Typical Trainings Week Schedule for Women’s Professional Soccer Player - Brittany Persaud

Brittany is a professional Women's Football player in Holland. She gives us an insight into a typical week of training at her club.

Training during the season at the professional level takes a high level of preparation but also knowledge when determining an appropriate plan of action.  It can vary from week to week pending on training load, fatigue, and recovery level during that specific week, as well as, many other factors.  Therefore, the process of determining the best plan of action so that the athlete is fit and fresh come game day, as well as, prevent injuries, is very critical.

My Typical Training Week:

Monday: 

Team training – 90 minutes focused on passing and getting touches on the ball exercises

Tuesday:

Team training – 60 minutes focused on VCT (Voetbal Conditie Trainen) – Football Conditioning Training

So we do interval style games of high pressure play to develop football fitness.

Wednesday:

Strength and Conditioning Training: 

-        Dynamic warm up

-        2/3 Plyo or agility exercises

-        Medicine ball throws.

Pending on how the body feels determines the type of lifting program I will do.  If I feel fit and fresh I will do a heavier session, if not, then I will do a lighter and body weight oriented session.  Also, I will adjust the sets and reps as necessary, pending on how my body feels.  If you can get the adaptation, the neuromuscular system working, and muscles firing, that is the main objective.  In season training in the gym is more about maintenance while, off-season is more about gains.  Sometime less can be more in this situation!

Fit:

• -        Back Squat 3 X 10
• -        Romanian Dead Lift 3 X 10
• -        Split Squats 3 X10
• -        Step down 3 X10
• -        Bridge (hamstring) 3 X 5
• -        One Leg Romanian Dead Lift 3X10

I will then through in some glute exercises such as, clam shells, bridge, banded sidewalks, etc.

Fatigued:

I will stick with body weight and pick 6 key exercise.  Two hitting core and back, two hitting upper body, and two hitting legs.

Core:

• -        Pass physio ball 2 X 16
• -        Russian Twists 2 X 40

Legs:

• -        RFE Split Squats 2 X1 0
• -        Hamstring Curls 2 X 12

Upper Body:

• -        Squat to Row 3 X 10
• -        Push up on rollout 3 X 10

I will then finish the session off with some stretching exercises and juggling a size one soccer ball 400 times.

Thursday:

Team training – Tactical Training for the match Saturday.

Friday:

Free – I sometimes do light touches on the ball on my own, or just take a light bike ride/walk to get the legs moving.

Saturday:

Game Day

Sunday:

Day off to allow the body to rest.

A key component for me personally as an athlete when determining how much training to do, or if I should back off a bit during as specific week, is being aware of my own body and how it feels.  For example, if my calf muscles are feeling over worked due to a lot of changing direction in the previous game, on my agility/lifting day I will not do any agility/plyos that really target the calf muscles but instead focus on lighter plyo work that focuses on activation the hip muscles in deceleration motions.  Or if my body is feeling extremely fatigued, I will skip the day in the gym and go for a bike ride instead.  It’s all about finding the right balance so that when game day comes, you are ready to give everything you have and feel fresh, while still being physiological prepared.

So my advice for you is to try and start tuning in to your own body and listening to it.  Pay attention to how certain training sessions effect your body.  However, this does take time to develop, it took me 15+ years to get a real handle on my body and learn about it, and I am still learning each and every day, as well as, each and every season.  Our body adapts and adjusts constantly from season to season, what might work one season, might be too little or too much the next, or not the right movement patterns needed.  So start trying to listen to your body and be aware of what is going on with it, and adjust as needed.

I also want to make it clear that each individual is physiologically different.  What I mean by this is that, what might work for me, might be too much or too less for another individual.  This is why it is important for the coaching and backroom staff to monitor their players in some sort of fashion.  This way they can best determine which plan of action is best for which individual, so that everyone is feeling fit and fresh come game day.  I believe sport science will be one of the leading industries in sport in the future when it comes to athletes training and injury prevention.  But that is a topic for another day.

