Lance's 2:46 Marathon a result of PEDs. Folks at cyclingnews suggest so.

I think everyone knows the guy wrote:

He doped on his own comeback tour after railing about how he is so clean you are welcome to check out his own private lance-is-clean website that never came about.

He did publish his test results during his comeback tour until some of the numbers looked suspicious, then took them down.

I believe he is such a psychopath that he began believing that he was actually clean.

Nutella1 wrote:

LennyZ wrote:

I am sure Lance could have run 2:20.

I am sure he could not have. It leaked that he will admit in the Oprah interview to having taken PED's since BEFORE his cancer. So even when he was just a "good pro" cyclist in the mid 90's, that was not his natural talent. It is also likely he started doping as a triathlete, so no one knows what his natural talent is.

Just to be clear,and I am no fan of LA, but he was not "just a good pro" in the 1990s. He was on a pretty steep trajectory towards stardom - watch his win at he 1993 worlds, for example, not to mention the stage of the TdF he won that year as well. He was definitely on the way to be a top one day rider from the very start. Now, was he using in 1993? That's another question, but he was always good enough to be a team leader type guy.

Now, if you want to see the trajectory of a guy destined for the very top, look up Greg Lemond's palmares. there was a rider who, from the very beginning, never missed a break, or left any doubt as to his talent, potential, drive and ethics. He was twice the rider as Lance and ten times the human being. (He finished 3rd, 2nd and 1st in his first 3 TdFs - that is the stuff legend is made of. LA dropped out of his first two.)

Just not very smart about how to recover from injury.

I ran 2:46 at Boston and was well over 185 lbs.

I've run 2:39 at 182 lbs. It's far from unfathomable that Lance's performance was unaided. Not that I think it was.

BigBren wrote:

Lance did not have the talent to run 2:20. Do you have any idea how hard it is to run 2:20? I ran 2:30 as a 16yo high schooler, but don't pretend that I could have won the TDF. Bikies can't run fast, runners can't bike fast, and tris do what they do because that is the only thing they can win. Lance was slow in high school XC, was slow as an adult in the marathon, and could never have run 2:20. Don't be stupid.

Ever heard of Phyllis Hines? She ran 2:52 (winning Rocket City, as I recall) at the same age. She switched to cycling and won several national championships.

Chooch wrote:

actually, as a guy who was passed by Lance on Heartbreak Hill en route to his 2:46, it's actually encouraging to hear.

Considering that he ran his 2:46 at NYC and Heartbreak Hill's in the Boston Marathon, you were maybe passed by Lance in a 2:5x race. I was about half a minute faster than Lance at New York that year in my first marathon, so it doesn't bother me if he was on drugs; that only makes it better.

altoroad wrote:

BigBren wrote:

Lance did not have the talent to run 2:20. Do you have any idea how hard it is to run 2:20? I ran 2:30 as a 16yo high schooler, but don't pretend that I could have won the TDF. Bikies can't run fast, runners can't bike fast, and tris do what they do because that is the only thing they can win. Lance was slow in high school XC, was slow as an adult in the marathon, and could never have run 2:20. Don't be stupid.

Ever heard of Phyllis Hines? She ran 2:52 (winning Rocket City, as I recall) at the same age. She switched to cycling and won several national championships.

I know a guy who was a 15 min 5k runner who started cycling and was a Cat 1 by the end of his first season and a dIII pro the next... super craziness.

moranick wrote:

Lance has sub 2:20 talent obviously. He was just doing recreational training with minimal commitment and wanted to sneak under 2:50. If he actually cared about marathon training for a year or more, he'd be amazing at it.

I always thought he was too big to run 2:20. He prolly has the cardiovascular system but he's a pretty big guy.

How big is Jason Hartmann?

runn wrote:

He prolly has the cardiovascular system but he's a pretty big guy.

A lot of runners have the cardiovascular system to run 2:20. They just need to run enough miles. The problem is that 99.9% don't have the running form to get away with running 120+ mpw year after year after year.

Cycling is different. You can go for a 6 hour rides 5 times a week without getting an overuse injury. It's more about not getting hit by a car.

This is the part of this whole mess that I don't get. How can you look at of these successful US Cyclists who used PEDS (Armstrong, Hincappie, Liepheimer, Van DeVelde, Zabriski, etc) as well as their contemporaries in other countries and then jump to the conclusion that Greg Lemond was clean or had "ethics"? No one ever questioned the ethics of Hincappie, Liepheimer, Van DeVelde, Zabriski, etc until their names came up in the investigation.

So we're supposed to believe that Lemond was clean as the driven snow and everyone who followed was doped? Sorry. I'm not buying it. Lemond, Indurain, and everyone else should be under suspicion as well.

