There is no proof that running more mileage makes you faster

Sorry for the double post, but I decided to split my responses to one post about the thread topic, and one to address your frustration.

If I claim there is "no proof" of something, this is the easiest claim to disprove by giving a counter-example. But that is not exactly my claim. There is some "proof" of performance gains in blood doping studies, regardless of blood doping method (including altitude training). Accepting amateurs represent elites, to avoid that unnecessary discusion, what do the best studies show for these amateurs? Time trials seem to me to be the most relevant rather than proxies like VO2max or time to exhaustion, but they generally do not control the initial state of training of the subjects, and they do not show that there intervention brings the subjects to new personal bests (the individual equivalent to world records). If trials show 5% gains over the course of the study, it is not obvious where on the spectrum of potential that 5% lies, if you don't control the start point, and don't have any perspective on the end point. There is a big difference if athletes are going from 85% to 90% of their potential, but just getting there a little quicker than the control group, or from 98% to 103% of their potential, suggesting doping produces super-natural performance. Furthermore, there are altitude studies showing similar performance gains, let's say 5% for discussion. In the real world, if an athlete shows a "suspicious" performance progression improvement of 5%, we could speculate it was through training with blood doping, or we could equally speculate that it was through training at altitude -- there is no way to conclude that the improvements came from doping until all other possibilities are reasonably ruled out, and any remaining uncertainties are bounded. The interesting measure is not how much an athlete improves over the course of a short term study, but how the end result of doping compares to the end result of clean training.

You seem to reference my attempts to measure the quality and quantity of historically recorded all-time fastest performances -- what elite athletes did in the real world -- and my choice of looking at three different "ethnic" groups. This was an exercise to evaluate many popular claims about EPO and East African -- mainly as rebuttal arguments to Renato's claiming athletes can run their best clean by training at altitude. These popular claims include: 1990s performance gains in the EPO-era were from EPO, as evidenced by the progress of the East African world records; EPO works the same for East Africans as it does for the rest of the world; doping is practiced world-wide, possibly as much as 29-57% based on one recent survey. Note that none of these claims were mine, but they helped shaped what I was looking for in all-time performances.

Given that we have no real data comparing elite performance with and without doping, in order to estimate the change in elite performance through doping, and because it was the East African progress at the top in the 1990s that is often used as "proof" EPO "works", I looked at progress at the top worldwide -- data we do have. The obvious limitation is that I cannot know if any times are clean or doped performances. But it is still an interesting finding that there was little progress at the top in nearly three decades -- during the EPO-era -- from most of the world, even from countries known to dope, especially in light of the claim that "EPO works for East Africans like everyone else".

Admittedly my choice of three groups was arbitrary, but as I explained my methods and reasons, I invited everyone to repeat the exercise with other groups if they felt I was cherry-picking, or shaping the outcomes with my arbitrary choices. But for one of the claims: "EPO works the same for East Africans as it does for the rest of the world", it was necessary to consider at least these two groups separately to test the claim of likeness. I chose to create the three groups I did, because I already knew where I would find the interesting patterns: among the East Africans across the board; and among the North Africans in the middle distances up to 10K, and nothing really from the rest of the world. I also chose to count East Africans that have migrated to other countries as East African, because I knew they generally dominated the other countries they moved to and that seemed the most fair. Interestingly, if we completely ignore Kenyans (226) and Ethiopians (88) competing for their own country, and just count their "ex-pats", East Africans still outperform the "rest of the world", with a similar quantity (27 East Africans, 30 North Africans, and 32 non-Africans), and superior quality.

Parker Valby

Tell us why you believe that "blood vector doping" can improve performance beyond natural metabolism?

Obviously you lack an understanding of what metabolism actually is, so I don't expect you to give an intelligent reply.