Alex Hutchinson calls out CANOVA over study confirming EPO works on Kenyan runners

Stupid studies`, wrote:

fact-based mesmerizing wrote:

OP says "runners", tweet says "athletes"

And we only know that EPO "works" (possibly confirmation bias) on the athletes in the sample, no reason to generalize to all Kenyan athletes.

There are NO valid studies showing that synthetic EPO helps anyone to run faster, than they would without it or with some natural means and no drugs.

ALL of such studies are only valid for confirmation bias, but not for anything truthful.

The same is true for ALL drug studies.

The issue with most drug related studies and their effect on human performance is that there are far to many variables to control for them to be valid. Where one is at in their training cycle is a huge problem that is difficult to control, as is psychological state. "I'm in great shape and taking EPO but damn I just felt like sh!t today when they did my performance test.) And then when you try to generalize your results to many different athlete populations (IE to a group of world class, lifetime altitude adjusted athletes) it creates further problems. Not to mention that changes in various bio-markers (V02 Max, Hct, Hgb, plasma volume, mitochondrial size etc. may or may not equate to improved performance (see above). Which is really what the intent of the thread was I believe, to discuss effect on actual performance in the athlete subset to which Mr. Canova was referencing. Which neither the study design nor data in the study address.

There is a very simple solution on this "elite" vs. "non-elite" status of the Kenyans where everyone is right in one sense. It is that the best Kenyan participants were at least almost elite level athletes, but that they could not've cared less to give their best effort during the first test.

It should be stated at first that the PB times reported in the 2018 version of the experiment are mean values, and even if one assumes that there were only two people in the PB groups, the standard deviation dictates that there were runners in the study with PBs of 13:35 at 5K, 3:45 at 1500m, 1:47 at 800 m in addition to the half and full marathon times. If there were more people in the groups, the fastest were naturally even further faster.

As rekrunner mentioned, the 3000 m times of the Kenyans weren't even close to their capabilities, but the three fastest baseline "control" times are around 8:40, 8:50 and 8:55 (based on the chart in the page 96 of the PhD), which doesn't appear to be anything reminiscent of their talent. The simple solution is that the Kenyans weren't giving their best effort, far from it, which is highlighted by the fact that the rate perceived effort (RPE) is very low, only 14.6 and with the standard deviation of 1.5, there were some who estimated their 3K TT effort (elites run at 100 % of their Vo2Max) as low as 12-13 corresponding "light" or "somewhat hard" at the Borg scale.

The Scottish runners considered that they gave roughly similar effort after the weeks of rHuEPO injections (~18), but Kenyans gave more effort after rHuEPO injections, because the authors state that "nlike SCO whose RPE post time trial remained relatively constant throughout the study, RPE in KEN increased after rHuEpo administration compared to pre-injections levels (16.1 ± 1.1 vs. 14.6 ±1.5)". Because RPE is usually considered to correlate roughly with heart rate with the coefficient of 10, this indicates that the Kenyans felt that the post-rHuEPO time trial felt like they ran with 15 BPM higher heart rate.

Is "7:40" your cutoff for "elite" times? 7:40 would be the 950th fastest time out of 3760 posted on the all time list. So what about the other 2810 times? (The slowest is listed at 7:49.99).

Perhaps diminishing returns for much faster clean athletes. But not all elites have the same physiological attributes - variations in VO2max, LT, time to exhaustion, injury tendency, etc. And using your 7:40 marker as an elite time, you could have a 7:54 runner (who would not make the list) theoretically improve to your 7:40 elite marker at a ~3% gain in performance from EPO (using the estimation from the Malm et al study).

1) a) I did play a positive role by providing the info about the experience/quality of the Kenyan runners already on page 3 - that you ignored.

b) I did play a positive role by providing the info about the consistent training of the Kenyan runners - that you ignored.

2) I did not troll you, instead I enjoyed watching you making those false claims. Repeatedly.

In the context of 1a, remember that the 1:03 was the average, not the best runner, before you claim the opposite again.

You pretended that their lower bound of 31% (earlier you claimed 29%) mentioned on page 2 under two hypotheses is more important/real/close to the truth than the key findings summarized in the abstract. For pages and pages. To date, you still haven't admitted that the real result of 44% is likely an underestimation, not an overestimation, as pointed out in the abstract, not even after I showed you the comments of the Harvard prof of that study.

