Is Bicarb ruining the sport ?

Kratom is definitely will boost performance. It dulls pain and increases focus. I’d stay away from red vein but I have been using green maeng da before hard workouts and races for years. I do mostly rowing for fun now, but I wish I had it during my competitive running days. I’ve even taken baking soda on top of it, not bi-carb just a half teaspoon an hour before.

Bicarb and caffeine should be banned.

Athletes have the option not to wear super shoes and not use Bicarb if they feel conflicted. It's their choice. Sport is ruthless and you need every advantage you can get or you'll get left behind.

Maybe, if everyone uses them, it will equalize relative to talent and training?

How are you going to ban chocolate? Shamone.

Bicarb isn't new, it's been used in track for decades. The Maurten bicarb solution is new, sure, but the effect has been known long before 2023. Is the Maurten solution really making that much of a difference? It's like proposing banning Tylenol after the implementation of the EZ swallow tab.

Any parents here? Would you purchase it for your teen high school kid who maybe has to double in the 400/800, 800/1600, 2600/3200 or any reason?

As written above, baking soda has been used in running for decades. But Maurten has popularised it.

I tried it last week, didn't feel any better and ran very poorly

Riding a bike on the track is definitely performance enhancing.

I notice kratom on your list. I've noticed kratom definitely helps me mentally push through a long run or a boring gym session. But on runs where I'm pushing the pace, it tends to make me nauseous. Is it proven to be performance-enhancing? Wondering if other folks gave be using it for working out and what their experiences have been.

Come on bro! The only reason everyone is getting faster is due to double threshold training. We all know it!😉

I don't have a particular problem with the product itself, as it doesn't seem to have any serious side effects. That generally seems to be the dividing line between supplements that increase performance (caffine, iron, beta-alanine, ect.) but are legal, and those that are classified as PEDs.

However, I don't like the monopoly Maurten has on the product and the ridiculous price gouging this allows them to do. It reminds me of back in 2018-2019 when Vaporflys were nearly impossible to get and if you did find a pair they were 500+ dollars. It certainly seems like if a supplement is cost-prohibitive for most athletes (especially college students, where some schools give it for free) it shouldn't be allowed.

Times are meaningless now. A sub 4 mile used to be special for high school and college. Now it’s commonplace.

There will always be a next best thing, either it’s super shoes or caffeine or beet juice. Science is always moving forward and you can’t put the cat back into the bag once it’s out. as long as the next best thing is safe, why should we try to stop it. I’m an older runner and the faster times today make me feel like I was that much slower back in the day but is Paavo Nurmi still the GOAT of his era? Twenty years from now, we will still think of Yared and Grant as the best of this era. I like to think of it as putting an asterisk next to my times from the 1980s as opposed to putting the asterisk next to current runners times.

I don't think it was that disguised.

lol banning bicarb is like banning carb loading before a marathon. Caffeine, beta alanine, creatine, bicarb, all have their places by now and if they were to be banned it would have been done decades ago

You could've said this about times when tracks were converted from cinder to synthetic tracks. What matters is competition. Times will always be relative. A 2:09 marathon isn't what it was 10, 20 or 30+ years ago. And that's OK, because if you understand anything about sports you take the difference in tech and nutrition into consideration. Plus doping controls are a lot better now than back than. So even though athletes have better shoes and legal supplements now compared to the 90s, 80s and beyond. Athletes at the elite level can't just take "reindeer milk" and "turtle soup" like they did back than.

Why isn’t the mile record down to 3:39? Adding the shoes, pacing lights and bouncy tracks, it should even be 3:35.

For WADA to ban something, it needs to meet at least two of these three criteria:

"1. It has the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance;
2. It represents an actual or potential health risk to the Athlete;
3. It violates the spirit of sport (this definition is outlined in the Code)."

I assume most of us would agree that bicarb seems to help. But does it present a health risk or violate the "spirit of sport"? I don't think so. It's certainly possible that someone could do a study and find that there are long term negative effects, and if so then I think bicarb should be banned. But to me, it's more like caffeine. Sure, taking enough caffeine would be bad for you, but I don't think it's violating the spirit of sport are causing a health risk if you drink coffee the morning of a race.

Why would anyone eat it when you can just insert it?