Brittany Persaud will be writing articles for our website. Her expertise and experience will bring a different side of material to read... and we can't wait!

8 Competition Day Nutrition Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Performance

Athletes can be notoriously fastidious regarding their nutrition around training. They can go to great lengths to ensure that they are consuming the right quantities of each macronutrient, micronutrients, fluid, and supplements. But all those excellent nutritional habits might be for nothing if nutritional practices on competition day are poor. In this article, I examine some common mistakes that athletes might be making regarding their nutrition on the day of their competition, and provide some practical tips to consider making.

Trying New Things

Race day is not the time to try something new. At competitions on the professional circuit, it is reasonably common to be provided with sports drinks or food to try. The problem here is that you have no idea how your body will react to something. The last thing you want is to eat a different type of food that might cause you stomach upset. You’re already going to be nervous, which can cause stomach problems by itself, without adding something that can further affect your stomach.

I’ve fallen foul of this myself. At the World Championships in 2011, the athlete’s village had an unlimited supply of Mountain Dew. We don’t have Mountain Dew here in the UK (we have a slightly different version that is marketed as a high caffeine sports drink), and so I had no idea that it contained caffeine. My caffeine strategy for race day was to attempt to abstain from caffeine for a few days prior – I now know this is not necessary – in an attempt to improve my caffeine sensitivity. By drinking as much of this novel and untested drink I could get my hands on, I was undermining my caffeine strategy.

Not Having A Well-Practiced Plan

Related to #1 is the fact that your nutrition in the days up to and of your competition should be well planned and practiced. You shouldn’t be taking anything that you haven’t practiced in training first. If you’re using caffeine, how much do you need? At what time should you be consuming this caffeine? How much caffeine can you tolerate before the negative effects start to show? How much fluid do you need? When should you eat? How much should you eat? What should you eat? In the case of multiple rounds, what are you doing for recovery? The answers to all of these questions should be planned and practiced well in advance.

When I competed at the 2008 Olympics, my race-day nutrition was the culmination of everything that I had learned up to that point. In 2007, I had been refining my nutrition plan all season. At the end of that year, I evaluated everything that I had done, made some changes, and then put into place my plan for the Olympics. At every competition that year, I practiced my plan, so that it would become second nature. Any problems that came up, I could solve them ahead of what would be the biggest race day of my life. On the actual day of my race, everything was in place to ensure that my nutrition was optimal for the first round, my recovery between rounds, and then my pre-race nutrition for my quarter final.

Poor Preparation

When getting your nutrition strategy in place for competition, it’s important not to leave anything to chance. Where reasonable, I used to take my pre-race supplements to competitions. That prevented me from having to rely on them being provided, and also ensured I was in complete control of the dosage. I used to pack my caffeine drinks in my hold luggage for plane journeys, so I knew they would get there safely. I also used to pack my own carbohydrate and protein bars and protein powder in case the protein sources at the hotel were not up to standard (sometimes they weren’t there at all!). Some athletes also pack their food, such as porridge that they can have in place of the hotels breakfast. All of this ensures you can stick to a plan that you know works, and can reduce the stress of having to find the “right” food at your competition venue.

It can be a good idea to pack some comfort foods too, to make you feel a bit more relaxed. I packed a tub of hot chocolate that I could have the night before (and sometimes during the day of) races, just to help remove some of the tension, and enable me to relax and feel a bit more at home.

As an additional point, if you find nerves make you go to the toilet a lot, it can be a good idea to make sure you’ve packed your own toilet paper. Never rely on the venue for this and pack alcohol hand gel, just in case.

