Episode 495: Performance Enhancing Drugs In Ultramarathon | Kilian Korth
Kilian Korth joined the show to have a discussion around ultrarunning’s growing professionalization without sophisticated regulated drug testing, the limits and trade-offs of WADA/USADA-style regimes, and why “doping” as a blanket term obscures intent and severity. We unpack gray areas such as THC thresholds, TUE complexity for common medications, transparency vs backlash, influencer incentives, and the future pressure regenerative medicine and technology (e.g., super shoes) may place on sport rules.
Kilian: IG @runtoughmindset | Substack: substack.com/@runtoughmindset
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Episode Summary: Zach Bitter & Kilian Korth on PEDs, incentives, and doping in ultrarunning
Context & framing
Conversation is the third appearance by Kilian on Zach’s podcast; shifts from traditional training/racing episodes toward current events in running.
Sparked by recent doping-related controversies (Cam Hanes / Sage Canaday online conflict, Mike McKnight’s discussion of BPC-157 use on Hanes’ podcast).
Both emphasize moving beyond narrow focus on specific peptides/cases to broader structural issues.
Activism, incentives & tribalism
Skepticism of modern activism: good causes often get distorted by perverse incentives (attention, platform growth, organizational self-preservation/mission creep).
Online environments (especially short-form social media) reward polarization over curiosity or truth-seeking.
Parallel drawn to low-carb diet advocacy: movement shifted from exploration of pros/cons toward dietary supremacy and identity attachment.
Both hosts value changing one’s mind with new evidence and prefer evolving conversations over tribal “debates” aimed at winning.
Core problem in ultrarunning
Rapid professionalization and financial incentives exist, but sophisticated testing (especially out-of-competition) is essentially absent.
Honor-code system + high rewards creates conditions in which some athletes near the top are likely to use PEDs.
Contrast with Olympic sports (e.g., swimming) where positives occur even with lower financial stakes.
“Doping” is an unhelpful blanket term that equates intentional, high-impact cheating (e.g., EPO) with gray-area or accidental cases.
BPC-157 and gray areas
BPC-157 is an experimental peptide with very limited human data (one small study of 12 people among 36 total studies reviewed).
Anecdotally has been used for tendon/muscle healing; on the WADA banned list at all times (no TUE pathway currently).
Gray areas exist in WADA criteria themselves (performance enhancement potential, health risk, “spirit of the sport”).
THC example: banned in-competition with a relatively high threshold; removed alcohol from the list is an example of changes over time.
Distinction between letter of the rules vs. moral/cosmic fairness; between intentional advantage-seeking and medical/recovery use.
Testing realities & practical challenges
Full USADA/WADA-style regimes require whereabouts reporting, out-of-competition testing, and significant lifestyle constraints (conflicts with the free-spirited, remote nature of trail/ultrarunning).
Even gold-standard systems have loopholes (missed whereabouts, remote camps, short-acting substances timed around sleep windows).
Half-measures are expensive, burdensome, and unlikely to deter determined cheaters.
Middle-of-pack and age-group athletes face different calculus; many use legitimate medications (inhalers, etc.) that may or may not require TUEs depending on type and dose/threshold.
Possible paths forward discussed
Transparency and honesty should be encouraged rather than punished (both hosts respect that Hanes and McKnight disclosed BPC-157 use).
Practical ideas:
Optional “non-competitive / open” checkbox so athletes using regulated substances can still participate without affecting results/records.
Tested vs. non-tested divisions (bodybuilding-style model).
More education needed around legitimate medical use (TUEs, Global DRO checks).
Focus should prioritize the small professional/elite tier where financial and competitive incentives are highest over age-group minutiae.
Future regenerative medicine and longevity interventions will force further adaptation; sport has already accepted large performance gains from technology (super shoes) more readily than internal/medical ones.
Influencers & broader culture
Influencer economy adds complexity: financial incentives to promote products or share experimental practices; difference between sharing personal experience vs. recommending use.
Transparency with clear caveats is preferred; pure anecdote-driven advice remains problematic.
Societal issues (tribalism, algorithmic incentives, low scientific literacy) make clean solutions difficult inside a small niche like ultrarunning.
Closing notes
Both stress nuance over black-and-white absolutism
Conversation aims to push the sport toward honest discussion of incentive structures rather than endless case-by-case outrage.
Kilian’s Substack article (“The Run Tough Mindset”) and upcoming documentary Forged in Failure are referenced as related material.
Episode Transcript:
Kilian, welcome back to the podcast. I think, what is this, round three for us now? Yes, I- something like that, but thanks for having me. It's awesome to be back, and and in a w- way that I'm sure will be much less focused on 200-milers and more focused on minor and major controversies in the sport.
Yeah it's funny because I was thinking of kinda what I wanted to do with the podcast outside of just the more traditional kind of episodes where you have a guest come in or I just go solo and talk about a topic that is a little bit more maybe education-based, or just reflections on my own training and racing and that sorta stuff.
And it was like, one of the things I thought would be kinda fun would just be to kinda touch on current event-type topics within the running world. And i- it-- the timing, I don't know, like the timing of it just seemed like it matched up with this, like this wave of interest with performance-enhancing drugs.
So I was like, part of me is like- ...Jesus, it just kinda almost feels like I s- launched that episode just so I could talk about doping. My hope is that's not the long-term trend line with it all, and then that I am able to cover a bunch of other cool current event topics other than that.
But in fact, I think I might actually end up... I'm just thinking out loud here a little bit, but I think, 'cause there are some times I'll do these episodes and it's like, okay, this is actually a better just standalone episode versus kind of what the intent of my current events one was. So I think I might end up just actually making this an actual episode anyway 'cause I think it'll probably end up being something that just fits a little bit better into that category just due to the length of what this will probably end up being and the topic as a whole.
