THREE KENYANS BANNED FOR DOPING

That's exactly the point. There are no studies that asked and answered this question by studying elite runners. It would be difficult to conduct such a study on the right group of athletes for ethical reasons.

Thinking out loud wrote:

Curious, are there any studies out there on this? And if not, then I think you could get your answer if someone actually DID this study.

I have to admit this thread is very fascinating. You make a lot of good points and ask very intriguing questions. I will have to go back to some posts that I wanted to ask and yet I still need to read the rest of the thread.

Aaah -- the "you are naive" argument. It's a useful one when you can't form your own arguments.Don't confuse faith with facts. Based on cycling times, seems that the effect of doping has diminished in recent years. Clean cyclists can once again penetrate the top 10.EPO is not the only PED there is. Fact is that Armstrong also took steroids, HGH, cortisone, and testosterone. This cocktail helped him finish the tours. EPO can't take all the credit.About Contador and Schleck, actually what I think doesn't matter. What I said is that we don't know what they were on, and if it was limited to this narrow category of just EPO and blood-doping.And we should talk about which Schleck. Frank seems to have a couple of marks against him, but if he was doping, it sure didn't seem to help him that much. But Andy was always considered the stronger one, and so far there is no reason to suspect him.

TLW wrote:

Well, EPO helped Amstrong tremendously as he couldn't even FINISH the tour before EPO.

Also, if you think Contador and Schleck weren't on EPO you are incredibly, and I mean incredibly, naive. You don't finish in the top 10 in the TDF without EPO. This isn't opinion, this is universally accepted truth in the cycling world.

It's never going to be possible to establish with certainty whether or not anything helped an athlete because we can never know what would have happened if the athlete hadn't had his "help." Cathal Lombard, for example, claimed that it was other changes he'd made in his training, more rest, exercises, etc., that got him from over 29:00 at 10,000 meters to the Irish record. And we cannot be certain that without EPO he wouldn't have made the same improvements, though we can have pretty strong opinions about it.

So when a 2:05 guy is found to have EPO we cannot be sure that he wouldn't have run 2:05 without EPO. Heck, maybe he'd have run 2:04 without EPO. But there is a general belief, born out by some research, that EPO helps endurance athletes perform better. Maybe that's an erroneous belief.

However, we seem to agree on this thread that EPO helps cyclists, track runners and marathon runners as long as they haven't run faster than 2:07. It seems far fetched to believe that there's a tiny, tiny, group of men in the world, maybe a dozen or so at most at any one time, who will not perform better by taking EPO.

I can't stop laughing at some arguments in this discussion.

And I can't stop laughing at the people who think the TdF is a comparable event to a marathon. If you want to compare cycling, look at single race events, not a month-long slog through the mountains of France.

anyone ever wonder how they would rank if all doped athletes were totally removed from the sport? what times would then be considered world class?

Um... Anyone every hear of Michele Ferrari?

Okay, I'm willing to listen to Renato about EPO not helping as much in the marathon....if it is a fast even paced race.

I do think that it is the reason we see the surges that we do in the middle of a marathon. Think about it....14:15 5ks in the middle of a marathon? 4:30 in the middle of a marathon and recovering from it and still finishing with fast times overall.

Thoughts?

brain fried? wrote:

pseudoscience detector wrote:

I suspect this phenomenon is difficult to test.

Oh yeah - you definitely are very scientifically literate. It just turns out that your magic ideas are difficult to test. But you KNOW they are true. Why do you believe things that are untested and untestable are true? Well - because you want to believe them.

Get a grip.

Grow up! Racing and lab testing are not the same thing.

How do you know the athletes running 2:05 who are 'too good' for EPO didn't use EPO to get there?

Would Ramzi be considered too good for EPO had he not been caught? Did EPO not help him go from 3:39 to 3:30 in 1 year?

This is just one of the logical fallacies that Renato is trying to perpetuate. You don't know if ANY of these guys are 'too good' for EPO - even if such a thing is possible they might be using the EPO to get to those 'too-good' times in the first place.

rekrunner - 9.5/10 on trollmeter

Yeah 27-year old first timer athletes running 2:04 is due to money on the roads... even though if anything there is less money than in the 80s.

yyy wrote:

if there is doping, it is probably administered by foreign

doctors and agents.

Yes, it all comes down to money and exploitation.

I want to get across the point that oxygen delivery is not limited in the way that most people think it is. That is a construct. If you believe that your lack of progression is due to limited oxygen uptake, then you are susceptible to the EPO dogma. If you use the philosophy of your own training guru Arthur Lydiard, you will not be so easily mislead.

Let me put it this way:

1, If you run with good oxygen economy, then you won't feel such a limitation.

2, If you get a lab test for oxygen uptake, the results are unlikel to reveal either your true oxygen economy or your true maximal oxygen uptake, because both of those things are highly variable.

rekrunner wrote:

Keep in mind, the discussion is about if EPO actually helps. Not all of the arguments apply to cycling. For example, the "glycogen management" argument for running a marathon does not apply to cycling. Cyclists can, and do, and must, eat and drink while they cycle, so that they don't experience glycogen depletion during the event.

Cyclists don't experience glycogen depletion? Of course they do, much more often than runners.

pseudoscience detector wrote:

I want to get across the point that oxygen delivery is not limited in the way that most people think it is. That is a construct. If you believe that your lack of progression is due to limited oxygen uptake, then you are susceptible to the EPO dogma. If you use the philosophy of your own training guru Arthur Lydiard, you will not be so easily mislead.

No, it is not limited by oxygen uptake, but that is a really misleading statement.

Why is it misleading?

If you're not limited by o2 uptake then you should be running FASTER.

That's the idea.

Arguments: EPO is only good for recovery. Marathon runners don't need extra power it provides, but need the ability to run sustained high aerobic pace. They need elasticity, some blood markers mentioned etc. that only come from training.

Maybe EPO (and other drugs) don't necessarily work if only used on marathon race day. But if used in training and the athlete recovers faster, he can get in more hard workouts and make the physical adaptations required in a shorter period of time. Therefore, the race is improved. Is this improvement not due to the drug?

Arthur rarely believed that good performances were due to doping. He was convinced that the East Germans weren't using anything illegal. I'm not sure what "EPO dogma" is but there are enough people using the stuff that it's reasonable to conclude it helps endurance athletes though we'll probably never have definitive answers.