Using The Wrong Amount Of Caffeine

Caffeine is one of the most studied ergogenic aids within sport. For endurance exercise, the evidence is pretty clear; it improves performance (Graham 2001). However, the results for high-intensity performance are slightly less clear. The main reason for this is that the caffeine appears to affect type I (slow twitch) fibers to a much larger degree than type II (fast twitch) fiber (Jacobson et al. 1992). There is some evidence that while caffeine may not directly improve one-off high-intensity performance, it might do so indirectly by decreasing feelings of fatigue, as well as increasing adrenaline secretion. Caffeine also acts as a pain blocker and can decrease rating of perceived exertion in maximal performance (Davis & Green 2009). Williams (1991) also found that caffeine ingestion improved reaction time, which is obviously of interest to sprinters.

The problem with caffeine is that different people have different levels of sensitivity to it. What works for one person might be too much, or too little, for another. From the literature, a dose of between 3-9mg/kg of caffeine appears to offer the most benefits. That is a wide range! Personally, I found that once I went higher than 3mg/kg of caffeine, I started to get shaky and feel ill. For an 85kg athlete like myself, this equates to just over 250mg of total caffeine. I split this caffeine dose across two caffeinated sports drinks, energy gel, and an energy bar.

Timing of caffeine intake is also important. Peak plasma concentrations are reached about 1 hour after taking caffeine (Graham 2001), and so most people take their caffeine about 60 minutes pre-race. I used to taper my caffeine intake in 50-80mg intervals, taking my first dose 80 minutes pre-race, and my last dose 45 minutes before.

Considering all the research on caffeine, provided your sport and governing body allow it, you should probably be taking it on race day – so long as you can tolerate it. You should practice the timing and dose of your intake in training, to see what works best for you.

Eating Too Much

This problem might be unique to me, but competition day makes me hungry! I assume it’s mostly down to the nerves (some people have the opposite problem), but I am always hungry. The problem here is that when you are competing at a reasonably decent level, you tend to stay in hotels before you compete. These hotels tend to be of good quality, and they tend to provide a buffet for the athletes. This buffet can increase the chances of overeating because it is packed with good food.

Overeating on competition day is potentially a problem for a number of reasons. The first is that by having a large volume of food in your stomach, you are likely to feel bloated and uncomfortable – not exactly how you want to be feeling come race day. In addition to this, having a full stomach can cause gastrointestinal distress (remember, you are already nervous and so likely to have a dodgy stomach anyway), and also increases the time for gastric emptying of important nutrients, as well as water. In weight dependent sports, a huge binge will make you heavier, and slow you down.

Instead, as per #2, have a well-practiced plan. If you know the types of things that you can eat without feeling bloated, go for that. I used to eat my last main meal at least 4 hours pre-race so that I wouldn’t feel bloated and heavy. If I were then hungry, I would then snack on carb/protein bars, which I knew didn’t cause GI distress, or make me feel uncomfortable. I also found that if I ate white bread, white rice, poultry, as opposed to whole grains and red meats, these would clear my stomach quicker, and so make me feel a bit more comfortable.

Eating Too Little

So, you don’t want to eat too much, but you also don’t want to eat too little. It’s well established that you need to ensure your energy stores are topped up, especially if you have multiple races in a day. Davis et al. (1999) found that carbohydrate intake was important in reducing fatigue. It’s also important to ensure that you consume sufficient protein around your competition. There is some evidence from both Meeusen et al. (2006) and Davis et al. (2000) that protein intake may have a role to play in limiting central nervous fatigue.

From my experiences, making sure that you are in a well-fed state before your competition helps your mood. Being tired and hungry doesn’t put you in a good state of mind to perform, whilst feeling content and happy can help.

I’m well aware that some people get so nervous that they feel like they can’t eat, and that’s fine. It might be an option to consume a drink that is quite high in calories, so at least you are getting something. Alternatively, experiment with foods that you feel you can manage, and then have those on race day instead.

Poor Fluid Balance

Everyone knows that being severely dehydrated can affect your performance. It can cause discomfort, overheating and a decrease in plasma volume. As I mentioned earlier, being uncomfortable on race day is not conducive to good performance, and so you want to avoid this as much as possible.