So yeah. W- whenever, whenever this releases and people are listening to it, they'll know at that point whether which direction I go with that, yeah, totally. It can be like a mix of both things. It's talking about what's ha- what's, in the news, in the, the conversation right now, but I think also you and I both probably agree that there's a much bigger picture than the somewhat myopic focus on BPC 157, which I'm sure we'll get into.
You know- ... there's a lot beyond peptides to talk about. Absolutely, yeah. And actually one thing, and we've chatted a little bit about this over text and before we decided to record here, and I had thought of something this morning too that I thought would maybe be an interesting launch point that goes very broad, and then we can bring it into the specifics.
But 'cause s- 'cause some of this stuff that I see when I just think about how all of it ends up playing out with respect to the conversations that take place, which are basically online conversations at this point in time. It's just a question of whether it's short form or long form for the most part.
And one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately that I think fits into modern-day activism. Yeah. And I've become increasingly- ... skeptical of modern-day activism. N- not that there's no good cause. I think there's obviously always and will continue to have good causes that are worth getting motivated about and pushing for change.
But once you determine that you have a, that there's a cause or something that's worth fighting for- I just think the way it ends up playing out oftentimes works counter to the actual goal of the core of that. And I just think I see that occur over and over again, and it's so broad. It's not just one specific topic.
It's everything. And part of that, I think, is just we have this weird scenario occurring where you get a cause that is-- it's inevitably gonna be polarizing, right? Because you're trying to change something or you're trying to s- shed light on something you think isn't getting enough visibility, and ultimately that's gonna create a polarization of some sorts.
And once that's created, I just think it-- with the-- in the modern environment, especially with short-form media like Instagram. I think Instagram and X and some of these social pages are probably the biggest offenders. It ends up just becoming something where the prese- perverse incentives that get sucked into it or attach themselves to it end up becoming almost bigger than whatever the original core message or the core approach was.
And you end up with this scenario where the best example of this is probably somebody who doesn't actually really care about the message and they-- but they care about the visibility that it has and it carries, and they start creating content around that because they know if they're talking about this topic that's in the news and that is really touching at people's emotions, they're gonna get visibility.
And if they don't actually care about the message, to them-- Or the, the, if they don't actually care about the outcome, to them that's just a no-brainer to make it as polarizing and controversial as possible because- Yeah ... if they hurt the end goal but attract attention, they got what they wanted out of it.
Yeah, 100%. And I think it's nice that you started off with the phrase perverse incentives 'cause I think that will become a theme of this entire conversation. But I agree with my-- your skepticism about activists. I think even more, just to add on to what you said, there is this ultimate incentive with activism to contain the goal, the work toward, a goal, even if it's actually been achieved.
So l- an industry crops up in activism. There can be nonprofits and organizations devoted towards a- any kind of goal, and if that goal is achieved, let's say, let's just use voting rights as an example 'cause everybody can vote, right? There's not a whole bunch of nonprofits around anymore thinking like, "Hey let's make sure that voting is a- accessible to everybody," because it pretty much is.
Like sure, there's debates around the edges there, but I'm not even trying to get into politics. I'm just like u- trying to use an easy example. But I'm sure that when that changed in law, that there were organizations who tried to broaden their perspective and got mission creep for stuff that wasn't originally in, their manifesto or their mission.
And I think that happens a lot as well with the incentive structure around activism because ultimately there's this weird, we want to achieve this thing, but also achieving it actually- Yeah ... undermines our mission because then there's no point for this organization, this person's platform for that reason.
Like th- that no longer exists as a mandate. And so I, I do... I share your skepticism even though obviously we can both, I'm sure, point to cases where activists have made big positive changes in the world. There's just, I think, on the edges and there's probably many cases of people who achieve something and then overstep their bounds, overplay their hands in a way that I think undermines the original mission in that broad sense.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it is something where there's almost like two things going on. There is actual progress being made with respect to whatever the cause is. That can be running alongside just all the extra perverse incentives and cottage industries that kinda come up along the side of it.
And o- what one spot that I look at that kind of brings this to my attention often has been like, low carbohydrate diet stuff. So you know, I s- I started doing a low carbohydrate diet in 2011 and did it for 11 years. And in 2011 it-- the approach wasn't novel. It wasn't something that's oh this is a totally new approach.
It's never been tried before. Like ketogenic diets, low carbohydrate diets have been around for a long time. They've been used in a variety of different capacities over the years. But there was like this new wave of it where it felt like there was this kinda need to kinda s- explore it and say "Okay, what are the actual what are the positives and negatives to this approach that we can use and kinda learn how they fit and what we should be looking for and stuff like that?
And somewhere along the way, I felt like that started to skew towards rather than being let's figure out where the use case is or the value add is here, and then weigh the positives and negatives and determine whether it's a good approach for this particular person and lifestyle versus not being good towards we need to advocate for it being better than everything else- Yeah
or constantly keeping up for it versus being curious and trying to actually explore where its weaknesses are and where its strengths were. And because of that, I ended up finding that the big faces and the big names within that movement became attached to the idea of dietary supremacy, where it had to be positioned as the best approach.
It wasn't enough just to be an approach that was on the table and worthy of discussion when you're looking at approaches to take, whether that be for lifestyle, whether that be for performance or anything like that. And then it- and then you've just created, you've backed yourself into this situation where these people have identified as the the defender, so to speak, and they can't be caught giving it any sort of negative connotation, and that just totally ruins the entire approach to me with respect to the curiosity side of things and actually trying to find who it will work for and who it won't work for.
