EPO Helps Mid D More than Long Distance?

Mid-D guys hate doing mileage. EPO + Intervals + race and they can focus on what they are good at. Some 'roids won't hurt either, to deal with the muscular stress.

Back in the '80's it would be blood-doping + Horwill training.

I've said that. Logically having greater oxygen transport capacity should matter most when you need to transport the most oxygen. 800 to 1500 especially, no surprise that Russian 800 meter stars are implicated.

The 10000 is a relatively static effort compared to cycling with its long rests in the peloton vs breakaway attempts.

About a year ago I posted a link to an excellent article on hemoglobin and gas transport in the blood.

I actually think it's opposite- vo2 max events benefit most from it. Why do you think it's so hard to medal in the 5000m? At least in mid D events tactical races can keep everyone in contention as they are shorter and there isn't as much time to get away

Wiggins- what about the marathon?

I'm assuming you'd say EPO boosting helps in all these events but more so in certain events?

And if we get to say 400, then power is more important so EPO is not as important?

Then why do sprinters take EPO? Because it works. Even weightlifters take it

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wejo wrote:
Wiggins- what about the marathon?

I'm assuming you'd say EPO boosting helps in all these events but more so in certain events?

And if we get to say 400, then power is more important so EPO is not as important?

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wejo, EPO is not a performance enhancer, you've been brainwashed by bad science.
A normal blood count is the best number you can have. The body produces all the performance enhancers you will ever need.

Why don't you and all the other journalists learn some real science for a change?

The argument is that you can outwork the bodies ability to replace EPO or whatever performance enhancer. If you work hard enough it is thought to be impossible to have a normal blood count without supplementing. To the original question, it may be easier to outwork the bodies ability to replace EPO doing middle distance training.

Wejo, I wrote a lot of times that for Marathon, and top athletes, there is no advantage, while for 1500m there is advantage.

All the explanation of Bad Wiggins are right. But I want to add another factor :
with EPO we can increase the quantity of Oxygen transported in the blood, but at the same time we increase the viscosity. This means to increase the periferal resistance for the blood circulation, reducing the velocity of circulation.

In a competition where the request is to have high lactic power, such as 800 and 1500m, the ability to transport O2 is more important than the reduction of the velocity of circulation, because we need to have more quantity of oxygen at disposal for short time.

In Marathon, the best athletes run using a percentage of 94-96% of their LT (Anaerobic Threshold), and the ability to transport oxygen depends more on the velocity of circulation than on the power of the enigine.

In other words, for the transport of oxygen, a runner of 800 - 1500m prefers a big lorry, moving at low speed ; a runner of 5000 - 10000m prefers a lorry of medium size, moving at medium speed ; and a Marathon runner prefer small lorries, able to move very fast.

In Marathon, the main enemy is the blood viscosity, which is increased taking EPO. The high viscosity, instead, is not the main problem when the duration of the effort is limited.

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Jon Orange wrote:

wejo, EPO is not a performance enhancer, you've been brainwashed by bad science.
A normal blood count is the best number you can have. The body produces all the performance enhancers you will ever need.

Why don't you and all the other journalists learn some real science for a change?

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Wouldn't increasing blood volume solve the viscosity problem Renton mentions? Is it simple to mix doped and undoped blood such that the concentration of EPO decreases but mass remains the same? I don't know anything about how any of this works.

Wejo,

YES

This is why Salazar is considered a poor to mediocre coach when it comes to the marathon as compared to being a genius at other distances. His expertise is in the Lab and not at all when it comes to setting up workouts and recovery.

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Expeert wrote:

Then why do sprinters take EPO? Because it works. Even weightlifters take it

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I'd say because they were told EPO works.

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Expeert wrote:
Then why do sprinters take EPO? Because it works. Even weightlifters take it

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Rita Jeptoo ran well in Boston because she had an aggressive pacemaker for 20 miles -- something quite rare for the women.

Since Boston is point to point, you cannot really compare Boston performances with other marathon performances.

EPO likely played a small role, if any, for or against Rita's performance.

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puddingmonster wrote:
So Rita Jeptoo improved 5 minutes in the marathon in her 30s after having a kid DESPITE being on EPO? I know you're going to say personal life issues were holding her back and what not, but as a coach in Kenya you have an obvious incentive to make people believe doping isn't a problem in Kenya. And every time you make that claim, something else emerges that discredits your stance.

At this point, only the most gullible on this board (Wejo) still believe you. You'd be best served to stay silent like Radcliffe.

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Wejo,

If you want to talk about things with certainty, you need to appeal to science, where attempts are made to isolate, and measure the effects.
With respect to EPO, if you want to appeal to science, you will find very little that can be reliably extrapolated to elite athletes, or for any running distance much longer than 5K.

