Jon Marcus: " Alan Webb had 55 Hematocrit"?

That no start rule was such a joke. I wonder if it has improved at all. I stopped paying attention to cycling years ago.

It's not a "revelation," to me that your body changes its chemistry from external environments, especially a three week grand tour. But we aren't talking about a three week tour. I'm talking about Alan Webb running around a track faster than anybody has done clean (at least that is the perception).

What is a revelation to me, is the fact of Alan Webb has a 55 hct (if that is true of course...still waiting on that Mr Jon Marcus). After hearing about Bjarne Riis back in the day, or any tour rider who died in his sleep in the early 90s because his blood was as thick as sludge, I hear 55% HCT and I think "wow that's definitely doping". I am cynical and done holding on to heroes so tightly. So I came on here looking for information (perhaps my first mistake). Your assertion that HCT means nothing because you have had a 49-55 and you suck at running compared to Webb, is interesting and I thank you for it. However that doesn't eliminate all of my suspicion. If it didn't matter then why was it such a focal point for Ferrari and all other cyclists. (They used to look for cyclists who were already good at low hct, so that they could be amazing once doped, Vaughters was one)

Lance Armstrong would have given his OTHER nut to have a hct of 55%, in any competition, as would any blood vector doper.

Lemond was up around 50% naturally, which is why he didn't respond to doping very well. It's certainly possible Webb could be around 50% naturally as well and after a long workout it can increase by 10%, which would put him around 55%.

Most of the Africans are generally in the low 40% range, which makes them natural candidates to benefit immensely with ESAs.

- Today cycling/running treat hematocrit the same way -- they both ignore it.

not nit picking but hardly the case,

it is measured indirectly through other fluctuations in blood profile.

so will be measured and given as measure of the many .

assuming still use off score measure in biological passport.

ask paula .

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6881090&page=92

Micera cover up

again show how iaaf and wada are constantly controlling the doping narrative ,

the more control on it , the less small fish and afew big star fish that bring in the money

they are the ones doing the real doping through various agents/managers /trainers and

some stars even backed by elites or backed with certain agenda ,pushing british empirism etc .

to get your hands on peds they deliberately wont test for , have to be well connected .

the control is even more so nowadays , if cant control a dope or is outed will be shut down

IGF-1 lr3 is what is pushing so many athletes and events since 2006 or liu xiang before that .

obviously with freedom/ being enabled to dope with many peds regardless

the speed peptide is crucial and massively controlled in track and many sports .

I'm an inpatient PT. Average range for male hematocrit is 42-52%. It's pretty common to see numbers above this with athletes so it's easy to think a runner of Webb's ability is above that as well. Also, while the UCI had thought 50% was an upper limit, it was never enforced because they talked to physicians.

legit? wrote:

Your assertion that HCT means nothing because you have had a 49-55 and you suck at running compared to Webb, is interesting and I thank you for it.

Well Webb was indeed about 38 seconds faster than me over the mile in High School and I still got to run Division III for three seasons in spite of it. But must of my background is in cycling and I seriously doubt that I would be pegging these HcT numbers if I hadn't switched over back when my knees went. The spring that I got north of 54 percent HcT was my best year for Nordic Skiing in the last 20 but I was only doing it on weekends, almost all up over 8000 feet too. After hammering myself all that summer, mostly below 6000 feet I was down to 51 percent and about six pounds lighter.

Anyway I would caution you against taking these stories seriously at first glance. If you meander over to "the Clinic" in the forums at Cyclingnews you'll find:

A: The linkage between thick blood and people dying in their sleep is not nearly as cut and dried as it might appear.

You could make a case where it's a story that has taken on a life of its own, although I have no doubt that trainers were waking their riders up in the night after people started to believe it. There's actually about 20 pages worth of very granular back and forth dispute over that, including the one individual that Greg and Kathy LeMond had put out there as a poster child for EPO fatalities. (If I'm not mistaken that whole story actually came as a surprise to his widow years after his passing?)

I don't have a dog in this fight but now I would almost put that one on the same category as Roger DeVlaeminck walking down a Belgian street barefoot in a gown with his ass hanging out and a 300 lb. hospital bed strapped to his back because they were trying to get him off amphetamines and should have perhaps looked at bolting the bed down to the floor. (Which is said to have taken place mid-career; so who said that speed kills?)

B: Evidence of a plausible distribution of HcT values over 50 percent among trained athletes in circumstances where you can pretty much rule out EPO.

I know someone who made the National Team for Columbia in Road, Mountain Bike, and Cyclo-Cross (over a 15 year career but still that's a pretty damn short list.) He said that they thought values BELOW 46-48 percent from some parts of the country were suspect at the national training center and that one guy ended up in Europe sooner because someone had arbitrarily told him he would never make the top ten riders in the country if he had to prevail in some sort of trails process at altitude to do it. If he was going to make any money in the sport it was going to be at sea level, simple as that. This would be among promising 16 year old kids who didn't even have their own bed to sleep in where they came there from which is why I rule out doping. Rather than name this individual I would rather say that he did get very good advice as far as his accountant is concerned.

When I showed this guy my own panels he said that I would have been just high average for the part of the country that Nairo Quintana hails from. After some consideration he added that me being a 6 foot tall white boy probably adds about equivalent 2-3 percent HcT to the suspect-o-meter, but ultimately nobody was really gasping too hard at a 53 percent HcT panel there and his own 75 VO2 max was thought to be pretty pedestrian at the same facility.

(Until it didn't diminish at all as he got out past 35 years old which is still pretty remarkable.)

Physical Therapist wrote:

Average range for male hematocrit is 42-52%. It's pretty common to see numbers above this with athletes

It is more common to see athletes with numbers below that.