However, the opposite is also true; it’s possible to consume too much water. That can lead to a condition caused hyponatremia (too little sodium). Although it is mostly limited to endurance athletes (Murray & Eichner 2004), it can still have an effect in speed-power athletes. The main cause is drinking too much water. This is a real risk. Athletes, keen to ensure they aren’t too dehydrated, can over consume water. I’ve certainly done this myself – back in 2007 I would quite comfortably consume 2L in the 90 minutes before my race, as well as high levels of liquid in the days leading up to my race. Clear urine was an obsession, and I was paranoid about getting cramps. However, the result is that I was over hydrating myself, which can cause cramps, the very thing I was trying to avoid. After I learned the error of my ways, I instead chose a more conservative hydration strategy, comprised of about 1L of liquid in the 120 minutes pre-race. Other side effects of consuming large volumes of water include needing to pee a lot (which nerves increase) and also the addition of extra weight. The 2L of liquid I was consuming would have been adding about 2kg to my weight, as well as being slightly uncomfortable in my stomach.

The advice regarding hydration is to drink for thirst, not for a pre-determined target. For speed-power events, anecdotally I can tell you that many elite athletes try to compete in a slightly under-hydrated state as it makes them lighter, improving their power-to-weight ratio. If you’re going to try this, trial it in training first, and properly rehydrate afterwards.

Finally, a little tip for you: Just before your race, rinse your mouth out with a carbohydrate drink, and then spit it out. It has been shown to improve performance in one-hour time trials (Carter et al. 2004). Whilst most people reading this will be performing for a much shorter period, it may well have some carryover into speed events, potentially by increasing the feeling of having energy within the brain.

Demanding Perfection

Despite what I have said in the previous points, sometimes things can’t be perfect. On competition day, you are already going to be in a state of high stress. You want to run well, and you’re nervous, so it’s understandable. Striving to make things perfect can be an additional source of stress. Sometimes you just have to make do. Sometimes you have to make sub-optimal food choices, and that’s OK.

Take Usain Bolt for example. He chose to eat chicken nuggets from McDonald’s at the Olympic Games. On the surface, this looks like a poor food choice. However, in this situation, Bolt is picking something he knows he likes, and he knows is safe. It’s also something he likes, so is likely to make him happy. Instead of stressing out about what to eat, he has just made a simple choice that hasn’t required much mental capacity and deliberation.

Remember, it is (almost) always better to eat something than nothing, no matter how bad. When travelling before a race, I have been stuck in an airport waiting for a flight. Rather than looking for my usual pre-race meal, which would have been almost impossible in an airport, I just ate what was easiest to find, which happened to be two burgers. That was much better than the other option, which was to eat nothing, and I still raced well the next day.

It’s also important to be flexible within your nutrition strategy. You have to realistic and understand that the meal you have at home pre-race may well not be available at the hotel. You’re going to have to not eat your normal food, and so it is vital not get stressed out by this.

Even with all the best preparation in the world, sometimes things outside of your control can have an impact on your nutritional strategy. Competing in Stuttgart Indoor Grand Prix in 2011, I had taken all my caffeine at my pre-planned points, when my race was delayed by 45 minutes. When I heard this, I had just finished my warm up and was heading to the call room. Instead of panicking and thinking that everything was wasted, I just chilled out for 15 minutes, topped up my caffeine, did a few strides, and subsequently ended up with my fastest time of the year.

Overview

So, to conclude, my key tips to remember for a good competition day nutrition program would be:

1. Stick to what you know.
2. Continually practice and refine.
3. Take your supplements, and where appropriate, drinks and food.
4. Practice your caffeine strategy and utilize it on race day.
5. Eat the right amount of food.
6. Drink the right amount of liquid.
7. Be flexible – it doesn’t always have to be perfect!

Please share this article so others may benefit.

