Was Paula Radcliffe the biggest genetic outlier in running history? Underappreciated on Letsrun

EPO/blood doping increases the number of RBCs and thus the amount of hemoglobin. This allows for a greater total oxygen carrying capacity. As the final electron acceptor of oxidative phosphorylation, oxygen is required for ATP production (outside of lactate formation, which is limited in scope). Hence when you exercise, your heart rate speeds up and you breath more rapidly to get more oxygen.

It should be clear how EPO and blood doping improve endurance performance. It doesn’t give you more energy, it allows you to burn what you have more quickly since you have a greater oxygen carrying capacity.

The problem when you are running all out is not running out of sugar for energy (at least for a while), it is having to resort to lactate formation due to insufficient oxygen to maintain high levels of oxidative phosphorylation.

There is no violation of any of the laws of thermodynamics in this.

What is the rule or principle that says doping must give a determinable level of superiority? Further, how can that differential be determined if the performances it is being compared with may also be doped?

yeah, but no, but yeah wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

Then you don't know what circular reasoning is.

So what is your premise and what is your inference?

You don't need to answer that, we already know what you believe.

Rekrunner has argued that if doping played a part in women's marathon running then Paula's performance would not be an outlier. It is an outlier. He is therefore arguing from the fact of her performance that doping does not play a significant role in marathon running (or at least women's marathon running).

This is not an inference that can be safely drawn. We see outlier performances in other running events - from the sprints to the middle distances - where we know doping is significantly present in those events (if not necessarily in the outlier performances). The existence of outlier performances does not allow for a conclusion that doping plays an insignificant role in those events. Athlete surveys have shown that at least 1 in 3 championship athletes have doped. It is unlikely that marathon runners will be an exception.

Armstronglivs wrote:

What is the rule or principle that says doping must give a determinable level of superiority? Further, how can that differential be determined if the performances it is being compared with may also be doped?

I'm not really sure I understand the question. Are you trying to help me make my point?

It is not my idea, that doping brings superior performances at this level, but it is a pervasive idea that fast performances are only possible with doping, and fast performances alone often serve as "proof" of doping because of its assumed large effect that can only be possible with doping.

Other pervasive ideas are that thousands of athletes know that, and that is why so many elite athletes dope (e.g. estimates like "at least" 1 in 3).

This doesn't seem logical that over the course of more than a decade, that large prevalence, combined with large effect, could be determined for one person, but would remain indeterminable for everyone else.

My alternative proposal is, that for the marathon, for the very fastest performances, any alleged superiority appears to be, as you suggest by your questioning, indeterminable, and surely has not yet been determined, because the differential is too small to be determinable. There is yet no observation that suggests a net benefit of the best doped performance over the best clean performance.

When the fastest known doped performances is minutes behind the fastest known performances, this leaves open the possibility that the very best runners, the world record holders, are not doped, and/or the effect from doping at world record level is, at best, a small part of the explanation of performance.

Armstronglivs wrote:

Rekrunner has argued that if doping played a part in women's marathon running then Paula's performance would not be an outlier. It is an outlier. He is therefore arguing from the fact of her performance that doping does not play a significant role in marathon running (or at least women's marathon running).

This is not an inference that can be safely drawn. We see outlier performances in other running events - from the sprints to the middle distances - where we know doping is significantly present in those events (if not necessarily in the outlier performances). The existence of outlier performances does not allow for a conclusion that doping plays an insignificant role in those events. Athlete surveys have shown that at least 1 in 3 championship athletes have doped. It is unlikely that marathon runners will be an exception.

More precisely, I argued that if it is a partial explanation of performance, it must be a small part, as opposed to a big part.

I did not argue "significant role in marathon running", to the extent it only implies "use", but significant role in explaining the fastest marathon performances, which implies "benefit".

We can safely infer that doping did not bring anyone below 2:18 (within 2.2%) in the 14 years after Paula ran 2:15:25, and did not bring many, below 2:20, nor even many below Ingrid Kristiensen's 2:21:06 (4.2%) in 1985 (before 2018, only 42 women ran faster over 33 years -- hardly an impressive demonstration of high prevalence plus high effect).

The outliers you have shown for the other events were not as great in magnitude as for the marathon.

The women's sprints were just over half as large (1.3% and 1.4% versus 2.2%).

For women's sprinting, we would also have to consider other factors unique to women's sprinting, in terms of doping and anti-doping. This still wouldn't rule out, by the same reasoning, that FloJo's superiority is explained in part by other factors than doping, despite a known large effect in events benefiting from superior strength from women taking steroids.

I'm not sure we know that doping is significantly present in the men's 1500m.

Suggesting prevalence as high as 1 in 3, combined with an assumption of a "big part of the explanation" seems to work against the likelihood of a single outlier, by almost twice as large as your next best example.

