training is destructive and the body needs time to recover…” Read more

Cobblestones, Crashes, and Potential Winners of the Tour (July 9, 2010)

“Crashing on your bike is not like falling down on a snowboard or off a surfboard – it is not onto soft snow or in ocean water. There’s usually some contact with the pavement or an obstacle, and that’s not fun. It can rip your skin off, break a couple of bones, or even kill you!

My most unusual crash was in the 1982 Liège-Bastogne-Liège, as a second-year pro. Didi Thurau was the big German star at the time, and I was just the young punk, 20 years old. I started at the back, knowing then that you should be either in the front or back of the peloton. If you were in the middle, you’d be in what I called the dead zone – it was that dangerous…” Read more

Surviving Off Days and Racing to Paris (July 14, 2010)

“What a great first week of racing. It is a Tour de France that I would have loved to have raced, so long as I was one of the lucky few that survived all the crashes!

Watching the Tour on TV can be interesting. To hear the commentators talk about Contador’s form and how weak or strong he appears to be is great, but it is purely speculation. It is impossible to know how he will be riding next week based on just two mountain stages. Winning the Tour seems simple: ride faster than your competitor every day for three weeks. This is not always possible and does not necessarily translate into victory. Sometimes a rider can just be on an “off” day and seem to be struggling…” Read more

Bravo to the New Generation (July 23, 2010)

“When I made my now often repeated statement about Lance Armstrong and his long term relationship with Dr. Ferrari in 2001, I tried to keep it as short and to the point as possible. I was very disappointed to learn that he was a patient of Dr. Ferrari. Long before this relationship was revealed by David Walsh in 2001 I had made comments about the entrance of specialists like Dr. Ferrari and others into the sport of cycling. I was hearing stories back as early as 1993 about Dr. Ferrari and his client list of pro cyclists…“ Read more

I was just out in Seattle coordinating with my team at LeMond Fitness regarding the last few pre-production tweaks I want to make to my new Revolution bike trainer and I took some time to chat with my friends at Mad Fiber. Ric Hjertberg literally broke the mold in his collaboration with Max Kismarton in coming up with the fastest, most durable carbon fiber wheelset to hit the market in years. Based in an old bakery in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, Mad Fiber is baking up some hot wheels using new out of autoclave carbon fiber processing technology coming out of the aerospace and formula one racing sectors. Can’t wait to get my set. Three weeks and counting.

Check them out here or this article on structural materials.

I believe most of Floyd Landis’s statements regarding the systemic corruption in professional cycling. I imagine from my own experiences that today he is paying a heavy price for his honesty and I support Floyd in his attempt to free himself from his past. I hope that others- fans, riders and sponsor’s embrace this as an opportunity to bring about positive change in the sport.

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Updated 5/21/2010

To be clear, Floyd Landis may have changed his version of the story, and while his own doping and subsequent lying have caused many to doubt him, my position, for which I have spoken long and loud, is to advocate for deep and systemic change in the sport to eliminate the scourge of dope. Too many lives have been lost, too many promising careers have been cut short and too many fans have been cheated. It isn’t about whether Rider X or Rider Y can be proven by physical evidence or otherwise to have doped. Floyd Landis is simply representative of many in the sport. The sport needs to change its governance and its culture to survive long term. It must get beyond the recurring controversy. The fans have the right to be certain that they are cheering for human athletes rather than rolling pharmaceutical billboards, and clean riders have the right to a fair opportunity to stand on the podium. Clean racing makes for a much more exciting sport, and I encourage the fans to engage in the dialogue surrounding Floyd Landis’ comments and advocate with me here and elsewhere for positive “pure” change.”

Welcome to the Fitness Section of my new website. Check back here for my thoughts on sports nutrition, fitness and training regiments, product reviews, podcasts, videos and more. If there is any subject in particular you are interested in let me know, I’m always on the lookout for new ideas. Leave a comment, find me on facebook or visit my contact page to share.

This should be interesting.

Greg LeMond

Read the full article here

After our three-day stay in BA we flew into the town of Barilochi, one of the larger towns in central Patagonia. We headed north to the Jackson Hole of Argentina to a town called San Martin de Los Andes. I went with a great fly fishing outfitter call Fly Fishing In Patagonia. The owner is a young guy named Pablo Zaleski. He picked us up in his 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser, which I thought was only one or two years old because it was so solid, the Land Cruiser is the four wheel drive vehicle in Argentina, actually nearly all of South America, because it is built with military specs. Great ride.

You never know what you will get when you hire a guide or an outfitter to take you on a two-week trip. You are essentially with this person for your whole trip and if the guy is not a nice guy or you don’t get along with him you are unfortunately stuck with him. I could not have met a nicer person. Pablo spent the two weeks guiding my daughter and honing up her casting skills. I would not go back to Patagonia without Pablo’s help. We hit is off so well that he and his wife Lorena flew up to the USA and skied with my family during that last week of March. I would highly recommend a trip to Patagonia. Nearly all of the ranches in Patagonia are owned by people that homesteaded the property or by very wealthy European families. A French family around the turn of the last century founded the one ranch that we stayed at. The same with one other lodge, they own the property next to Ted Turner, they actually sold him half of their ranch to Ted and you can still see the pain in that decision. A Norwegian family founded the third lodge that we stayed at. If I did not her Ronnie speak Spanish I would have sworn he was from Minnesota.

All of these ranches are just down stream from several very large national parks and all of the rivers flow out of pristine lakes. This means the water is crystal clear and great trout water. We ended up catching a lot of fish, some decent size fish, I hook and lost two 10lb plus fish on my last day- that would have capped off an unbelievable two weeks. To enjoy Patagonia you don’t have to stay at a fishing lodge. Patagonia is extremely safe and some day I am going to take my bike down and load it up and spend three months just riding around Patagonia and exploring the country by bike, (the bike is the best way to see any country. You actually go fast enough to see a lot but slow enough to take in the scenery, the smell of the countryside and do it on a quite mode of transportation.

Gorgeous Argentina

I have been fly-fishing since the age of 11 and fished until I got into cycling. I was excited to take my daughter there and show her an area that resembled Montana but as though it was 1920. My daughter Simone was with me and we had one of the best trips that I could remember. We spent three days in Buenos Aires; the last time I was there was for a one-night stay in 1996 while on my way to Patagonia for the fly-fishing show. Before that was 1979. That year I stayed in BA for nearly two weeks. I was there for the Junior World Championships. I tried to visit the Velodrome that I got my silver medal in the 3000-meter track but it was closed down. I did see it by Google Maps and all that I could tell was that the track has not been taken care of- at least in the satellite photos. There were trees and bushes growing in the middle of the track. It was a pretty cool track with banking that was nearly 55 degrees. I have great memories from that 1979 trip. I ended up getting two more medals at those World Championships, a bronze in the team time trial, still one of my favorite events, and a gold medal in the World Road Race Championships.