In Drug Test, amateur cyclist and professional journalist Stuart Stevens describes his experiment with performance-enhancing drugs:
My plan was simple. I would train as I always do — about 15 to 20 hours a week — while taking various supplements under Dr. Jones’s supervision. I started in January 2003. In eight months, I intended to ride the 1,225-kilometer (761-mile) Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, a once-every-four-years sufferfest that’s popular among amateur ultracyclists. I would first have to qualify by completing a series of 200-, 300-, 400-, and 600-kilometer rides within certain time limits. The PBP was a quirky event, a ride rather than a real race, with no prizes, no ranking of finishers, no doping controls. So if the drugs helped me, I wouldn’t be knocking anybody else down in the standings. And since this was a monster ride — which I’d have to complete in less than 84 hours — it would serve as a real test of my augmented self.
Here’s what a little human growth hormone did:
After a few weeks of the HGH, I began to notice subtle changes. My skin started getting… better. Sun blotches that I’d had on my arms for a year faded away. One morning I woke up and a scar on my forehead — which I’d gotten from a mountain-bike endo two years earlier — was more or less gone. Even though I was training like a madman, I looked more rested. Younger. A little fresher.
Then I started to realize that my eyesight really was improving. I’d been thinking about getting glasses to read fine print on maps, but now there was no need. The glasses I used for night driving stayed in the glove compartment, unused, unnecessary.
A 200-milligram injection of testosterone and a pump vial full of Testocream didn’t do much:
I walked out of Dr. Jones’s office smiling broadly, then waited for a werewolf surge. And I waited. But the truth is, I didn’t feel much of anything. No irresistible bursts of lust or rage, no particular feelings of omnipotence. That afternoon I went home and celebrated my newfound energy and aggression with a long nap.
When he added EPO (erythropoetin) two weeks later, he felt the difference:
“You have to be careful with this stuff,” Dr. Jones warned after explaining the routine: three injections a week of 1,500 IU each. I was expecting a lecture on the dangers of thickened blood, but he meant something else: he wanted me to take it easy while racing, lest people catch on.
“One of my bike racers who isn’t really a climber went on a training ride and dropped the best climbers on his team,” he said. “They were like, ‘Um, what are you taking?’”
It wasn’t cheap — $2,000 for ten vials totaling 100,000 IU. At my prescribed dose, each vial would last two weeks. Before the first EPO shot, my base hematocrit level was 43.8 percent, well below that magical 50 percent disqualification level. That seemed like a reasonable goal — hematocrit levels high enough to be bounced from the Olympics. Sweet.
The morning after I took my first dose, I woke up with a strange headache, a very distinct kind of pain that I would come to associate with EPO. It defied all manner of ibuprofen and aspirin but gradually went away.
Within three weeks, my hematocrit level had risen to 48.3. By this time, my testosterone levels had shot up to 900 nanograms per decaliter, from a previous mark of 280. (My starting level was just below normal.) My HGH had increased only slightly, which Dr. Jones found unusual. He upped my HGH dosage to 1.2 IU a day, speculating that the long hours I spent training might be keeping the level down.
Despite these measurements, I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I’d been training hard, but I’d done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders — good, strong riders — who looked as worn out as you’d expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles. The last time I’d ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I’d been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I’d entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I’ll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.
When I checked in with the good doctor soon after the race, he wasn’t surprised about what I’d experienced. “With your hematocrit levels higher, you don’t produce as much lactic acid, which means you can ride harder, longer, with less stress. The growth hormone and testosterone help you recover faster, since you’re stronger to start with and recover more quickly. All those little muscle tears repair much more quickly.”
He shrugged. “It works,” he said. “It always works.”
It all started to make sense. Feeling like I did after the 200-miler would be a huge advantage in a long stage race like the Tour de France. I understood what five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil meant back in 1967 when he said, “You’d have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”
Back then, “stimulants” mostly meant amphetamines, which kept riders going through day after day of hard stages. The new drugs had the same rejuvenating effects but simply worked much better, without the crash and depression of uppers.
I began to adjust my training schedule for harder rides and less rest and I felt fine. It wasn’t a huge difference — I added about 10 or 15 percent more effort to my training — but had I been competing at a top level, it would have represented a major advantage.
When he added Deca, an anabolic steroid, he felt like he’d “grabbed on to a car moving at 60 miles an hour”:
Once I started the Deca, I didn’t even think about lifting weights. I wanted to get stronger, not bigger. Within two weeks, the pain I felt in my left knee after 100 miles or so — 100 was now just a standard ride — went away, coming back only on the most brutal hills. My shoulder felt much better. And then one morning I stepped on the scale.
Two hundred and nine pounds.
I was stunned. I’d never weighed this much. When I first saw Dr. Jones, I weighed 195, which was high for me.
[…]
“What’s the problem?” Dr. Jones demanded when I told him I was freaking out over the weight gain. He had me stand on a machine that measured body weight and fat. I weighed 207, but my body fat had dropped to 6.5 percent, down from 10 percent.
“Don’t give me this you’re-getting-fat crap,” he said in an exasperated tone. “You sound like some teenage girl. You’ve lost six pounds of fat and gained 12 of muscle. That’s why you’re heavier. And like I told you, the Deca supersaturates the muscle cells with fluid. That’s one of the reasons your joints feel better.”
When he got back from his ride in France, he quit everything:
For me, it would be a quality-of-life question, not a performance issue. If the HGH weren’t so expensive, I’d probably continue with it, at least until I had a good reason not to, like some new evidence that it makes you grow extra ears. (The side effects of HGH are reportedly mild — one is fluid retention.) If nothing else, it helped my eyesight, and I had more energy. Lately, I’ve been reading studies about how endurance athletes suffer from low testosterone, which leads to early signs of osteoporosis, so I’m going to continue to monitor my levels and, if they drop too far, consider boosting them with the cream.
With the EPO, even if somebody gave it away, I wouldn’t go down that road. Using it is too much of a literal and figurative headache, and if you get sloppy there’s always the danger of nasty results. And I would never touch steroids again, unless I had some specific medical need. It’s all just too powerful, too strange, and it’s hard to read a list of the side effects and not feel like you’re playing Russian roulette.