Why Lance Should Be Let Off the Hook

Lance Armstrong. Beneath all of the controversy, the comeback from cancer, the seven consecutive Tours de France wins, the hero worship from some and blistering hatred from others, to the stack of books written about him and a documentary titled The Armstrong Lie, to the Oprah Winfrey interview to the onslaught of litigation and the USADA lifetime ban from all competition, and just a week ago, USA Cycling announcing that he would not be allowed to ride in a Gran Fondo in South Carolina that raised money for Meals on Wheels, there’s long been an undercurrent of truth about the story that rarely gets brought into the discussion.

Call it the Armstrong Paradox: If long ago Lance had decided to never touch a banned drug, no one would know who he is. As Tyler Hamilton detailed in his book, The Secret Race, when EPO started oozing through veins of the Tour de France, the speed and endurance of the peloton kicked up a notch in a fashion that clean riders were marginalized into obscurity. Talented, hard-working roadies who were driven by dreams of being the next Merckx, Lemond or Indurain ultimately, one way or another, encountered the hard fact of the professional cycling culture that Hamilton did: They had to make the decision, get on board with the drugs or forget it. Surely there were those who were chafed at the notion of artificially cranking up a red blood cell count, or using steroids or human growth hormone or so on—and said forget it, either for personal ethics or because they heard the stories of 18 riders dying over the course of four years, late 80s to the early 90s, from a drug, exogenously-manufactured erythropoietin, aka EPO, a drug modulated through recombinant DNA technology for patients with kidney failures. (As hematologist Dr. Randy Eichner explained to the NYT back in 1991, abusing EPO can lead to blood clots that can trigger stroke and heart failure even in a super-fit 20-something with sub-5% bodyfat. Said Eichner, “”Pretty soon you have mud instead of blood; then you have trouble.”)

Here’s where the paradox involving Armstrong surfaces: Armstrong’s mad thirst for not only winning but for bulldozing through his rivals was why he became a superstar. It wasn’t just that he won—it was the hell-fury he brought to his craft. Watching Armstrong race was like watching a blade-thin Hindu-yogi-warrior in action, fresh off a vision quest in the mountains and borderline psychotic because of it, go into battle, drunk with the belief that he was unkillable. Watching Armstrong race was unreal. Like the 2004 15.5k-time trial, watching Lance bike up Alpe d’Huez and on a fence-less road through a tunnel of 90,000 fans, including plenty of venomous, seething haters. The nuts were jumping out in front of him, screaming and spitting at him. Of course, they might have well as been spitting gasoline into a an open furnace, fueling the obliteration of everything in his path.

—-

Armstrong’s grit had no turn-off switch. He was always on, always working, always strategizing, always pushing. Like legendary wrestler and wrestling coach Dan Gable, the 1972 Olympic Gold medalist. Gable’s high-school record: undefeated. College: 181-1. As a head coach, his teams won 16 NCAA championships. He drove himself and his athletes unmercifully into the shadows of total human effort.

As characterized in Daniel Coyle’s Lance Armstrong’s War and other journalism, the Texan was ruthless in pushing everyone and everything around him to breakthrough levels of performance and invention. As Bicycling Magazine reported on the Alpe d’Huez thriller, Armstrong’s “obsessive preparation” was the source of his success.

For Armstrong, a man of exacting preparation, the singular importance of today’s stage was not lost. Months ago, he rode the climb more than a dozen times in practice, and his sponsors sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into special lightweight carbon fiber bikes and wheels, airy skinsuits and even lightweight pedals and shoes.

You know who this also sounds like? The late Steve Jobs. About two years ago I read the Walter Isaacson biography on Jobs and the parallels between Jobs and Armstrong were many. Both were abandoned by their fathers. Both became obsessive competitors, ruthless when it came to achieving and demanding excellence, and criticized by some for how harshly they treated others. Jobs was described as someone who made it routine to drain every ounce of talent and capacity out of those who worked for him and wasn’t afraid to crush an individual’s morale. Armstrong has been similarly described. Both identified enemies and sought to thrash them without regard to what might be fair and honest. Jobs died not long before the investigation surrounding Armstrong began to heat up. At the time, both were cultural American icons.

