Ma's Army - What were they on?

Weren't they on turtle blood and worm fungus???

did any of them ever test positive for PED's?

Wahts better, Radcliffes 2:15 Marathon or that 29:31?

rockville management wrote:

did any of them ever test positive for PED's?

Not that I know of. But 'Ma' would actually beat them or actually "discipline" them if they didnt push as hard as he felt though shouldve. I remember a quote by one of the athletes saying that there training revolved around pushing the beyond the borders of pain by getting beat into running as fast as they could everyday they trained...something along the lines of that but whatever the record stands and it wont be gone until someone else comes up and breaks it.

From what I've read, Ma recruited ~15,000 women from the country. The plan was to run them into the ground, with their daily 40km of running, workouts, etc. Within 1.5yrs, they wanted to drop 90% of the women -- the ones who couldn't hang.

Of those 1500 that did survive the first 18 months, he would work them more, ideally getting to roughly 50 women of unbelievalbe talent and durability.

Given gene pools and power like that in a country like China, it's not hard to see why they achieved what they did. I'm 99% certain that drugs played a large role, but if you really don't give a shit about anybody but the top 1%, and can essentially "make" people do the work, you can get phenomenal results.

Bill Tanui wrote:

From what I've read, Ma recruited ~15,000 women from the country. The plan was to run them into the ground, with their daily 40km of running, workouts, etc. Within 1.5yrs, they wanted to drop 90% of the women -- the ones who couldn't hang.

Of those 1500 that did survive the first 18 months, he would work them more, ideally getting to roughly 50 women of unbelievalbe talent and durability.

Given gene pools and power like that in a country like China, it's not hard to see why they achieved what they did. I'm 99% certain that drugs played a large role, but if you really don't give a shit about anybody but the top 1%, and can essentially "make" people do the work, you can get phenomenal results.

Read the same thing when I basically spent 2hrs on the computer looking up info on them.

What were they on? They were on their bikes, six hours a day. What are you on?

8:07 last 3k, really?

no 8:07 by itself. the last 5k of the 29:31 was at 5k record pace.

food for thought - given the punishing regime that Ma put forth and drawing on women from hard lifestyles, would it surprise people if they actually were NOT on drugs? get a bunch of people of a very high caliber and have them train together - some extraordinary things will happen. heck same thing with Brian Sell and Hansons.

Sorry to be the wet sock here, but all of that rubbish about 15,000 chinese on a programme is complete and utter garbage. I was in China at the time and Ma simply took the best girls from the province, and trained them very hard - with or without PED's.

The province probably had over 50m people, but the athletes chosen were based on their performances at provincial school athletics and then moved in to the sports institute at around 16 years of age.

Please do not believe that this was a mass programme, it was just the same as any other province at the time.

Dear Jon wrote:

Wahts better, Radcliffes 2:15 Marathon or that 29:31?

This IS a good question. What's more impressive? That 10k is 3+min behind the men, ergo, the Marathon should be 13-14min behind? But Paula is less than 11min behind.

What was Paula on?

If there were more women's 10000m over the years, instead of just the championships, we'd see a slew of sub30s by now. The women who are cranking mid 3:50s these days, which is not far off Ma's Army, should be able to go well under 8:15 if they really cared about the 3000m. Same with the 14:20-14:30 5k women.

Is Ma's Army so far ahead?

geez! wrote:

8:07 last 3k, really?

No, not quite. The last 5000 of the 29:31 was 14:26.1 (way under the standing WR) and the last 3000 was 8:17.5 (also, of course, way under the then WR). We've been through this before on a few zillion other threads. I'm firmly in the "not even remotely believable" camp.

Why did they disappear like they did if they were legit?

those rotten chinese must be drug cheats because i'm a fat ass and don't run that fast plus i know everything whoops i farted haha

they burned out under that kind of training? i mean, if they were on drugs and getting away with it, you;d think they would keep going. our US sprinters show this to be the case.

girls are different. Hard training will make them WANT to stop even if they were on PED's. No doubt they were given PED's to aid recovery. ITs the classic role foreign coaches play, Train the athlete into the ground, give them PED'S to recover faster. It helps more than actually taking the drug for one race or two, but rather the benefits last all season.

rd2 wrote:

[G]et a bunch of people of a very high caliber and have them train together - some extraordinary things will happen. [H]eck same thing with Brian Sell and Hansons.

You must be kidding. How many Olympic medals and world records have the Hansons? Getting a couple American guys to run a mediocre marathon (by international standards) is a far cry from rewriting the world top-ten lists in one meet.

Those were interesting days. There was more talk that those Chinese women were actually men than they were women on drugs, but when the East German machine broke up some of the doctors involed reportedly did move to China. By my calculation that 8:07 is very similar to 2:15, and I would assume a 2:15 marathoner could also run about 29:20 10k if the right race came along and conditions were ideal. We often hear that the Cinese have over a million people so they should find some great ones, but that is coomparing them to other countries -- how about comparing them to all the rest of the world. Shuoldn't there be some in all the rest of the world that could equal what that relatively smaller population produced?