Jens Voigt and Chris Horner have to be the two luckiest guys out there because they have been neither caught nor implicated and stand a good chance to retire with their reputations in tact. As much as it pains me to say, though, they too must be considered suspicious for excelling during a time of such widespread PED use.

So, my 2:42 at 46, is legit and faster than Lance's tainted 2:46 at 36?

Suck on that cyclists!!!

Bullet the Blue Sky wrote:

Jens Voigt and Chris Horner have to be the two luckiest guys out there because they have been neither caught nor implicated

Generally, there is nothing from a performance perspective that would indicate that Jens Voigt ever doped. He won a few stages but would typically hurt beyond believe the next day. It's not like a won another stage the next day.

However, and that's a big but, he was always outspoken against those who doubted cycling and never raised his hands against dopers. Never said a bad word about LA. So, yes, he probably did it, too.

Chris Horner, yep, big buddies with LA, of course he is dirty.

If you look up the 8k results Steve Magness talked about in his article, you'll see Lance ran 26:40 in an XC race last year at age, what, 41?

Whether he's doping for these post-retirement performances or not, I have no trouble believing he could achieve a 2:46 marathon without doping. You're an idiot if you believe otherwise. Doping or not, Lance Armstrong is one of the most talented endurance athletes in the world. Sure, he's no runner...but plenty of people with awkward builds or bad form run 2:46. 2:46 is not an impressive marathon time for a really top level type endurance athlete, runner or not.

I can run faster an I'm certainly not talented. Drugs don't take you from being some fatass scrub to being the best in the world, which should be obvious but seems hard for some of you Letsrunners to grasp.

Lance is absurdly talented at endurance & multisport athletics. Yeah, he's a cheating scumbag bully with no moral compass, but that doesn't mean he isn't a freak of nature too.

From cyclingnews and other cycling places of interest

No one ever took Lance up on the offer of him paying a few hundred grand to whoever would come out and say Greg used PED's. Presumably because he did not take them. Assumption I know...

I think it is right to question cyclists and their performances based on the sports history. However you have to look at the fact that guys who were killing it in the late eighties and early nineties (Lemond, Hampsten) all of the sudden couldn't make the front split once EPO use started to really get going in the mid-nineties.

Makes You Wonder wrote:

I have no trouble believing he could achieve a 2:46 marathon without doping. You're an idiot if you believe otherwise. Doping or not, Lance Armstrong is one of the most talented endurance athletes in the world.

How would you know if he NEVER competed clean?

Does he have the same VO2Max as Patrick Makau or Wilson Kipsang? No way.

Cycling guy wrote:

Makes You Wonder wrote:

I have no trouble believing he could achieve a 2:46 marathon without doping. You're an idiot if you believe otherwise. Doping or not, Lance Armstrong is one of the most talented endurance athletes in the world.

How would you know if he NEVER competed clean?

Does he have the same VO2Max as Patrick Makau or Wilson Kipsang? No way.

It doesn't matter if you never competed clean. And athletes like Makau and Kipsang have NOTHING to do w/ Lance, since they are 2:03-5 marathoners. We're talking about him running over 40 minutes slower. Plus his vo2 max is quite high...you do realize just b/c an athlete runs super fast doesn't mean their vo2 is higher than the 82 lance has been tested at, right? vo2 max isn't that linear of a predictor of performance.

even if he's been doping since age 15, you have to have a high level of talent to start with to have any chance of becoming a tdf champ. A VERY high level. Doping allows you to train much harder and w/ less need for recovery...it doesn't turn you from a scrub into a great athlete. If you don't understand that, you're going to be hopelessly misinformed any time doping talk comes up.

I could take all the drugs Lance took and chances are I still wouldn't be able to be a professional cyclist -- or, if I was (I did race at an amateur level when I was young), I'd be at the bottom of the barrel. Drugs don't make you good enough; they may, however, make you great.

It's like all of you are insecure about the suggestion that someone wouldn't need a great deal of talent OR dope to run a 2:46. 2:46 just isn't that good, sorry boys. Maybe he was on dope to do it, but it wasn't b/c he wasn't talented enough to do it anyway if he trained right. It's an OK time for a high caliber athlete at best. It's not like he was a football player. You guys keep talking about how "big" he is...dude weighed under 160 lbs when he was racing. That's not big.

Makes You Wonder wrote:

just b/c an athlete runs super fast doesn't mean their vo2 is higher than the 82 lance has been tested at

1. If a guy runs 2:03, yes, that is not possible with a VO2Max

Jon Ulm wrote:

Mr. Armstrong was supposedly around 185 pounds during the marathon at Boston. not certain if this is true. From the photos he appears to be much larger than anyone around him. It was seem impossible for anybody at that high a weight to run 2:46. It most likely was drug aided.

lolwut?

I am 195 and I have run 2:28