bangalangadanga wrote:
maybe the symptoms of hypothyroidism are accentuated at high intensity - volume training?
What kind of excuse is that? The symptoms of muscle damage and overtraining are accentuated at high intensity too. Does that make it ok to treat the symptoms with steroids?
If your body can't handle the training intensity without drugs, then you're an inferior athlete and have no business winning.
Jefe in the CO wrote:
Typical Never Was wrote:In my mid-twenties, I started bonking at the end of easy runs, and I could not recover. I'm not talking about general fatigue, soreness, or anything like that. My body felt completely depleted. Blood work showed that I have hypothyroidism. I have taken Levothroxin every morning for 10 years. Now, I don't feel like I hit the wall everyday...There's probably a reason thyroid medications are not banned: they don't enhance performance like some of you seem to think.
I think the description of your experience is the definition of performance enhancement. Do you think you could have maintained your times without thyroid medications? If no, then hasn't it enhanced your performance for the past 10 years?
The slippery slope here is that these drugs allow someone to achieve something that they would physically be unable to achieve without them. It may not matter whether they would enhance the performance of a healthy individual or not.
Without rendering judgement on Salazar's crew one way or the other, I tend to disagree. Would you consider an iron-depleted runner who starts supplementing with iron to get his performances back to par to be performance-enhancing or cheating? I wouldn't.
This discussion points toward the need for more transparency from elite athletes and their federations - i.e. making available a list of what TUEs everybody is taking, blood passport numbers, etc. In modern sports, especially in light of the recent events related to Armstrong, it is unreasonable to expect a knowledgeable fan to just accept that athletes are clean because their coaches say so. Salazar has no right to get all snippy about people questioning his athletes. He is aware that, deserved or not, he has a somewhat shady reputation. When a guy with a shady reputation, employed by the ultimate evil empire sports corporation, has his athletes winning Olympic medals, he can't expect to be considered beyond suspicion.
If a list of who took what TUEs was made available, it would help avoid threads like these (or alternately, it would justify their existence). If we saw that a bunch of Ethiopians from the same group had TUEs for, let's say, Prozac, that would be a red flag that would demand an explanation. Or if a group of elite athletes in the Pacific NW were all taking thyroid meds, that would raise a red flag too. It wouldn't automatically mean they were guilty of anything, but it would demand an explanation. Fans are sick of being taken for idiots by athletes and their coaches. A little transparency would be nice, and if there is nothing to see, it would help stop rumors like these from swirling.
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Spoken like a true anonymous aszhole.
Start with a lie, a false premise, and then ask a question.
ALL of Salazar's runners are not on thyroid medication.
Sagarin wrote:
Jefe in the CO wrote:I think the description of your experience is the definition of performance enhancement. Do you think you could have maintained your times without thyroid medications? If no, then hasn't it enhanced your performance for the past 10 years?
The slippery slope here is that these drugs allow someone to achieve something that they would physically be unable to achieve without them. It may not matter whether they would enhance the performance of a healthy individual or not.
Without rendering judgement on Salazar's crew one way or the other, I tend to disagree. Would you consider an iron-depleted runner who starts supplementing with iron to get his performances back to par to be performance-enhancing or cheating? I wouldn't.
I can see why one might argue that my medication enhanced my performance, but I always looked at my situation simply as getting healthy so I could return to running. It's not like running suddenly became easy. I was just able to return to the normal grind that I experienced for years before developing thyroid problems. Sagarin's iron-depletion analogy applies well. I don't consider a person who takes iron supplements as having an unfair advantage. The slippery slope is in failing to distinguish between the radically different "enhancement" benefits of various drugs and whether or not legal drugs are being abused. With that said, perhaps the blood work of elites and their prescriptions should be more transparent. Not sure of the legal issues involved there.
Sagarin wrote:
Without rendering judgement on Salazar's crew one way or the other, I tend to disagree. Would you consider an iron-depleted runner who starts supplementing with iron to get his performances back to par to be performance-enhancing or cheating? I wouldn't.