You still seem to be conflating use of doping with benefit. Suggesting "marathon runners will (unlikely) be an exception" only speaks to "use", and only clouds a discussion about alleged superior performance benefit for the fastest performances.

hes as clean as jarmila kratochvilova,paula ivan,wang junxia and marita koch.they never failed a doping test,either.

You don't understand thermodynamics/thermoregulation.

The ATP splitting releases heat, overly 40% of the energy released powers the muscle contraction, the rest is heat production. A further 20% or more of the gross energy production is used for heat dissipation.

And lactate production has nothing to do with oxygen supply, because all the chemical reactions of lactate production happen in the cytosol, not the mitochondrion.

That sould be only 40% of ATP powers muscle contraction.

yeah, but no, but yeah wrote:

Why do you believe that EPO can deliver supernatural amounts of oxygen to the muscles?

The key word there is supernatural....like it's some kind of miracle. Think,dont just believe, actually think about it.

Bruh, because it helps you recover supernaturally fast? As in above-natural. Because you are jacking up a hormone to above-natural levels only scene in a few people with a genetic mutation? A hormone that makes you produce oxygen carriers in you blood. Smh

I know im getting trolled in some sort of socratic biochem seminar, but somebody get this guy some EPO so he can take it and see if he gets faster.

You are seeking to draw inferences from inadequate information. It is what you say others do, when they claim the best are doping.

The core weakness in your argument is that you depend overly on data relating to "known" or confirmed dopers. As we also know, they are but the tip of the iceberg. Very few dopers are caught. The athletes you assume are clean (including Radcliffe) could easily have been doping but not caught.

You are correct that we don't know in any exact terms what the likely effects of doping will be on elites. But that doesn't enable you to conclude the effects are either non-existent or negligible.

The bigger picture is that doping is widespread in all sports at the elite level and has been for quite a few years now but only a few are caught. You are looking for details in the picture that it doesn't provide, which is who is doping, what are they taking and what benefit does it give them. We often don't know that - except in a more general sense, derived from what knowledge we have of the practice (which is quite a bit). But we can say that if they are elite they are part of the picture - because that is sport now - and we can't take them out of it unless we can be certain they haven't doped or aren't doping - which we can't do.

Yes, it isn't enough to say anyone is doping because they are fast. But they may well be fast because they have doped. If it were not so there wouldn't be a widespread problem with doping. There is thus a link between prevalence and performance even if we don't know the exact relationship.

Your argument against a single outlier if there is a high prevalence of doping (as suggested by the 1 in 3 estimate) doesn't work because it assumes athletes will use the same peds and in the same way, and will also respond to the same extent, and that they will have the same training and even natural ability. It also presupposes the same rigour applied to anti-doping testing and detection at different periods in history. None of those variables is a given. Taken together or in several combinations they could produce considerable variety in levels of performance that at a given time could produce outlier performances in certain individuals. Given the prevalence of doping the statistical likelihood is that it has.

pancho sanza wrote:

I know im getting trolled in some sort of socratic biochem seminar, but somebody get this guy some EPO so he can take it and see if he gets faster.

You are not being trolled. I am trying to explain why these ideas are nonsensical.

These things I'm telling you really are basic physiology.

The problem is, you get assailed constantly by bad science. Rveductive ideas about drugs that supposedly break the laws of physics allowing supposed superhuman energy delivery.

At what point do you question what you are told by people who can't back up their beliefs with real knowledge of how the human body actually works?

pancho sanza wrote:

I know im getting trolled some sort of socratic biochem seminar, but somebody get this guy some EPO so he can take it and see if he gets faster.

You are not being trolled. I am trying to explain why these ideas are nonsensical.

These things I'm telling you really are basic physiology.

The problem is, you get assailed constantly by bad science. Reductive ideas about drugs that supposedly break the laws of physics allowing supposed superhuman energy delivery.

At what point do you question what you are told by people who can't back up their beliefs with real knowledge of how the human body actually works?

yeah, but no, but yeah wrote:

pancho sanza wrote:

I know im getting trolled some sort of socratic biochem seminar, but somebody get this guy some EPO so he can take it and see if he gets faster.

You are not being trolled. I am trying to explain why these ideas are nonsensical.

These things I'm telling you really are basic physiology.

The problem is, you get assailed constantly by bad science. Reductive ideas about drugs that supposedly break the laws of physics allowing supposed superhuman energy delivery.

At what point do you question what you are told by people who can't back up their beliefs with real knowledge of how the human body actually works?

Why has WADA banned EPO/Testosterone then? If they provide no advantage as you seem to claim.

heelstriker wrote:

yeah, but no, but yeah wrote:

You are not being trolled. I am trying to explain why these ideas are nonsensical.

These things I'm telling you really are basic physiology.