As far as adherence to the rules and ethics, Armstrong and Jobs were also similar. As Isaacson reported, Jobs lived and worked in a dimension where he didn’t really believe that the rules applied to him, part of the so-called “reality distortion field” that he projected.

Consider this opening sentence from a NYT article last May: “If Steve Jobs were alive today, should he be in jail?” The story digs through an assortment of sketchy business dealings at the hands of Jobs, from price-fixing to backdating stock options. A law professor is quoted in the story as saying that Jobs was “A walking anti-trust violation…I’m simply astounded by the risks he seemed willing to take.”

Imagine the riot that would have transpired if Steve Jobs had been arrested and sent to jail. That Jobs wasn’t particularly kind to his workers and his competition, and that he was willing to push against the law or even break it to get the results he coveted—few seemed to care, as long as he delivered the iPhone. He was admired for the single-minded purpose. It was part of the hero-worship, and Jobs became a template for the shatter-all-the-conventions mentality of Silicon Valley.

—–

When it comes to evaluating the blowback that Armstrong received following the investigation and lifetime ban—and the public acknowledgement that he had been lying for many years—it’s difficult not to consider that he was a scapegoat of sorts. Did Armstrong lie? He did. But professional athletes lie all the time. Even in a sport like triathlon that we like to think of as being pure. Go to a pre-race press conference at the Hawaii Ironman and ask the favorites how they’re feeling. They lie left and right, and who blames them?  It’s only after the race that you find out if they were battling a flu bug or were hobbled with an injury, or what they’re actual strategy was.

Did Armstrong use PEDs and did he lie about this? Yes. But what became vividly clear in The Secret Race was how PEDs have played a role at the top of the cycling world since the late 1990s. The sport was over-run. If you were a successful professional cyclist, you were using drugs and lying about—all apparently part of a their alternate universe, where telling the truth would have been a betrayal of the cohort.

Considering how rampant PED use was in cycling, it seems like a lot of prominent players—governing bodies, team directors, major sponsors, etc— were either really easy to fool almost all of the time within this Secret Race universe, by a bunch of skinny bikers, or they knew and just weren’t motivated to do anything about it.

Prominent players were either complicit, turning the other way or keeping their distance and ignorance intact because they didn’t want to know about it one way or another. There were too many millions of dollars at play for everyone to simply be outwitted by a bunch of canny cyclists who spent most of their time on the saddle, hollowing out their cheeks by riding for seven or more hours a day. Let’s be frank about this: No one tried to control things when it became clear that a drug like EPO was providing a fantastic edge. The result was that PED use in professional cycling became like jaywalking in NYC: so deeply imbedded and a part of daily life that its just the way it is.

The public furor over the matter has motivated the sport to crack down. It’s been bloody and at least to some degree effective. But the crackdown has focused on the riders.  They’re the ones who have paid the price. Armstrong was an especially visible symbol of it it all, and the case can be made that he was a political scapegoat, and he’s been hit hard, tagged with the word ‘fraud.’ Armstrong got dropped by all of his sponsors, for example, but those sponsors, race organizers and the bike industry itself had already made their fortunes from Armstrong’s work. Not to mention magazines like Men’s Journal and Outside that saw their numbers spike upward every time they figured out a new reason to stick him on the the cover. Lots of money was made—and the only one I’m aware of that has had to give some money back is Armstrong—along with his titles.

It’s as if all of the anger and frustration with cycling’s cheating scandal has been blasted directly at one person. Armstrong’s ability to be a front-page story made him the primary target. He may have doped and lied about it, but again, if he hadn’t done both of those things, most people would have never heard of the guy. It would have been someone else winning those Tours, and that someone would have been doping too.

