Have you ever wondered what it would be like to race like a pro...a cheating pro?
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be on the juice?
Sure, lots of athletes over the years have taken performance enhancing drugs to get faster, stronger, bigger, and better then their competition, but none of them have described (for obvious reasons) what it is like to be on the juice.
That is until Stuart Stevens came along. A few years ago in THIS classic Outside Magazine story Stevens took a cocktail of performance enhancing drugs and describes his personal transformation from elite athlete to superman.
I bring this up because he writes about taking testosterone:
"Dr. Jones had a specific protocol he wanted to follow, partly for safety reasons and partly so I could discern what each drug was doing. After the HGH, he added testosterone, giving me a 200-milligram injection and a pump vial full of Testocream, white stuff that I rubbed on the sides of my stomach. "It's like with a bathtub," Dr. Jones explained. "The shot fills the tub. The cream keeps replenishing it every day to top it off."
You may recall the clear and cream. It was the stuff that many professional athletes (including Marion Jones and Barry Bonds) used in the recent Balco scandal.
I found it interesting that many of the Balco Athletes claimed in self defense that they were simply not aware that the cream was a steroid.
I would think that the name Testocream might be a good clue.
But what's really seals the doping deal for me is that the cream is used to supplement the clear. The clear was the primary designer steroid developed by Balco. The cream was simply the supplement used to "replenishing it every day to top it off."
But I digress.
Stevens ends his experience and story by writing:
"Besides, on a fundamental level, drugs ruin the simple joy of competition. With drugs in the mix, it's not about the athletes, it's about the chemistry."
I suppose for me and many of my triathlete friends, performance enhancing drugs take somethings that is fundamentally beautiful...the pure joy, grace, and competition of endurance sports and human performance and with one quick injection deform it and turn it ugly.