Until the stupid simplistic thinking about HCT is undone the issue will be drowned in mythology. Athletes develop high blood volume because they sweat, and that typically lowers RBC concentration.

aduck2022 wrote:

Micera cover up

again show how iaaf and wada are constantly controlling the doping narrative ,

the more control on it , the less small fish and afew big star fish that bring in the money

they are the ones doing the real doping through various agents/managers /trainers and

some stars even backed by elites or backed with certain agenda ,pushing british empirism etc .

to get your hands on peds they deliberately wont test for , have to be well connected .

the control is even more so nowadays , if cant control a dope or is outed will be shut down

IGF-1 lr3 is what is pushing so many athletes and events since 2006 or liu xiang before that .

obviously with freedom/ being enabled to dope with many peds regardless

the speed peptide is crucial and massively controlled in track and many sports .

Hey...aduck2022, what happen to the rest of your posts? I presume they were deleted? I've never understood this site where so much deletion goes on and so little explaination. I recall just once in the last several months where a mod came on after deleting several posts and locking it down to registered users saying that the thread had gone way "off topic."

Another American hero?

Just can't be.

Mr 55%. EPO doesn't work said Mr. Renato.

This is just a coincidence.

Webb - mindweak? wrote:

Another American hero?

Just can't be.

Mr 55%. EPO doesn't work said Mr. Renato.

This is just a coincidence.

hey dont forget mr gary rekrunner says EPO doesnt work either. and yes webb was def mindweak, i mean he was as bipolar of a runner as you can be.

i would say the top two most bipolar distance runners america has had since 2000 is

1) webb

2) leo

some might argue that german could be up there, but i think his body was just to fragile...man too bad he never could reach his potential...

oh and one more time, EPO and PEDs dont work

basic intrinsic, im out

You believe athletes are constantly hypervolemic because we sweet? That's just not physiologically true.

post deleted gave a list of obvious

athletes with the 2008 drop in performance

most obviously due to cera .

and fact that had to be informed to be off by certain time by iaaf and wada .

feeling that whenever mention a certain aussie distance runner

on list ,post gone.

here goes again bekele , geb , ramzi , shaheen , wariner , and another

for the men that is that benefitted massively from it

aduck2022 wrote:

post deleted gave a list of obvious

athletes with the 2008 drop in performance

most obviously due to cera .

and fact that had to be informed to be off by certain time by iaaf and wada .

feeling that whenever mention a certain aussie distance runner

on list ,post gone.

here goes again bekele , geb , ramzi , shaheen , wariner , and another

for the men that is that benefitted massively from it

I'll tell you something, people talk about when the epo era ended, some say 2000 with the Sydney Olympics, or 2001, or 2005 with the better testing or 2008, or 2009 with the ABP. The truth is the 'heavy epo use' era ended at the 2012 London Olympics because GSK was involved and athletes knew as early as 2009 that they had to be off the source by the London Games because the testing program would be superior to what existed previously. Athletes have been alot slower since then, only the odd newbie Ethiopians have run faster times since, then they get into the IAAF testing pool and they slow down. Though they are only 18.

I think Webb started doping in high school....

Explains his erratic performances , muscularity and bulging cranium.

Probably the "heavy EPO use" stopped with ABP because of the increased target testing when hematological anomalies would be flagged. So, an athlete has basically two choices, i.e., blood doping or micro-dose rEPO. If the athlete had the resources they could blood dope and be guaranteed of never having a doping positive but would run the risk of a passport sanction if not careful (i.e., Russia's 35+ world-leading ABP sanctions). Micro-dosing rEPO would guarantee your passport would never be flagged (e.g., Savinova & Poistagova) but there's a risk of a surprise OOC test while the athlete might still be glowing. Of course, if doses are pushed higher then a flag of the ABP would occur and the athlete would be aggressively target tested.

IMO, all the passport has done is allowed controlled O2-vector doping. Once the athlete has a baseline Hct/Hgb established, it's just a matter of navigating within your individual parameters. And even if tomorrow WADA developed a test than could detect micro-dosing, there's nothing to detect blood doping if it's done within the individual parameters of their ABP. Anti-doping's biggest challenge right now is blood doping.

Physical Therapist wrote:

I'm an inpatient PT. Average range for male hematocrit is 42-52%. It's pretty common to see numbers above this with athletes so it's easy to think a runner of Webb's ability is above that as well. Also, while the UCI had thought 50% was an upper limit, it was never enforced because they talked to physicians.

Absolutely, 100% false. It is far from common to see an athlete over 52%. If anything, runners are lower than the average person, secondary to constant cell trauma. My goodness. Don't comment on something that you have no idea about or have no training in.

Physical Therapist wrote:

You believe athletes are constantly hypervolemic because we sweet? That's just not physiologically true.

Yes, it is, unless you're comically interpreting it backwards as I expected some idiot would.

Sweating diverts blood to the skin and away from working muscle. Blood volume increases to compensate.

Not even close wrote:

Physical Therapist wrote:

I'm an inpatient PT. Average range for male hematocrit is 42-52%. It's pretty common to see numbers above this with athletes so it's easy to think a runner of Webb's ability is above that as well. Also, while the UCI had thought 50% was an upper limit, it was never enforced because they talked to physicians.

Absolutely, 100% false. It is far from common to see an athlete over 52%. If anything, runners are lower than the average person, secondary to constant cell trauma. My goodness. Don't comment on something that you have no idea about or have no training in.

Speaking from the viewpoint of an orthopedic surgeon that commonly deals with athletes, I'm going to agree with you. I think the range at the hospital I do the majority of my work at is 39-50. I rarely see anyone with a hgb > 14. You need to work a little on your delivery though, dude.