Drugs. In the world of fitness – and by extension – sports,
they have become an issue impossible to ignore. Even though most of us amateur runners,
cyclists and other athletes will never deal with steroids personally, we are
constantly barraged by allegations about or confessions by the names we admire:
Lance Armstrong, Mark McGwire, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Bill Romanowski…the
list goes on for miles. If we think about it, we realize that these are names
not of gods and titans, but of humans just like us – straining to hit the ball harder,
pushing to top that hill faster, struggling to shave an extra second off that
lap time. Those who use steroids want to
be the best and make for themselves a name to surpass the heroes they admire.
Author and
extreme amateur athlete Stuart Stevens began taking steroids in 2003 as
research into the mental and physical effects of steroid use, and he wrote
about his experiences in Outside Magazine. (Read it here.) Stevens relates how his body changed into a muscle-bound machine that wouldn’t
quit, but more interesting than the effect it had on his body was the effect it
had on his mind.
“You
confuse what these performance enhancing drugs are doing to you and yourself,”
Stevens told NPR’s Michele Norris in Oct. 2003. “You start to think pretty
quickly, ‘Well, this is me. I can ride three hundred miles and the next day, I
can feel just fine. Aren’t I impressive?’ ” (Hear it here.)
With steroids, we could all be bigger,
faster and stronger. So why don’t we? For me, it’s a combination of reasons:
the prohibitively high cost, the dangerous health risks and the lack of any
real need. But there’s another reason I’ve chosen to take the hard road to
fitness: to me, using steroids defeats the whole purpose of being an athlete.
“Sport is about individuals competing
against individuals, not about individuals competing against other individuals’
doctors,” Stevens says. “… There’s something about it that is tremendously
dishonest. The athletic endeavor should be one of the purest endeavors that we
engage in in life.”
I have been running and watching my
diet for about five years, and I’ve lost more than 70 pounds in that time. I’ve
run two half-marathons, gained self-confidence and greatly lessened the health
risks I’ll face later in life. Sometimes I imagine just what I could have
accomplished if I had taken steroids. I could have done two full marathons, and
I could have a chiseled physique to show
off. But I’ve come to realize that wouldn’t have been me. I may be slow, weak
and a bit pudgy, but I’m better off now than ever before. And I’m proud to say
I did it the hard way.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2010.