But providing false medical history data to support a TUE for thyroid medication for an athlete that does not have a thyroid condition most definitely is cheating on the part of the coach. And malpractice as well as perjury (?) on the part of the physician.
Unless you have EIA, an inhaler will not help....in fact. your spirometer test results before inhalation of medication and after will yield the same result...
coach d wrote:But providing false medical history data to support a TUE for thyroid medication for an athlete that does not have a thyroid condition most definitely is cheating on the part of the coach. And malpractice as well as perjury (?) on the part of the physician.
Wow, that ups the ante. First, the claim was just that "all of Salazar's athletes are on thyroid medication," despite the fact that, in four pages of this thread, no one could come up with a single shred of evidence for this claim.
Now you're talking about "false medical history data"?! Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this?
coach d wrote:
But providing false medical history data to support a TUE for thyroid medication for an athlete that does not have a thyroid condition most definitely is cheating on the part of the coach. And malpractice as well as perjury (?) on the part of the physician.
But it's not that clear cut. The normal range for TSH is around 0.30 to 5.50. Higher numbers are indicative of low thyroid hormone. There are some studies that suggest that if someone has a TSH of 3.0, they should be treated since subclinical hypothyroidism is associated with hyperlipidemia. Other studies say that the normal values should be used to determine treatment.
I'm still waiting for any sort of basis for the claim that "all of Salazar's athletes" have a TUE for thyroid medication. Heck I'll make it easier than all of his athletes. Just point me to any suggestion at all that Ritz and Farah are on thyroid medication.
For the record, Ryan Hall
and Paula Radcliffe
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jan/16/paula-radcliffe-london-2012-mo-farah
have thyroid problems as well.
As for Alberto's athletes besides Galen I have never seen confirmation that Mo Farah is on thyroid medication.
Jos Hermens made a stink about it at the the Olympics and this article made a big deal of Mo and Galen being on thryoid medication but I haven't seen confirmation Mo is on it:
Can anyone confirm it?
The implication by some of you is that
1) Athletes abuse the TUE system to get on drugs that also have performance enhancing benefits.
The other possibility is
2) Hard training screws up our thyroids and all endurance athletes should be getting their thyroid checked.
Either way the TUE process needs to be way more transparent. If we learn all the top 10 in the world have thyroid problems then we should a) all be getting our thyroids checked or b) asking if there should be a TUE for thyroid medication.
Instead now everything is speculative.
And everyone who has a hematocrit below 45% should get EPO.
Everyone who has test level lower than normal should get testosterone (That would apply to about anyone who runs a high mileage. Get your doctor to check your own free testosterone level, report back if it is higher than normal AND you run more than 100miles a week).
To me i simply cant believe that elite athletes into hormonal treatment that are not also using EPO, and HGH and testosterone.
wejo wrote:
Jos Hermens made a stink about it at the the Olympics and this article made a big deal of Mo and Galen being on thryoid medication but I haven't seen confirmation Mo is on it:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&u=http://www.gva.be/sport/olympische-spelen-2012/aid1222872/levensgevaarlijk-nieuw-dopingmiddel-op-spelen.aspx&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dmo%2Bfarah%2Bthyroid%26start%3D10%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26tbo%3Dd%26biw%3D1241%26bih%3D567&sa=X&ei=S7kIUayBJIqC8QT_0YDoCw&ved=0CDYQ7gEwADgK
Not Jos Hermens. It would appear to be Herman Ram, the director of the Dutch anti-doping authority.
http://www.dopingautoriteit.nl/dopingautoriteit/organisatie/bureauTake it with a grain of salt; T3 may improve lactate clearance from muscle cells (in rats anyway):
Sagarin wrote:
Would you consider an iron-depleted runner who starts supplementing with iron to get his performances back to par to be performance-enhancing or cheating? I wouldn't.