If we look to science for the answer, we see they have only studied "well trained", or "amateur" or even worse, "untrained" subjects, over a short period of a few weeks or months, over short distances, like 3K or 5K time trials, or even worse, on a stationary bicycle in a lab. Many studies measured VO2max, or time to exhaustion at sub-VO2max, rather than looking at real-world time trial performances, further insulating the study's results from real-world performance benefits. From these types of limited experiments, we cannot reliably conclude, for example, if EPO potentially enables "super human" results, like steroids can for power events.

If we want to think, as we see often in running tabloids, that the *only* benefit of EPO is increased oxygen delivery to the muscles, due to increased RBC, then logically it should favor VO2max duration events (which for running Jack Daniels defines indirectly as a continuous 10:58 effort), or shorter (like the 1500/mile). Longer/slower sub-VO2max events would not be limited by restricted maximal oxygen delivery. The marathon distance is further complicated by non-oxygen related factors like optimal glycogen management. One obvious anomaly, that suggests EPO must have other benefits, is attempting to explain why EPO would benefit a 3 week long cycling tour that last much longer than 11 minutes, with efforts much lower than VO2max efforts. If we still want to believe EPO benefits longer events, there must be other benefits to EPO, like increased recovery from hard training, and placebo or other psychological effects, and protective effects.

If we think further about why EPO benefited the "grand tour" cyclists, we shouldn't forget that the great cycling EPO experiment did not control for effects due to steroids, testosterone, HGH, blood transfusions, cortisone, and placebo. If we want to conclude, for example, that EPO helps recovery, then we need to account for, and factor out, improved recovery benefits from other sources, like steroids.

With respect to the marathon distance, any influence, positive or negative, due to EPO has never been reliably isolated, observed or measured. Renato is often crucified for his repeated insistence that it cannot help some narrow class of elite, altitude dwelling class of runners. But the fact is that today, any statement about anyone benefiting at the marathon distance from EPO, either in training, or in a race, is pure hypothesis, speculation, or faith. It remains to be observed, measured, in order to be confirmed or denied.

In my non-expert, non-educated opinion, any conclusion connected to EPO impacting performance, must carry with it a high degree of uncertainty, when straying too far from 11:00 3K runners, or 20 minute stationary cyclists in a lab.

It's essentially poiseuille's law of flow dynamics at play when speaking about blood flow resistance. Vessel resistance is directly proportional to the length of the vessel and the viscosity of the blood, and inversely proportional to the radius of the vessel (to the fourth power (r4)). Meaning, the longer the length of the vessel or the more increased the viscosity, the higher the resistance. On the flip side, the larger the diameter of the blood vessel, the lower the resistance.
I think your question regarding epo is a bit misguided. Epo (erythropoietin) is s substance produced by the juxtaglomerular cells (jg cells) in the kidney. Speaking on very general terms, epo is stimulated to be produced when the body senses hypoxia (low oxygen). Epo then stimulates production of red blood cells. The reason for this is that rbc's carry oxygen. So, the more rbc's one has, the more oxygen that can be carried "in the blood". Basically, the onset of rigging is prolonged. Multiple other variables are also at play, including the body's ability to buffer lactic acid, etc; but that's it in a nutshell.

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wejo wrote:

We were talking today and I was saying I thought I had seen a thread saying EPO would help mid-distance runners more than long distance runners because they are competing closer to their max.

Does anyone remember the thread or the concept? Am I off base?

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lol lol lol lol wrote:

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wejo wrote:

We were talking today and I was saying I thought I had seen a thread saying EPO would help mid-distance runners more than long distance runners because they are competing closer to their max.

Does anyone remember the thread or the concept? Am I off base?

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The concept does not make sense; while running a 10,000 as fast as possible requires one run at a lower % of whatever "max" one is referring to, this pace is still limited by those "maxes" and is a percentage of them. Best to simply think of EPO and related drugs and techniques as boosting aerobic performance abilities rather than anaerobic ones; the more aerobic an event (Read: longer) the greater the ability of EPO to boost performance. Tour de France > marathon > 5000 > 400 >100 (and all of those, with the exception of the 100, benefit from EPO and friends).

The problem--or A problem--that muddies the waters and leads to some confusion on this issue is that when you compare very long events to shorter "long-distance" events--Tour and marathon to 10,000/5000/1500, for example, you have other "ways and means" to improve performance of the former that either have no effect or can't be employed with the latter. You can improve marathon performance with faster courses, not so track races. You can improve marathons/Tours with ketone supplementation; these don't help shorter events nearly as much. You can improve marathons by having them run in very specific, relatively cold temperatures that they used to be run in much less frequently; track races benefit from higher temps that they have long been run in. You can improve marathons by using rabbiting techniques that...have long been used in track races. You can improve marathons/Tours with cortisone and other catabolic steroids; these have far more of an effect on extremely long events where "bonking" or "hitting the wall" is an issue than on ones where lack of glycogen is never an issue. You can improve marathons/Tours with glycerol; this has less of/no effect on shorter events because dehydration is less of a problem in a 5000...And so on...

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