Yeah, 100% And I see that a lot with these topics. Th- this is why your intellectual approach to subjects is so admirable, and one that I hope that I am able to achieve as well, is just not being attached to your ideas. And so if as humans we're so good at being tribal and, and- ... I think that is totally in our DNA and I think that it made sense evolutionarily to attack the other in a physical and intellectual sense as sort of an enemy to whatever structure was h- like holding up your society.
And so I think that leads to most of these problems. And the diet is a great one. We are... I have s- kind of followed your path to one or another degree with diet. Originally the first time we ever talked was me paying you for a consultation about how to have a low-carb approach for FKTs and longer efforts.
And then I think actually independently you and I both ended up going to a high-carb, higher carb somewhere- somewhere around that kind of at the same time actually too as new evidence appeared. And so I do think it should just be a virtue to change your mind, and it's unfortunate that, in politics and society it does seem like doubling down is more often rewarded.
Like you get the cheers from your fans as, if y- if you are owning the other guy. Whereas I think the structure of, quote-unquote, debate is actually bad for an evolving conversation, because in a debate you aren't incentivized to actually change your position with new evidence because you're trying to win.
It's- ... it's like we don't actually want diet conversations like this about doping, whatever we're gonna get into, we don't want those to be a debate. We want them to be an evolving conversation wherein each side is willing to acknowledge the best points on the other, and it isn't attempting to win anything in regards to how they're, we're perceived by our people who might be on our side of the issue or the other side.
It's like we just want to come to the closest thing to, the capital T truth about whatever we're discussing, and I think that people are in general not particularly good at orienting themselves in that way. Yeah. Yeah, and then the funny thing too is, like, when I decided to try a high carbohydrate approach too, there was a l- there, there was a enough conversation around and messages that I received and comments I saw and things like that, that were a ba- basically saying, looking at it through the lens of, like- Somehow I was either gonna prove or disprove high carb and low carb.
And I'm just thinking w- whether this works I could go out and just obliterate my PR in the 100 mile with a high carb approach, or epically fail to do so, and it would cha- it would be totally irrelevant to the broader conversation around who and who this isn't applicable for. Yeah. I always find that really interesting too, 'cause it's like people love to grasp onto something they can see and feel, like that anecdote, versus- Yeah
What is the broader application here? And one more thing about all that too, it's just it's like my, my mindset with all of that stuff is oftentimes like is there enough value here that it's worth looking into and getting curious about? And let's fi- let's say for example like 10% of the population responds well to low carbohydrate diets.
They find that they just prefer them for one reason or the other. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that really for the most part. And, that's a big enough group of people. That's one out of 10 people. Like within that group of people, they would be very interested in just s- kind of the positives and negatives and what, a- and just the protocol to success within it.
And it's just, you're like, I don't know why it has to go beyond that, beyond the- Yeah ... like tre- the growth of that. Do we need to get it to f- it's almo- it gets, it gets literally political to the point where 10% isn't enough to win an election. Yeah. So we need to get this up to, 51% or whatever it happens to be depending on the structure of the voting.
But- Did you can I ask you, did you when you switched from low carb to high carb, since you were publicly low carb for a long time, and I wouldn't say like proselytizing about it, but like informing people about your experience, did you get any messages that were like angry about you leaving that tribe?
Frustrated that you'd be going to the other side? I didn't get any mess- I got a lot of messages from people who are curious about- Yeah ... some of the, the details of the hows and whys, and the-- I think these were the, these are the silent majority people who are probably engaging in as good a faith as they can, and they were just curious.
They're just like I wanna know because maybe this informs something that I should know about, or maybe there's something I should be thinking about that I'm not thinking about, that he can share with me." I didn't get a lot of the... I saw s- I got more backlash with just commentary on stuff- where it would just be like here's an example. You'd have... This happens constantly where you'll be, there'll be... What'll often happen is someone who has built a brand around low carbohydrate will make some sort of polarizing post to gain attention, and then arguments in the comment section will ensue, as they anticipated and as they planned for it to happen to boost them up on the algorithm.
And within that conversation or argument, you'll just get people who are just trying to find examples to prove whoever they're arguing with right or wrong, and then my name will get brought up in that a lot of times. Yeah. So then it's just a- and then the funny thing about it is sometimes it'll be something where a person will be making an argument directly to me, and they-- I don't know that they even have information as to my background with it.
They just think I'm just some random person, and then someone will come in and... 'Cause they'll be making an argument to me that would clearly have been something that I would have had to address early on in that process with respect to, like, how to structure that dietary approach and perform on it and where the limitations are.
And they'll be presenting all these weird little level one arguments that it's just "Okay, And I think that's probably the, the, the worst it got. I don't think I had too many people just getting super upset about it. Yeah. But I also didn't approach it in a massive polarizing way either, so that may have a, that might be part of it too, where even when I was at kind of the height of things where, I broke some world records, got on some massive platforms, and when we were just uncovering everything I did, the dietary stuff would come up.
I still generally avoided trying to be, like, absolutist about it or try to- Yeah ... advocate for it as being, like this s- superior approach versus something that worked for me within the context of what I was trying to do, which was running 100 miles as fast as I could in a very controlled environment.
And I think because I didn't go out there and try to proselytize as much as maybe you s-sometimes see, I wasn't identified as someone who just was, like- w- like totally 180'd on, on it, the way it would maybe look if somebody who just sp- spent their entire identity at building something around that brand in a very kind strict manner versus a more of a like a situational manner like I did.
