Sage Canaday Reports Cam Hanes to USADA After 58-Year-Old’s 2:39 Eugene Marathon

Thank you Sage. It would have been a whole lot easier for you to do nothing in this situation, just go for a run and enjoy your day. But you saw a serious problem and did something about it. There are a lot more cheats out there, but a bright light is now shining on this one and I’m about to head out for a workout in a sport that’s hopefully a little cleaner, thanks to you. It’s crazy and sad that people attack you for doing something so fundamental and important to all who compete but know this, a lot of us really appreciate it. Again, thank you.

EPO, HGH, anabolic steroids, and horomonal therapy such as testosterone significantly increase risk for pulmonary embolism….

curious to hear Sage’s opinion regarding the disclosure of TUE’s and IV infusions. Has Sage ever received IV infusions or TUE’s in the past? The guy admitted in this thread to busting his balls for marginal gains

Stay relevant? LOL. Sage is very relevant in running, particularly ultra running. W Sage. He also turned something he loves to do into a career. W Sage. That's rare.

Damn right it isn't. 3.1 is a warmup..........

Looking at the gold toothed bow hunter he does not exactly ooze give me the benefit of the doubt. He broke the rules, lets sack him. Seems like a DB that would go on SM and brag about these things. It's a thing.

I would hope Sage (or anyone else) could report these things anonymously. Or maybe he outed himself.

This dude's doping is so obvious it can be seen from outer space, and I agree, it would be really interesting to see everything that's on the menu. He beat a lot of guys who worked really hard, did not cheat, and lost to this d-bag. I wish those guys could know what drugs they lost to.

Speaking as a daily LRC visitor since 2004: lol

As for this guy and his ilk, what clowns. If this is acceptable behavior, they should be totally on-board with biological males competing with females

Bear hunting performs an important role in population control. Especially in this era when they can and do get meals out of garbage cans. Next time you are not turned around on every trail run by a bear be thankful this is a thing. Even if you would never do it.

A lot people forget, that [S]cam Haynes doesn’t have a full-time job. He works out all day, and with help of peds, of course he going to run a fast marathon. I want to see him run a 2:40 marathon while working full-time and not on peds.

Sage, thanks for your efforts for clean sport in the Ultra space.

Frankly, you'd be shocked the number of 40-60+ year old men who are using non-prescribed TRT, among other things, and give zero sh**s about whether it is illegal in sport or otherwise. There's a significant proportion of that demographic who have self-identity wrapped up in a narrow view of masculinity that involves gainz, invulnerability, and machisimo.

Maybe we runners are a bit more used to being on the skinny side, and having a classic masculine physique hasn't been such a large part of our identity. But that makes us outliers.

I agree with your take that various brands and events are doing harm by holding up some of these guys as standards to strive for. Sadly, for them that may just be a trade-off they're willing to accept in order to have a broader consumer market ($$$$!). So you're fighting a battle with people over a deep-seated identity crisis as well as significant monetary incentives around them.

Best of luck out there, remember to find most of your joy in the act of running and self-improvement rather than comparisons to your peers,

-J

I'm super supportive of Sage and any effort to get d-bags like Cam out of any competition where the expectation is that athletes be clean. But my question is more of a logistical one, where presumably this dude will never submit to a test this far after a race. What really is enforceable at this point specifically in regards to his Eugene marathon? Is him admitting to taking PED's previously enough? If someone knows what actually can be done here, let us know.

I agree there a lot of dopers and cheats out there, and masters are probably the worst offenders. I also agree its important to enjoy running and strive for self improvement. But I'm not ready to give up on racing and I 100% intend to compare myself to my peers. I'm a hobby jogger, don't take away my age group, lol! But seriously, rules matter. Sure there are a lot of people will break the rules and get away with it. People will take T, they will bib swap, they will cut courses, they will do all kinds of things. And some of these cheaters might unfairly take away my little age group trinket, and I'll be fine. It's a trinket. But we need to call this cheating out when we see it. We're only going to catch some, but we have to do it. Enforcing rules is part of sport and it's certainly central to racing.

He's a drug cheat, so this is not me defending him. But I think he probably did run the whole distance. Eugene has splits every mile and they all look normal for him. It would also be a hard course to cut in the more secluded sections because you're pretty limited by the small number of bridges across the river unless you're cutting a LOT of distance. I'll also say that I did see him when I was spectating at ~24.5mi and he looked like he was going about the same speed as the people around him. Pretty dumb that he won masters on chip time by a second after getting 2nd on gun time though, that seems like something that should be on gun time.

Hunting for the sole purpose of sawing off a Lion or Tiger or bear's head, and stapling it to your den wall, seems like a weird wiring to me. Seems murderer-adjacent/in training. Not the same as a deer hunter or fish hunter.

I support Sage's reporting this guy.

Emma Coburn buddying up with Cam Hanes is so funny. I noticed it a while ago and my sense of the situation is that recognition and affirmation from anyone semi-famous outside the running world is irresistible to many pro runners. I think Emma shot some arrows = at his house a few years ago on instagram. Sara/Ryan Hall, Ben Blankenship, Des Linden and others are in his likes and comments too.

The guy is a psycho who has an audience exclusively because he goes hunting with Joe Rogan. Go look back for some of his IG rants about politics. I can't tell if she only cares about doping when it's in by someone she lost to or if she doesn't think ultras are legit competitions, so doping doesn't matter anyway. That's Cam's defense... "I run to get in shape for bow hunting so who cares." Yeah... you need peptides and test to train for your training for your other sport which you also happen to record and do podcast recaps about. Your "training."