I think that altering the diet can help correct most cases of iron depletion without the need for artificial supplementation. I don't think that the same can be said for treating hypothyroidism so the two cases are quite different.
I would love to see any studies exploring hypothyroidism frequency in endurance athletes. I was hit with the condition during a period of increased training load. I went from running 70-80 mpw to not being able to tolerate even a few miles at several min/mi slower than my normal easy run pace.
I have since been medicated however, have never been able to run or train as I did prior. My doctor indicated that he has seen a disproportionate number of endurance athletes with the condition versus the general population. However, I have not been able to find any studies to back this up. Also, I am female and was just over 30 years old at the time, so perhaps I was one of the 3.5% and the condition coming out during heavy training, was simply a coincidence. The doctor also noted that some people, once medicated within the normal range, are able to resume former training loads and some are not, although he had no explanation as to why.
It has been several years since my diagnoses and over that period, when I have attempted to increase my intensity or volume, my thyroid function decreases further and I end up unable to do much more than get myself out of bed, until I take a good amount of time off and/or have my dosage changed.
Personally, I would simply be happy if the medication could bring me back to my former normal. Perhaps the benefit to Salazar’s hypothyroid athletes, is their access to top endocrinologists and constant monitoring?
Have a hematocrit below 45% is in no way comparable to living with hypothyroidism. It'd be more like you suggesting that athletes shouldn't be allowed to take liquid iron when they have hematocrits at 20% -- it's a disorder that does much more than you seem to think. If they're getting diagnosed with sub-clinical hypothyroidism that's different, but I haven't seen any indication whatsoever that that's the case. Presumably to obtain a TUE for thyroid drugs you'd need a clinical diagnosis.
Does anyone know when Hall started taking thyroid medication? It would be interesting to see at what stage in his career it happened.
wejo wrote:
As for Alberto's athletes besides Galen I have never seen confirmation that Mo Farah is on thyroid medication.
Wejo, this might be obvious, but has Letsrun pushed hard to try to find out in more detail who on the Oregon Project does what?
I think most of us feel that Rupp, Farah, and Salazar's other runners are clean. They may not be, of course, but let's go with that assumption for now. Of course, what "clean" means is open for interpretation. They are open about the fact that they use lots of training aids to get that last little bit of performance. Some of that, almost undoubtedly, is in the gray area, legal but either frowned upon or unknown to testers and therefore legal.
I think this sort of gray level performance-enhancement would not be immoral because everything is legal, and if you can't even do LEGAL things, how are you supposed to compete then? That said, it is still something that people should know about, and like others have said, could at least hypothetically be a cover up for a heavier doping program.
Again, I do not think that Salazar's group is doing anything outside the rules, but they are being awfully secretive. Has Letsrun considered pressing the question of what Salazar's athletes are taking for performance enhancement to the same extent that it has done so for Regina Jacobs and Carmelita Jeter? I think that high level coaches should be obligated to answer questions about this stuff in the same way that they answer questions about doping.
I think Letsrun could make a major difference here if its reporters pressured Salazar's group for transparency.
Azaleas wrote:
Have a hematocrit below 45% is in no way comparable to living with hypothyroidism. It'd be more like you suggesting that athletes shouldn't be allowed to take liquid iron when they have hematocrits at 20% -- it's a disorder that does much more than you seem to think. If they're getting diagnosed with sub-clinical hypothyroidism that's different, but I haven't seen any indication whatsoever that that's the case. Presumably to obtain a TUE for thyroid drugs you'd need a clinical diagnosis.
Agree to some extent.
But hypothyroidism can to a large degree be compared to hypogonadism (low testosterone levels)
Low testosterone affects your well being, your temperament, your mood to a large extent.
Very many people get low test levels, low thyroid levels or both when subject to high volume endurance training. Should they all be treated with hormones? If they back down on the training they would be just fine, but could maybe not compete at the elite level.