Totally. That makes sense. Yeah, I was picturing a Lizzo on Ozempic kind of situation where she's getting you know- ... angry messages. Maybe I'll get some now because we talked about it. Who knows? But yeah, so yeah I find m- most of the time it becomes something which is just a worthwhile consideration to make is, like, how do you wanna spend your time, and I could go online and provoke people to get mad at me pretty easily with respect to just the path I took and, but that's a choice I can make or not make, so if I don't go online and provoke people, then I generally don't get the angry comments.
So- Solid, solid segue into what we wanna talk about today. Yeah exactly, yeah. Yeah let's bring this in from as broad and kinda get into more of the topic at hand here, which I think is just broadly speaking within sports and running is performance-enhancing drugs in ultramarathoning and kinda where that is.
So I do kinda wanna start from the top with respect to where we would normally apply this topic, which is the professionalization side of it, 'cause I know the article you wrote on Substack kinda started out that way, where you presented this, "We have this situation in ultrarunning where it's growing fast.
The professionalization side of it is also growing fast with it, where we have lots of people now that are basically focusing on training and racing as their primary income source, their primary profession. Maybe they coach a bit on the side, maybe they create content on the side, but their big focal point is, 'I need to be prepared to do well at this race,' and that is where it's going-- I'm gonna sign my contract, essentially, on."
And we f- we lack any level of sophisticated drug testing in the sport- Yeah ... to the degree that it would be even remotely comparable to what we see with track and field or Olympic level testing and things like that. So you sorta started your article out by saying anytime we have that sort of situation where the incentive for performance is quite high and financially lucrative- And there's really no safety guards outside of the honor code.
Some percentage of people are going to take advantage of that situation, and you're sort of-- we're at this exposed point in professional ultramarathon running right now, where if someone decided they wanted to try to capitalize on that and were maybe a, a few percentage performance points away from being able to do so, could start using performance-enhancing drugs and maybe get themselves in that position.
Yeah. I think, once again, returning to the phrase incentive structures, it's just I don't have literal proof because we don't have a testing regime, but it seems impossible that there aren't people near and/or close to at the top of the sport who aren't going to be willing to take performance-enhancing drugs, regardless of what those might be, in order to achieve both y- success in terms of attention and success financially.
You look at the Olympics, and in a sport like swimming, people pop for PEDs with y- relative frequency, and there's almost no financial incentive in swimming. So there doesn't even have to be the money side. It can just be the glory, the attention side, the love from within a community, that sort of thing.
But we also have the financial side at this point. Using-- I think I use myself as an example in the article I am making a good living. I've never once been tested. I've never even taken part in an or- in a race. That's not true. I ran the Ouray Hundred, and they tested their winners.
But I've, I've-- other than that, I've had zero races where I even had a potential for being tested. And then you mentioned the-- we're so far away from a USADA or WADA-style regime for Olympic athletes who are testing out of competition, and I think there's a conversation to be had there, too.
It's like, do we actually want that? I don't in terms of my lifestyle inconvenience, but we are just It's like we have these conversations from time to time about peptides or other types of PEDs or potential PEDs, and I just don't really ever see the broader conversation being had of "Hey, here's the situation we're in.
It's clearly a wild west scenario, and what do we want to do about that?" And so that's where I was hoping the Substack article I wrote could nudge the conversation in that direction because I think ultimately that's what's going to create-- even if it's, even if we end up deciding like, "Hey, we don't want to put the effort in to create a testing regime," like even if we decide that, at least we'll be, like, going on from an honest place as opposed to, I think, where we are now, which is this kind of, "Hey, we have this big problem, but we're just not gonna look at it."
And I think that's part of the reason why some of the current headlines with respect to doping in sport have gotten so much attention within the ultra-running world right now to the degree where now the running community is talking about the ultra-running community talking about doping problems.
Yeah. And it's-- and I think part of that is just because this has been something that has been in people's consciousness, but just there hasn't-- it just didn't have a catalyst yet for-- like, all the kindling was there. It just didn't have the match strike yet to really become something that is just this topic that keeps popping up because we don't have the answer necessarily, and that just gives it breeding ground for debate and argument as to what to do because we haven't all gotten together, so to speak, and determined we need this governing body to come in and start putting together a protocol that we can s- put some faith behind.
Yeah. Do you want to just take a second to kinda outline for anyone who isn't aware what sort of just kickstarted us into this conversation and why we were talking in private about it before now? Yeah. Yeah, we, yeah, we probably should. I'm assuming a lot of just prior context here. I think the big catalyst was probably the Cam Haynes and Sage Canaday sort of online storm that took place that sort of-- I think that's what really launched it if-- I don't think- Yeah ... there was something prior to that necessarily. There, there's been things that have popped up in the past that have been potential firestarters but like people actually testing positive for things in the very little testing we do have.
Yeah. Or the other one that's been a, a part that I've seen it bubble up in the past too has been there'll be someone who has tested positive in a pro- in a different sport come into trail running and ultra running, and then there's this kind of conversation around are they trying to run away from the rigorous testing that caught them into an environment where now they can just go back to that doping they were doing before?
There's a lot of interesting potential, like, nefarious behavior that makes for good content, that kind of makes that story pop up. But I don't think any of it really blew up to the degree that the Cam Haynes, Sage Canada one did. And then as that arc hit its peak and then started maybe falling behind some other headlines, we had the story where Mike McKnight goes on Cam Haynes' podcast and Rekindles it perhaps with talking about how he used BPC-157 to help with a back issue that he was dealing with, and then that kinda just re-jump-started it more or less or gave people- Yeah
reason to kinda dive back into that topic again. Yeah. And for anyone who doesn't know, BPC-157 is an experimental peptide with just the tiniest amount of information out there available on it. And if you read my Substack article, I just kinda outlined, there was a systematic review last year of 36 total studies on this compound, one of which was in humans, which had a sample size of 12.