It's not just her, I think a lot of pro runners would collab with Saddam Hussein if he told them he was a fan. It's a simple fact that Cam isn't famous because of his running accomplishments or training or anything like that. There is no reason for Emma Coburn to be his buddy instead of the guy finishing right in front of/behind him in races who hasn't publicly admitted to doping and said nobody should care about it... other than his fame. They're all craving a little taste of that social media money/fame for nothing.

Edit to add: I love Cam's defense where he says he's taken test in the past (2011 I think?) but his levels are normal now. Sure, when he was 40 he needed test but at 58 and running faster than he has in his life, those numbers are totally normal. You really got us with that one, Cam.

In my training group, there was a guy who ran the 800 in Div I and then got into body building after college. He was jacked about like Cam, but not huge. He could run a 1:17 half and broke 17 in a 5k. But he could not get under 3 hours for the marathon. He readily admitted that he just carried to much weight and would bonk hard in the marathon if he tried to run a pace that was anywhere near what his 1/2 time suggested.

I used to race against a 40+ runner who could regularly reel off a 2:30 marathon and would win the masters division frequently at some of the bigger marathons. He just aged into the 55-59 age group and can barely get down to 2:50 now for the marathon. Very dedicated and smart athlete who still loves to compete. He has made all the training moves needed to keep at it. Cross trains religiously in the pool. Strength trains and does mobility/stability work daily in the gym.

2:39 at age 58 is a world leading time. You may see a three or four 55-59 age group runners break 2:40 in a given year. And that is for the entire world. Anything close to 2:40 even will win the 55-59 age group at any major marathon. And the top times will come from runners who are closer to 55 instead of those who are closer to 59. Those times will also more than likely come from runners who used to be pros and very rarely, if ever, from a pure amateur who took up running late in life.

There are some well known younger guys who are jacked up and can also run a fast marathon for an amateur despite carrying so much extra muscle weight. But to be very top heavy, 58 and hitting a time like 2:39 is just beyond what is possible.

I know nothing about this guy. He could be a freak of nature and a once in a lifetime talent. But if he is going to use the marathon as part of an online influencer brand and tout his results online, he better be doing it without any PEDs. Same for the ultras. If any bozo can get pharma-ed up and blast there way to the top of their age group in the marathon, it is just taking a huge dump on the very talented and dedicated runners who are doing it clean.

Influencers are a huge source of performance enhancing drugs. There was an article earlier this week that mentioned how influencers get commissions from peptide dealers for every referral they make. This tracks with some other anti-doping influencers (Track Club Babe and Fueled by Lolz) who have been quite vocal about what they see as unethical sales pitches from GLP-1 brokers who want them to post about using GLP-1s, even though neither do. That particular case is a really disturbing nexus of the two worst elements of running: eating disorders and performance enhancing drugs.

Pro-athletes might have different reasons for associating with Cam than obtaining referrals to peptide dealers, things like social media clout, increased follower numbers, etc, can potentially lead to more lucrative contracts. Still, given Cam's openness about PED usage and the fact that the booming peptide industry is definitely providing commissions to influencers for referrals, people who are closely associated with him should be tested more.

But I'll go further than this: a fifteen, probably soon to be twenty, minute decline in Boston Qualifying times over 15 years isn't solely about the shoes. At best, the shoes are worth ten seconds a mile. That's less than five minutes over a marathon. In my view, the rest of the decline outside five minutes has a lot to do with widespread PED use amongst the general population.

A big selling point of the shoes is "they help you recover better and do more workouts." The latest wave of performance enhancing drugs claim to help you recover faster and do more workouts (we don't really know if that's true because there haven't been clinical trials on many of them). I remember the Armstrong era of the 2000s and similar claims about equipment/vitamins back then.

I think if we really want to get rid of performance enhancing drug use at the recreational and competitive Masters level, the BAA should require random testing for somewhere between 1-3% of the field for a race to count as a qualifier. Maybe cap the testing at 4:30. At a regional marathon with a couple thousand runners, you're talking maybe 25 onsite tests. It depends on whether you do a full screen or a basic screen, but that's anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000 in new costs. But if you spread that out amongst the 1.3 million people running a marathon every year, it's $2.6 million to $25 million to fund such a program. And if you really wanted to do it right, you'd take maybe 1% of the the 1% and give them full panel out of competition tests. That's maybe another 100-200 people, and around another $300k in expenses.

Who is really going to sponsor that? I guess if the side effects of PEDs were bad, and costly enough, (like say getting cancer from it and requiring years of chemo), a health insurer might have some business case to do it. If a shoe company, be it Nike or Adidas or Puma or whatever, really wants to isolate the effect of their latest and greatest show, I guess it could make sense. But do they really even sell enough super shoes to justify that? The endless success of Brooks and their boring but durable and reliable Ghost suggests that you sell the most shoes by selling to runners who run 15 miles a week and show up to the turkey trot and park run.

And so here we are where we're stuck and headed down the path blazed by triathlon (where doping infests age groupers) before us. The shoe companies don't really have an incentive to call it out because if a doped 58 year old guy runs a 20 minute PR while wearing their $300 shoes, some other 50 something guy with a high disposable income might throw $300 at his pair of shoes. And the entities that might have the most incentive fund regulating the sport in a way that facilitates clean competition, either aren't involved in the sport at all or sponsor some local 10k.

My guess is somewhere between 15-30% of all Boston qualifiers are on some sort of banned substance (some of this may be legitimate medicine treating a legitimate condition, but where they've failed to get a TUE). I also think TUEs should be public for all runners.