Seems pretty debatable to me after reading through all the comments. I upvoted the OP. I know everything Rojo posts is going to get 75 percent downvoted, but i guess that percentage has now moved up to 95? Good job.
tl;dr: rojo—please pull your heat out of your butt. What kind of mental gymnastics are you doing so that you don't have to confront just how widespread cheating is in this sport?
I am in the camp that thinks that cheating is not a moral failure, but an ethical one. I believe virtually every elite runner cheats in some fashion or another, and that it is extremely naive to think otherwise. Statistical arguments based on performance distributions between known dopers and the (elite) population at large show that the distributions of times are the same in both groups. In simple terms, doping works for the population at large, and it clearly shifts times downwards. There's a reason why we have the term "EPO-era." You can see when steroids became part of the sport in to 50s as well as EPO and other drugss appeared. Just look a the Arturo Barrios-Yobes Ondieki-Geb progression and tell me there's not a line to be drawn there.
Personally, I would not cheat, as it would tend to nullify any accomplishment I might gain from running. However, a lot of people don't feel this way, and we live in a narcissistic society that values 'chasing clout.'
In my modest running career, I've known people to dope, especially in the early days of the internet. It was mostly stimulants and androgens, but I actually know people who did it.
I knew a guy who faked a disability so that he could train more.
When I did cycling, I saw countless examples of cheating. There's little to no enforcement in a rolling pack within a crit, and you can *almost* get away with murder there. I saw hand-checking, slings, dangerous obstruction, and outright malfeasance.
What I've found in life is that if you'll cross one ethical boundary, you'll easily cross more, and it is only stigma and the potential for being shunned that will halt your descent.
I think many people have a hard time believing that cheating is so widespread because it makes them confront cheating within themselves, and they desperately want exemplars to look up to.
The truth is, that just because someone runs 3:27 and smiles/doesn't doesn't make them good/bad or more/less moral than you are.
I sure hope not. Taking performance enhancing drugs to run a 1:21 half marathon would be really quite sad.
Bad post.
1:21 will place highly for a woman in many city races (certainly in the US, and probably in Spain, too), and that is easily Boston qualifying ability which is a big deal to many recreational runners.
I can easily see a good local runner, struggling to recover, getting on low-dose steroids or HGH.
i take supplements and protein powders from sellers online and manufacturers that arent exactly household names, and I'm not paying much attention to the labels.
I don't know what the exact rules are in Spain, but usually you don't need to apply in advance for a TUE unless you are part of a testing pool. "Hobby joggers" and other non-elite amateurs normally aren't part of any testing pool. The usual procedure in their case is that they should apply for a retroactive TUE if they test positive for a substance which they have taken as part of a medical treatment. Otherwise anti-doping organizations would be overwhelmed with TUE applications from hobby joggers and other amateur athletes who are normally unlikely to ever get tested anyway.
Which means that if an amateur gets busted for an anti-doping violation, they either failed to apply for a retroactive TUE or weren't granted one, which suggests that there was indeed something fishy going on and they weren't just taking prescribed medication as part of treatment for a genuine health issue.