—-

Not that making a sport fair isn’t a hard job. It’s next to impossible, with all the gray areas and ethical predicaments involved. Consider the World Anti-Doping Agency’s mission of trying to keep sport clean. It’s no simple task to even define what ‘clean’ is.  For example, here’s how a substance or method gets put on the WADA Prohibited List. It has to meet at least two of the three criteria:

1. It has the potential to enhance or enhances sport performance
2. It represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete
3. It violates the spirit of sport

There’s all sorts of subjective hiccups that can come into play in trying to define and apply the standards.

Let’s take nicotine. Nicotine is not prohibited, either before, during or after competition. Next time you’re doing a triathlon—although your fellow racers may have something to say about it—you can freely light up a cigarette in transition and you will not be tagged with a penalty. Surely, the nicotine is a risk to the health of the athlete. But according to Ben Greenfield, female athletes may be able to get some body-composition benefits—a potential performance enhancer—by chewing on some Nicorettes. So nicotine can enhance performance, it’s bad for you, and doesn’t seem aligned with the spirit of the sport. That’s three-for-three by my count. On this list it should go. So should sugar-laden electrolyte drinks, if you subscribe to the idea that the carbs can help you in an endurance race but may also contribute to type-2 diabetes. Or rotting your teeth.

But this is just the beginning of the complexity involved in assessing whether a substance should be banned or not. Perhaps the most knowledgeable expert on the topic in triathlon is Mark Sisson. Sisson was a professional triathlete in the early days of the sport but also spent 13 years as the International Triathlon Union “Anti-Doping” commissioner. In a blog post, Sisson talked about how there was a time that if you ate a poppy-seed muffin as part of your pre-race breakfast, you had a good chance of getting caught for having metabolites of opium in your system.

Sisson explains the challenges involved in simply conducting and collecting a good test, but also the loopholes that false-positive situations create. He also makes a compelling argument for why we should just let go of the trying to govern PEDs at all. The concern about the “actual or potential health risk to the athlete” is a farce, Sisson suggests, because the business of professional athletics is not in the least about health:

World class athletes tend to die significantly younger than you would predict from heart disease, cancer, diabetes and early-onset dementia. They also typically suffer premature joint deterioration from the years of pounding, and most endurance athletes look like hell from the years of oxidative damage that has overwhelmed their feeble antioxidant systems. Most people don’t realize it, but training at the elite level is actually the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle. The definition of peak fitness means that you are constantly at or near a state of physical breakdown. As a peak performer on a world stage, you have done more work than anyone else, but you have paid a price. It is again ironic that the professional leagues and the IOC, the ones who dangle that carrot of millions of dollars in salary or gold-medalist endorsements are the same ones who actually create this overtrained, injured and beat-up army of young people. They don’t care. These organizations then deny the athletes the very same drugs and even some natural “health-enhancing” substances that the rest of society can easily receive whenever they feel the least bit uncomfortable.

When I think about how much cycling has become linked to drugs, I think about the NFL. I’m not that especially tuned to pro football, but if you test positive for a banned substance, your penalty? Sit out for four games. I assume players get caught using either steroids or HGH, and I imagine it’s reported somewhere, but I can’t recall an uproar. Considering the beatings they give and take and the whole gladiator quality of the sport, how could you even begin to say, “Don’t take performance drugs—they might be unhealthy!” It’s ludicrous.  It also seems to be forgiven. It’s as if, ‘Hey—here’s a sport where every week from August to December you go out on to a field and spend a couple of hours smashing into 300-pound high-speed human tanks, you’re going to need something more than protein drinks to make it through the season.’ I played high school football at about 175 pounds against others my size. We’d play games Friday nights and then I worked a job at the mall on Saturdays. I was such a limping mess my boss sent me home at least twice. And I think we had maybe six games in a season. In one game, the cartilage in my right knee was shredded and I had to have major surgery. I was 17. You don’t play football to improve your health, and the same goes for professional cycling. So to Sisson’s assertion: there’s a lot that should be considered with PEDs in regards to professional sports.