The problem is, you get assailed constantly by bad science. Reductive ideas about drugs that supposedly break the laws of physics allowing supposed superhuman energy delivery.

At what point do you question what you are told by people who can't back up their beliefs with real knowledge of how the human body actually works?

Why has WADA banned EPO/Testosterone then? If they provide no advantage as you seem to claim.

Good question. The plain fact is, people believe that drugs can give you more energy.

Some might say that drugs allow the body to produce more energy, but essentially this is the same nonsense reworded.

About your original premise that Paula is a genetic freak, she would dispute this. She has poor speed compared to many of her rivals and had to build up the training over many years to beat them.

She new that her true strength would eventually be in the marathon.

Thermodynamics or thermoregulation? Those are two different things.

The second law of thermodynamics: energy can’t be created or destroyed, only transferred. There is no energy created by blood doping. All the energy you need comes from your body’s energy stores. The other reactant you need is oxygen. Having more oxygen available allows you to sustain a higher output using oxidative phosphorylation without having to resort to lactate formation. Oxygen is the limiting reactant, you have plenty of sugar available and already stored , the question is how much oxygen you have available to burn it?

I don’t know why you are mentioning that only 40% of the energy is going to the actual muscular movement. The point is, with more oxygen available you will be able to convert more ADP to ATP at a time to power muscle contraction and all other needs of the body.

Lactate formation has everything to do with oxygen supply. With low oxygen supply, the tricarboxylic acid cycle will slow, pyruvate concentration will increase in the cytosol and will not be moved to the mitochondria to enter the tricarboxylic acid cycle, and your body will shunt the pyruvate to lactate fermentation to unload electron carriers so glycolysis can continue.

And thermoregulation? When you exercise you produce a lot more heat from your muscles. Your body will counteract this through sweating and vasodilation of arteries. This does not prevent blood doping from making you faster.

My inferences are independent of these unknowns, as they are based on various combinations of assumptions, logic, and logical consequences that should predict many fast times, contrasted with historical knowledge of the lack of sub-2:18s, and low quantities of sub-2:20 and sub-2:21 performances.

Since doping's connection to performance is a product of prevalence and effect, it is precisely the lack of many fast performances within 2.2% of Paula's record, up to with 4.5% of Paula's record, that allow me to conclude 1) either prevalence is not high, among suitable candidate elites, or 2) effect is not important. Both options allow me to infer that doping did not play a big part, without having to settle the question of who doped.

You seem obsessed with emphasizing use is widespread, and must be much bigger than we know. Since the performances are already known and will no longer change, arguing that prevalence must be even much bigger than we know, is also arguing that doping effect must also be that much smaller than we thought, as the resulting product can no longer change. You can't have it all.

You would agree that having more red blood cells in your blood would allow for greater oxygen delivery to your muscles, yes?

rekrunner wrote:

My alternative proposal is, that for the marathon, for the very fastest performances, any alleged superiority appears to be, as you suggest by your questioning, indeterminable, and surely has not yet been determined, because the differential is too small to be determinable. There is yet no observation that suggests a net benefit of the best doped performance over the best clean performance.

When the fastest known doped performances is minutes behind the fastest known performances, this leaves open the possibility that the very best runners, the world record holders, are not doped, and/or the effect from doping at world record level is, at best, a small part of the explanation of performance.

But it also leaves open the possibility that the very best runners, especially world record holders, are doped and just were not caught. And the women's marathon has their fair share of dopers - here's a list of confirmed dopers and their current standing on the top 100 all time fastest list:

(9) Shobukhova (RUS)

(15) Jeptoo (KEN)

(23) Wangui (KEN)

(26) Sun (CHN)

(31) Chepchirchir (KEN)

(52) Sumgong (KEN)

(68) Kirwa (KEN-BRN)

(74) Duliba (BLR)

(99) Hamera-Shmyrko (UKR)

These are just the confirmed dopers and doesn't include the ones who are highly suspicious (the other Kenyans & Russians on the list). And Sumgong & Kirwa were one-two on the podium at Rio.

At one point Shobukhova had the 2nd fastest time in the world only behind Radcliffe - her 2:18:20 is smoken (and will probably remain the Russian NR forever. Lol). She was using EPO & HGH and blew her ABP with very high anomalies. If she never get caught you would still probably suspect her of doping because she's Russian. So, Radcliffe runs a sizzling, unbelievable 3 minutes faster than a full-throttle Russian and you don't think she's suspicious one bit? (especially since some of her disclosed blood values are regarded by some as suspicious). And what about the seven other faster times than Shobukhova (all "East Africans" including the current WR holder) - they're not suspicious because they haven't tested positive?

And what about the two dopers on the podium at Rio? The only ones doping that day? Lizzie Lee certainly doesn't think so: ?