So we really just don't know that much about BPC-157, but it is, anecdotally again, said to heal, increase the healing of tendons and muscle structures, s- potentially bones as well. But that's its primary use case right now. But I... it's strange to me. I wonder, like, why these two cases are the ones that kind of really caught fire to one or another degree.
Because if you think about the actual kind of competit- competitive sphere in the sport's biggest event, like the Joyline Challenger if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I'm sure I am, I apologize, but that case where she failed for one of the UTMB events, it seems like that would have been a much bigger deal within the sport, but it really wasn't.
She's someone who was at the top of the very top of the most elite events in the space and then failed the test. So it does-- I do find it strange. I wonder if it's a measure of how online the conversation is because she doesn't have a platform like Cam Haynes does. So I, I-- it's like it is strange how these conversations take place. But yeah, that's I think good context for why you and I started talking about this both privately and now publicly and why I ended up writing an article, and I think that my hope is that ultimately this sort of edge case with the peptides can flow into the broader conversation we wanna have.
Because I do think the BPC-157 cases are actually much harder to parse than the actual broader con- conversation is to have in some ways. Like- ... there's so many reasonable opinions about is it a PED? Why is it on the WADA list? Like, all of those things I think are gray areas, whereas I think the-- what's not a gray area is the what we've already talked about is the incentive structure in the current environment.
And so hopefully we can y- you know, help direct the conversation to what I would see as what we actually need to be talking about as opposed to, the somewhat low-hanging fruit that catches fire online . Yeah. A, a couple things to add to that. I would say one thing that I think is worth just mentioning upfront before we dive into some of this too is when we talk about gray area on this topic, I think that sometimes confuses people because you get the group of people who want it to be black and white, and they say, "Look, it's cheating or it's not cheating.
It's as simple as that. Why can't we just say that?" And there's truth to that, right? The-- 'cause we do have a list of-- We do have a protocol, right? We do have WADA's list of banned substances. Those banned substances have different applications with respect to their potential performance benefit, and therefore carry bigger weight or lighter weight.
But we do, as you mention in your article, have this issue of we use the word doping as this umbrella term that encapsulates some of the most egregious doping you could do, like EPO, where you're looking at a, a 10% improvement in your VO2 max and a 5 to 6% improvement in performance, which is massive- Huge
compared to what you're going to get with most everything else. And then that's in the same category as something that is much less likely to make your performance move by more than like a small, like a fraction of a percentage or something that's still cheating technically, but less impactful.
And wh- when I say gray area, I'm not necessarily talking about whether the person violated the WADA code or not. I'm talking about just the WADA code as a whole has a lot of gray area within it, because there's a scenario where I could follow the exact same protocol with medication and violate the WADA code.
And there's a protocol I could take with that exact same medication and exact same dosage and not violate the WADA code. And that's what the TUE process is. That's what medical exemption is. So we have this big category of scenarios inside regulated substances that require a framework to be followed in order for it to be legal or to, in order for it to be legal versus it be illegal.
And I think that's where things get really complicated for people because we have a scenario there then that if we're gonna look at this broad scale versus the top tier professionalized side of the sport and say, "Okay, this applies to everyone in the field." We're obviously not testing everyone in the field, so then it gets to honor code.
And how does that group of people say, how does the person who finishes smack dab in the middle of the Boston Marathon engage with that process of, "I got prescribed this medication by my doctor, and it-- like what's my next step?" And I don't think most people even know what the next step is, much less whether they would actually need to go into this in, into the, the, the protocol of applying for a TUE and things like that.
I think that's just so far out from people's conscious and ability to really wrap their head around without kinda getting into the topic as a whole and really looking into it, that it ends up becoming a, a problem with the conversation where I just see people basically saying things that End up not actually making any sense because they actually think they're doping and they're probably not, or- Yeah
they think they're not, and they actually probably are. So- Yeah. The g- I think you bring up a really good point with, ... So the rule, the code of rules and the list is an objective thing in a sense of BBC 157 on the list. Broke the rules. No one-- I, I don't think anybody's debating that.
And I think an even clearer case of this is when Sha'Carri Richardson failed a test a while back for THC, and did she actually end up not going to the Olympics or the World Champs because of it? Something was- Yeah. World Champs ... it was big. Big. But in a sense, it's like, okay, you, so you can think maybe THC shouldn't be on the banned list.
So you could think there's a cosmic injustice in some sense in her not being able to compete, but she broke the rules. These are the rules. These are the consequences. So it's like both of those things can be true at the same time because there's a difference between the letter of the law, spirit of the law.
The law doesn't always align with what we might think of as moral truths in any given sense, i-i-in relation to both literal law and WADA's guidelines or cr- like, criteria. And then you pointed out to me, and I added this into my article the criteria for, that WADA has is actually gray in and of itself.
There's, it, p- there's the potential or proven evidentiary basis to be performance-enhancing. There's a safety concern criteria. And then the last one violates the spirit of the sport. What does that actually mean? I can imagine what I would think would violate the spirit of the sport, but that's gonna be different person to person, right?
So I ... there's a gray area acknowledged upfront even on WADA's definitions of what's making their list. So I think it's good for you to point out, like- We're not talking about BPC-157 being a gray area in the sense of is it on the list? There is no TUE for BPC-157. It is banned at all times, period.
And so no gray area in that sense. It's more the cosmic injustice side of we don't really know that much about this. Should it be considered on that list to the extent that it is? Eventually, will we have a protocol for how athletes can use this if there is a proven evidentiary basis that it does, increase recovery and help with recovery from injuries?
