An Astonishing Statistic...and Ultrarunning

According to this recent article by Reuters, many teens are using human growth hormone:

U.S. teenagers' reported use of synthetic human growth hormone more than doubled between 2012 to 2013 as they sought to improve athletic performance and appearance, a survey by anti-drug advocates found.

Eleven percent of 3,705 teenagers in grades 9 to 12 polled by the non-profit Partnership for Drug-Free Kids said they had used synthetic human growth hormone at least once without a prescription, up from 5 percent in 2012.

Use of synthetic human growth hormone (HGH) was higher among blacks and Hispanics, at 15 percent and 13 percent, respectively. Caucasians were at 9 percent, according to the group's annual survey released on Tuesday.

Twelve percent of boys said they had used synthetic HGH compared with 9 percent of teenage girls.

These data are absolutely astonishing to me!  Are you kidding?  One in ten high school aged kids have used HGH?

Now I love me some Ultrarunning, and I am not above using coffee and Mountain Dew in the latter stages of a race to perk me up, but injecting HGH as part of a deliberate strategy to improve performance?  I cannot imagine the pressure that these kids must feel to resort to that solution, nor can I imagine the type of rationalizing mindset that would pass that off as something OK to do.

2 Rather Large and Callous D-bags

Today's first winner is former NFL quarterback and now announcer Boomer Esiason, who trashed talked Mets infielder Daniel Murphy for missing opening day of Major League Baseball due to his wife giving birth.

Basically it's not your business, Mr. Esiason.

Second d-bag is Maine governor Paul LePage, who strongly opposes making the anti-overdose medication Naloxone more widely available to first responders and family members of opiate addicts.  Why? Because, as reported in the Huffington Post, "Last year, LePage vetoed a bill expanding access to naloxone because he claimed it would give drug users a feeling of invincibility. Scientists say there is no evidence to support that assertion."  Also cited was the cost...estimated at some $22 a dose. 

That's per life-saving dose.

Mr. LaPage obviously thinks that addicts are not worth saving...better to decrease the surplus population, I suppose.

The mean part of me hopes that both these jerks get enlightened on these issues...knowing that true enlightenment usually only comes from personal experience.

Cheaters in Sports...and Ultrarunning

Saw Mike Wise's commentary in the Washington Post a week ago about drug cheating in baseball.  And he makes some great points:

Almost forgotten this weekend is the annual Baseball Hall of Fame enshrinement ceremonies in Cooperstown, N.Y. It is a pastoral postcard of a hamlet in upstate New York somehow still called “Baseball’s Spiritual Home.” Amid clubhouses full of lost souls, a better moniker might be “Graveyard to the Grand Old Game.”

For the first time in almost 50 years, the new inductees are all dead. The players eligible for induction — Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, only the greatest power hitter and pitcher of their generation — are widely considered disgraced drug cheats who, in the end, needed lawyers more than Hall of Fame votes.

Ryan Braun isn’t getting into Cooperstown, either, but not because he merely used performance-enhancing drugs. No, before admitting his guilt and accepting Major League Baseball’s 65-game, rest-of-the-season ban, he committed a more cardinal sin: He kept lying, only more belligerently. Going after the people who caught him lying and cheating, he became the National League MVP who knew no bottom.

Braun followed the Bondsian deny-till-you-die credo, attacking the people who caught him, swearing his innocence on everything — including, comically in retrospect, his actual life. A week of ugly backlash showed Braun there is a harder-to-forgive crime than using steroids to steal money and fame from your peers: being a bad guy.  

Alex Rodriguez, who admitted he once used PEDs, is flirting with expulsion from baseball because he too didn’t learn the lesson of the PED era: Fess up when the truth catches up to you and move on. [Note: he was suspended thru 2014]

These 2 guys, sadly, followed the Lance Armstrong strategy: deny, Deny, DENY, and attack, Attack, ATTACK, until their pack of lies ultimately crumbled like a house of cards.

I learned long ago that bad news never improves with age, so it's best to deal with stuff head on and early.  You're going to face some pain, sure, but nothing compared to the escalated pain that will have compounded if you wait.  Just sayin'.

So, the lies turn out to be worse than the original sin.  Back to Mike Wise:

Bonds, Clemens, Braun and Rodriguez are all cautionary tales in what should be the thesis of the Lance Armstrong School of Ethics: The public will forgive a guy for using PEDs.

What they’re less likely to forgive is lying about it afterward and then trashing and attacking the accusers.  People understand the temptation to cheat. But if and when you get caught, don’t be a jerk. It makes you look irredeemable.

Oh, and the connection to Ultrarunning?  It's entirely likely that some of our elite Ultrarunners do use performance-enhancing drugs to do better, although on the other hand the financial incentives to do so just aren't there (endurance running is NOT a big-money sport, duh). 

But overall I truly believe that our sport is mostly clean, just based upon the kind of people I know who gravitate to it.