"Nicholas Thompson: In our last exchange, we talked about one of the things I love about track: strategy in the five-thousand-metre. But now I want to ask about something less lovely: drugs. Specifically, Malcolm, how many of these guys do you think are doping? My instinct is that virtually all the men and all the women in every event shorter than four hundred metres are doped, about half of the quarter milers are doped, a few of the half milers, and very few of the long-distance runners. There are some exceptions though: Moroccan men and Russian women seem to have particular issues. The greatest dopers of all time, I suspect, were the Chinese women in the early nineties who claimed that exotic worms made them fast.
I would, however, be shocked if any of the top Kenyan or Ethiopian distance runners dope. I’m sure there are physiological benefits to doping in long-distance running, just as there are in long-distance cycling. (There’s an interesting Science of Sport study from a few weeks ago that suggests that the winners of the Tour de France have slowed down so much since Lance Armstrong’s time that it’s perhaps conceivable they weren’t doped this year.) But drugs haven’t become part of the culture of distance running.
Malcolm Gladwell: I confess that I don’t understand the relationship between long-distance running and doping. Sprinting—yes. But do we know what kind of benefit a truly élite runner in, say, the ten-thousand-metre gets from drugs?
What I’ve always understood is that to compete in anything from the five-thousand-metre to the marathon, you need to train at least a hundred and twenty miles a week. But most people who try to run a hundred and twenty miles a week or more will, in a relatively short period of time, get hurt. The great American distance runner Chris Solinsky is a clear example of this. He’s clearly one of the finest long-distance runners in the world. Unfortunately, the amount of training he needs to do to compete at that level has so far proven too much for his body. I’m guessing there are hundreds of Chris Solinskys out there, all over the world. The limiting factor in distance running is injuries, and the greatest challenge in the sport is finding a way to make the hundred and twenty miles a week manageable.
What I don’t understand is how “performance enhancing” drugs help you manage that hundred-and-twenty-mile-per-week burden. Surely the ideal performance-enhancing drug for a distance runner would be a brand-new, perfectly legal, anti-inflammatory. Nothing too complicated. Just a super-charged ibuprofen that would help injuries heal faster. Or am I being naïve?"