A-at some point down the line, we'll probably have answers to those questions. We just don't right now. And so that's why, the term doping isn't helpful w-when applied to every case because you have-- You think of Lance Armstrong, and then you think of some athlete that had a tainted supplement one time or forgot to declare an inhaler.
Both of those things are called doping, but one is a, a regime of purposeful cheating and intimidation of others and probably actual criminal offenses, and then one is an accident. And so we just have this blanket term that doesn't do us any favors in kinda differentiating between individual cases here.
Yeah. Yeah, and just to add to that stuff too, so the listeners that are maybe less familiar with this stuff, like the three criteria that World Athletics works off of, and you need to satisfy two of the three in order for it to end up on the banned substance list, is it has to have potential to enhance or does enhance sports performance, it represents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete, and then, as you said, it violates the spirit of the sport.
So when we're looking at THC, I actually went down a little bit of a rabbit hole yesterday after we started talking about this around THC because I was like, I was a little more curious about, okay, what did WADA actually-- W-what-- Did they-- 'cause they-- I assumed they probably had released a statement at some point where they were like, "This is why we put it here," versus decided to leave it off.
And they said-- Th-they didn't necessarily say that they didn't include potential to enhance performance Because I think there is small amounts of evidence that you can situationally say, "Okay maybe this could help with performance," but it's just way, way less clear and way weaker. But what they really leaned on was it pre- presents an actual or potential health risk to the athlete, 'cause they were saying you're basically you're losing your ability to take care of yourself more or less or you don't have your reaction time slows down, all these different things that are associated with THC.
So they looked at it through a potential health risk, and then they also layered in if you get someone stumbling or... let's use ultrarunning. If you get someone stumbling about a trail erratically, and all of a sudden they start bumping into people or something like that, you can propose a risk, health health risk to others.
And then the other one that I was really interested in 'cause I could understand that one, the actual, the, the health risk potential, is to violate the spirit of the sport, and their argument there was that ki- basically a role model argument of this is a bad example to set if we have our professional athletes out here getting high and using THC, and the kids see that, and then that creates this bad spirit of the sport side of thing.
And you know what my th- first thought was, is like, how does that differ from alcohol? Totally. And, yeah. And I was thinking- So then I got interested about figuring out what WADA is, why WADA, 'cause WADA used to have alcohol on the list. I'm not sure what their thresholds were, 'cause I'm sure there was a threshold- To all of this, and I'll get to some thresholds here, 'cause I think this is also an important thing with respect to some of the current event stuff.
But I think it was 2018 they removed it, and I think they argued that it doesn't violate the spirit of the sport because culturally alcohol has been something that we've engaged with. And I'm just like Okay. And so you could imagine- That just seems like a really silly argument. You could imagine that type of argument being applied to almost anything.
It, so it, it- and even here even if you acknowledge some of the stuff around health and safety with THC THC is y- another gray area is that it's fat soluble. It stays in your system longer than almost anything else. Someone could, a week before the Olympics they compete in an event, they could've been doing coke at a party, and that's gonna be out of their system by the time they take a drug test after their event.
Whereas if they took an edible to fall asleep, that's gonna be in their system. So i- it's like it... There's even within one single category on the list, there's gray areas within the one category. So it is just- it's, I think, a constant theme here that I, I wanna just keep harping on a little bit is just that it is just not totally black and white.
There are black and white cases, but even when it c- sorta seems obvious, if you really drill down into things, it's like maybe there's edge cases here and I think obviously THC is one of those. One other interesting thing I did see when I was looking at the difference between alcohol and THC with respect to its banned versus not banned was the, w- one argument was that alcohol's arc of impact is more predictable.
So okay, if someone gets wasted and is, during a competition their arc of returning back to baseline is more predictable than if someone takes in a bun- takes in an edible versus inhales THC or something like that, which I thought was both interesting and funny.
Yeah. But I should also add, too, because this topic has come up a lot in the comments that I've seen online with the polarization of the thing, too, is people will make an argument where it's like, "THC's on the banned substance list. That's ridiculous. Therefore, to hell with all of it," a mentality of just if this is their, if this is...
Kinda using that as an argument of why we should disrespect the banned substance list. And I think that is based in somewhat of a n- a misunderstanding of what actually is on the banned substance list with respect to THC because, first of all, it's an in-competition- it's banned in competition.
So the idea there is that you're not ... wADA's viewing this as, we don't want you using this when you're, like, within a ri- roughly 24-hour period of when you're competing. Yeah. So since it's not banned out of competition, they try to set the threshold such that if you're using THC, it's very unlikely that if you're not using it during the competition itself or within 24 hours of the competition itself, it will still be in your system at a threshold that would ping a positive test.
So they set that at 150 nanograms per deciliter, which is actually quite a bit higher than a drug test that you would take for an occupation. I think an occupational drug test is quite a bit lower than that. It's maybe 50, 'cause they actually probably care more about you engaging with that product in wider capacities, 'cause you're going into work, roughly 40 hours per week, and if it's in your system, they're probably assuming that it's probably not a first-time type of thing.
But 150 nanograms per deciliter essentially puts it at a situation where you have to be using quite a bit of it, and you have to probably be used- or in some cases you might even have to be using it during your competition timeframe. Yeah. And that gets misrepresented a lot, where I think people use it as an argument to say like I was saying before, this shouldn't
W- we should be suspicious of the entire WADA banned substance list because they seem to be out to lunch on the THC conversation, when in reality their actual policy is quite forgiving with respect to the usage of THC in general. Yeah. I think I've probably been guilty of doing that in the past because if you just look at it at face value, it does seem absurd.
But I, it-- that makes sense. And adding, again, appreciate you adding nuance to the conversation and even pushing my intuitions around there. I think where people make mistakes with any of these things is the extreme positions on either side. So I might be here saying "Yeah, there's gray areas with WADA's list.