—

A strong point that Sisson makes is that the dream of creating a fair playing field in sport is just that: a dream. Especially in sports where technological arms races exist, like endurance athletics. Let’s say Triathlete A has a budget of $1000 for a bike and Triathlete B has a budget of $10,000 for a bike, and both are similar in skill and athletic capacity.  With a set of physics tests, we can quantify how much free speed Triathlete A can pick up with with better wheels alone. This really isn’t fair, but there’s no rule that says it isn’t fair, so spending a lot of money on your machine is within the rules and considered fair play. No one really puts up a fuss about this, either. Probably because we like fast bikes.

Here’s another example, one Sisson discusses, more directly related to the issue of EPO use. Let’s say you’re an elite marathoner and are good enough to make $300k per year from your sponsorship contracts. While you just say no to EPO, you do want to raise your oxygen-carrying capacity to max levels—within the rules. So you spend money to have your house outfitted into an altitude chamber, where you can push a few buttons and the machine thins out the oxygen so that you simulate 10,000-feet-plus inside. Your body responds by creating more red blood cells. Even though you live at sea level. So you get to live at high altitude and and train at low altitude, which may be an optimal way to get the benefits of altitude exposure without it degrading the quality of your training. It’s within the rules. But is that really fair compared to a runner who can barely afford shoes?

You can take the argument even further and just admit that life isn’t fair. Some of us are born with outrageous heart-and-lung function, with wicked max VO2 levels. Most of us weren’t.

Armstrong was. When he was a teenager growing up in Texas, he gravitated into the fledgeling sport of triathlon and put posters of guys like Scott Tinley and Mark Allen in his bedroom. At 16-years-old he started beating guys like that. He tore down the posters. His destiny sparkled before him. Still a teenager, he went on to become the Tri-Fed National Sprint champion.

In what was no doubt a smart economic move, he switched to professional cycling and began winning races and stages in the Tour de France. Armstrong had that combination of rarified talent and champion mind-set that comes along once in a generation. He also beat cancer. Whether he got it because he used steroids or was just unlucky, he beat it. Then he returned to the racing world.  I’ve never met or interviewed Armstrong, but my read on it is that when the peloton took off like an EPO-powered hovercraft, as Tyler Hamilton wrote about in his book,  Armstrong analyzed the situation with a coldest, hardest of edges, like a commander preparing for a ground war. He wasn’t about to let the enemy get an advantage on him.  It was the reality and he wasn’t much for shrinking back into oblivion. And ironically enough, this was the stuff of his character that led to his incredible rise. And to his Greek Tragedy-like fall.

After I finished The Secret Race, I had hit the wall in about the drugs and cycling. It was exhausting to think about.  I wasn’t going to watch the documentary, The Armstrong Lie, but I finally did about a year ago. Since then, I’ve forgotten almost everything in the movie, except for the footage of Armstrong visiting sick children at a cancer clinic. Those kids were so happy to see him. It’s all I remember from the film.

I know the case had been made that Armstrong had used Livestrong as, “The Cancer Shield,” the charge that his foundation’s work for cancer awareness and such was to a way to defuse the motivations of anyone wanting to come after him with an investigation. Maybe there’s truth in that, I don’t know, but watching the kids light up with Armstrong in the room was powerful.  He certainly didn’t seem disingenuous to me. I’m not sure how you quantify how much tangible good Armstrong and Livestrong generated for the cause, and how much inspiration to those stricken with a such a horrible disease,  but it’s infinitely more than I have ever given or done for a charitable cause. What would be disingenuous of me would be to judge Armstrong without taking this into account.

Which brings me to my point: Dismiss the lifetime ban. It was issued in August of 2012—so that’s more than two years. Let the guy ride in a charity bike race. And if he’s still up for it, let him race in triathlon again. He’s really good at it.