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

JonO. wrote:

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

Simple. More blood can be shunted to the skin for cooling and still have a pile left over to keep the muscles working like a race car engine.

But the body no longer has to work as hard at breathing which saves a whole bunch of energy there and allows it to be used more productively for work.

Not really a physics buster at all.

Rekrunner has repeatedly tole us that running is not cycling. So he cannot point to that study as any sort of basis for his belief, which is purely based on faith.

OLD SMTC SOB wrote:

Rekrunner is a liar wrote:

Based on no evidence, but purely on faith.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3690100/

Your intuition is not evidence, but just another word for faith.

JonO. wrote:

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

Do you actually think people running say a 3-5k are at the limit of their heat tolerance and artificially raising blood levels would cause them to catch on fire or at least collapse from heatstroke if their body could take advantage of the boost?

Welll that's pretty easy wrote:

JonO. wrote:

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

Simple. More blood can be shunted to the skin for cooling and still have a pile left over to keep the muscles working like a race car engine.

But the body no longer has to work as hard at breathing which saves a whole bunch of energy there and allows it to be used more productively for work.

Not really a physics buster at all.

That's what we were told back in the 90s but it doesn't work that way. You are still avoiding the issue. More cooling = more energy so you slow down. Your scenario is beyond the laws of thermodynamics. You can't create energy out of nowhere.

The EPO doping dogma is written by people who have no knowledge of this or try to ignore it for financial gain. This is not an honest way to make a living. If WADA is supposed to be anti corruption, then why are they funding such research?

Cheetah brain wrote:

JonO. wrote:

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

Do you actually think people running say a 3-5k are at the limit of their heat tolerance?

Yes. Have you ever run a 3k or 5k?

Cheetah brain wrote:

and artificially raising blood levels would cause them to catch on fire or at least collapse from heatstroke if their body could take advantage of the boost?

[quote]Cheetah brain wrote:

How is collapsing from heatstroke an advantage?

You're so silly, Jon. The increased cooling requirement is inconsequential in a typical record type race.

Nobody said anything about creating energy.

JonO. wrote:

Cheetah brain wrote:

[quote]JonO. wrote:

I'm still waiting for the drug believers to explain to me how rEPO can help you exceed your thermoregulatory limits and thus disprove the laws of physics?

Do you actually think people running say a 3-5k are at the limit of their heat tolerance?

Yes. Have you ever run a 3k or 5k?

Cheetah brain wrote:

and artificially raising blood levels would cause them to catch on fire or at least collapse from heatstroke if their body could take advantage of the boost?

Cheetah brain wrote:

How is collapsing from heatstroke an advantage?

Show your core temperature data proving they are at the limits of heat tolerance.

Nice quote out of context

Kangaroo tendons wrote:

You're so silly, Jon. The increased cooling requirement is inconsequential in a typical record type race.

Nobody said anything about creating energy.

You did say that. Now you're lying.

If I'm talking about diminishing returns for higher talents, there is no cut-off, but it's a sliding scale. There can be individual variations for a hundred reasons.

RFM wrote:

Is "7:40" your cutoff for "elite" times? 7:40 would be the 950th fastest time out of 3760 posted on the all time list. So what about the other 2810 times? (The slowest is listed at 7:49.99).

Perhaps diminishing returns for much faster clean athletes. But not all elites have the same physiological attributes - variations in VO2max, LT, time to exhaustion, injury tendency, etc. And using your 7:40 marker as an elite time, you could have a 7:54 runner (who would not make the list) theoretically improve to your 7:40 elite marker at a ~3% gain in performance from EPO (using the estimation from the Malm et al study).

JonO. wrote:

Kangaroo tendons wrote:

You're so silly, Jon. The increased cooling requirement is inconsequential in a typical record type race.

Nobody said anything about creating energy.

You did say that. Now you're lying.

Stop it. You're just dodging reality now.

I'm not the one denying the laws of physics. You are.

EPO is not a performance enhancer or a short cut to better performance. EPO doping is Frankenstein phsyiology and shame on those scientists who themselves think they can prove othewise and re-write the laws of physics.

We have a thermoregulatory limit to oxygen consumption. Trying to prove otherwise is ridiculous. But that's what dishonest researchers will attempt.

No scientist in the world is going to argue the point about thermoregulation, they would quickly be exposed as the charlatans they are.

Yep, there you go again.

Come up with some new material. Surely you're reaching some sort of repetition limit.

NO. I'm not the one denying the laws of physics. You are.