There's gray areas with the term doping." But then I don't think that means logically that you can go to the point of saying the list is stupid. The testing regime is useless." That's also not what I'm saying. So it's definitely good to qualify that. A- and I think that, the technical side of things with the threshold in your system a- and everything like that it's good to know with THC, and I'm sure that there's other things it's designed for other substances that like it's designed for that in-competition use.
Because that, that does make more sense, and I'm much more willing to give them kudos for sort of thinking through those final two criteria in regards to how they're testing then, especially given the, s- the specific nature, like I mentioned with THC being fat-soluble and in your system longer.
That- ... that does make a lot more sense. Yeah. And I think it's just worth saying that because when I see these online conversations and debates and arguments occur, a lot of times people will use that where someone is advocating for clean sport, and then someone will try to make them look like a hypocrite essentially and say, "Have you ever used THC?
Because if you've used THC, you broke the..." And it's that's a reach, right? Like- Yeah. It's not a- it falls into that it's like you can't really use that as a cudgel to just win arguments. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's where my, like-- I guess my intrigue with this whole conversation is how do we steer it back to what we're trying to do here today versus those sort of debates, where we have that being used as a cudgel against the clean sport advocates, and then the clean sport advocates being just black and white with respect to, "You should just follow the rules or else don't come here," type of a mentality.
Because we need a lot more education in the sport before we can even expect the average person to go through the protocols required to check their medication and all that stuff which I think is a worthwhile exercise to, to go through, but just so people are aware. But it's also not very helpful to make that argument and use that as a cudgel either, because it doesn't tell anyone what they should be doing or how they should actually be addressing the situation to do better in the- Yeah
at the end of the day. Yeah. I think to me it's like zooming out from, Mike McKnight, Cam Haynes, peptides, any specific case, especially one where i-i-- you know, if -- We'd be having a different conversation if they had admitted to taking EPO, right? We kinda said that upfront, like this is-- it's one of those substances where there's nuance involved here.
But I think instead of focusing on one specific, two specific cases, it's like, what do we wanna see with the evolution of the sport? Do we want there to be some- Progress toward a more Olympic-style testing regime? What are the positives? What are the trade-offs with something like that? For people that don't know to be involved in a WADA, USADA-style testing, you have to give those authorities, it-- like, y- the location you're going to be is, I think it's for at least an hour a day for months ahead of time, so that they can show up and test you randomly.
And that, o-out of competition. And out of competition testing is ultimately how you're going to stop the doping that ultimately amounts to cheating in sport. And that-- it's like, do we want that in trail running? A-and I'm asking that as an open question, because to me, there's obvious trade-offs.
There's, I think one of the things I like about the trail world, the ultra world in general, is that we're just like a-- it's free-spirited. It is a little bit more of this "Hey, I'm gonna go camp for 10 days. I'm not gonna have service, and I'm gonna run some 20-mile routes in the mountains, and I'm gonna spend all day doing, like n-nothing related to, a real society," right?
And you can't really do that if we w-- if we evolved to a point where we have an Olympic-style testing governing body like that. It's just like- Yeah ... that's not gonna work. So it's like, where do we wanna go with this? And I've heard various suggestions. I was talking to another professional who said "I wonder if there's a way to incentivize sponsors to test their own athletes."
Is there a way to incentivize-- i- can professionals opt in to being tested at races and pay an extra fee to that race organization to help provide the money for those tests? What can we do here? But these are the conversations I think we wanna have because I don't think that it's reasonable to just scream into the wind about any in-individual case and expect that any sort of meaningful change will happen.
Yeah. And to highlight the amount of progress is gonna be required to get anything that would resemble an adequate testing is almost And I hate to be like overly negative about this, but like even with the sports that have like what we would consider current gold standard testing to the degree that we have it now there's flaws in it.
Some of them you kinda highlighted too, because like with that protocol that you have where you have your whereabouts testing is what they call it, where you have... it's essentially an app, and you put your-- the way it works is you put your basic standard schedule on there and then if you're gonna deviate from that, you update it.
So when you see people miss these whereabouts tests, oftentimes what happens is they deviated from their normal schedule. They went on, they went somewhere they weren't planning originally, they didn't update their whereabouts. The agent showed up at their s- their, the spot they were supposed to be based on their general schedule, and they weren't there.
And that's why they have the three-strike thing with that, because they assume that it is a complicated enough process where humans are gonna make mistakes, and you could make a mistake. And if you make one mistake with that respect. But that also ends up giving you a situation where if someone's really, wants to be really diligent about their doping protocol, they realize, "I've got two strikes, so if I'm taking something that's gonna be in- out of my sy- system in an X period of time and an agent shows up within that window, I just don't respond."
Yeah. This was the whole Mo Farah thing where there was that whole like controversy around like they said he was like hiding in his house or something, and they were ringing his doorbell, and he just, they said he was probably doping and, and- Yeah ... w- knew he wasn't without, he wasn't outside the clearance window, so he just took one of his strikes as a result.
So I- it, there's all sorts of problems. And then the other thing that you mentioned too is if this gets applied in ultra running, there is these remote camps where if someone really wanted to try to skirt the rules, what they would do is they would go on a remote camp because they know that the likelihood is basically zero that a WADA agent's gonna show up at some random mountain peak in Montana or- Yeah
Or something like that. And we've s- we've seen this in the more tested sports too where you would see professional athletes do camps in areas where there was just way less agent access. So they said, "Okay, there's this percentage of chance I get tested. I'm gonna move it to the very lowest and then go through the protocol with the, in the environment where I'm also less likely to get tested in the first place."
And then to further complicate the inconvenience side of things, if we really wanted to be catching athletes doping with the current protocols that are being used, they would need to be tested in the middle of the night. Because right now the way it's set up is you have an eight-hour window essentially where they just will not, they're not allowed- Like, you don't have to respond to them because everyone else understands you should be able to get a period of time to sleep without being disturbed.
As soon as the doping protocols get to a point where something that's impactful gets in and out of your system in a handful of hours, every one of the athletes who wants to cheat is just gonna take that right before they go to bed, so then when they wake up in the morning, the doping agent maybe shows up first thing in the morning thinking that's the best opportunity to catch them, it's probably already out of their system Yeah, I think, we've, we saw that if anyone was paying attention to the Tour de France with Jonas Vingegaard being woken up at 2:00 a.m.
And imagine it from the athlete's perspective there. You're in the middle of one of the most grueling endurance events in the world, and your sleep is being interrupted by that would be infuriating. And so- Yeah ... I don't-- I have this issue with the overall term clean sport to one or another degree just 'cause it's like what-- There's always gonna be ways to skirt the system.
If anybody's watched that documentary Icarus, it's fascinating how the Russians managed to undo the vials that were totally unbreakable and all, all this stuff. So it's like, like, when the incentives are there, people will figure out a way to do this. So it doesn't seem to me like in trail and ultra-running that if we take half measures that we're really going to do anything particular- to anybody who's particularly motivated to continue cheating.
I was talking to my wife about this yesterday, and she just said maybe the best way to deal with this is to take a sort of hands-off approach like we have, have some testing at some races. And the ultimate punishment is that it-- the, the person who's cheating is kinda sad. They know they're cheating, and it's if you're even a remotely psychologically normal individual that's gonna live in the back of your mind for the rest of your life, and maybe that's a sort of cosmic punishment.
I know that's not a practical A solution in any way necessarily, but I actually-- I don't really see how we're going to get from where we are now to a much, how we're gonna make enough improvements without putting in so much effort that we-- 'cause it's like we either have to go all the way or kinda just stay where we are.
Do you see what I mean? If we spend a bunch of money and we put a bunch of effort into creating, twenty percent of a testing regime, like I just don't think that's gonna do anything, and it's gonna cost a lot of money, and it's going to impact people's lives negatively whether or not they're cheating or not.
And so I just don't know exactly how we get from A to B. Yeah. I think the starting point is probably trying not to make perfect the enemy of good with respect- Yeah ... to what kind of impact you can have versus doing nothing at all. But also not pretending like we live in a fairy tale land either, where like there's this opportunity to have a hundred percent squeaky clean sport because that's just not on the table.
It's not on the table with the professionals who are tested more frequently. It's not on the-- It's certainly not on the table for the middle-of-the-packers, age groupers who are basically never tested. And that's where we-- I think we get into kind of the arguments I see too where I get the feeling that there's some people that are fighting for a scenario in which that occurs, where everyone just gets on board and follows the rules.
And the problem I have with that argument isn't that I don't wish that was the case. It's more so to like we're striving for something that's im- is impossible or impractical to the degree that we risk harming the overall goal of reducing the number of cheating, quote unquote, that goes on because the structures we have in place are based upon this fairy tale outcome and then become this feeding process where someone who otherwise wouldn't cheat ends up cheating.
And my best example of that is like currently, we have a system where if a v-- if an event is regulated, where it's like this is-- we're following the World Athletics or the USATF rules of substance abuse and all that stuff, and everyone should follow these rules. If somebody is going to sign up for that race, and they are using a medication, doctor's approved medication that technically requires them to get a therapeutic use exemption they're tech-- They have one of two choices, which is do I do this event and not disclose or just not do the event?
Other than where I think the next piece is like what do we do to prevent that sort of mindset from occurring- Yeah ... on a regular basis? 'Cause right now I think that is the default mindset of okay, I have this option of going into this event and not saying anything, or not going in at all. When in reality, I think if we had other options that include-- w- within that, that made it easier to make a choice that is more acceptable to the majority of people, we'd see less people just entering events and not saying anything because they have other options.
And one of those options would be, one, just disclose and remove yourself from the results if you know you're o- Like this would be a better one for someone who decided, let's say someone just decides, "Hey, I wanna get on testosterone replacement therapy," which in almost every case is not gonna land you a TUE.
Yeah. Getting a therapeutic use exemption for something heavy-hitting like testosterone is gonna be something where you're going to satisfy, like such a, such an a- an aggressive amount of issues that, they're gonna say, "Yeah, you can get on this," and that's gonna require like a clear diagnosis, like no extra advantage.
So they're basically bringing it to baseline at that point. You have no other choice, meaning that like there was no other path forward for you to remedy this issue you have without getting on testosterone. And then not caused by past behaviors and things that are preventable. So if someone just destroys themselves and then decides to hop on TRT to remedy that, like World Athletics would look at that as no, you'd go through the due diligence of actually trying to build yourself in a way that was, quote-unquote, "natural" for us to allow for that.
But I think that society as a whole is just going to... Especially as we get further along, and this has been my thought process along this as I've watched this stuff occur, things like testosterone replacement therapy, and peptides, and all this stuff, that stuff's gonna get easier to access.
It's gonna get safer, and it's going to get easier to use for people, essentially. Yeah. And once you remove friction from something, there's just gonna be a certain percentage of people who are gonna engage with it. And in some cases, it's probably gonna be something that's good for their overall wellbeing, but it's not an elite sport.
So where do we put those people? Do we have a, a scenario where you can sign up for an event similar to you would in some other sports where you have maybe bodybuilding's one of the better examples of this, where they have their tested and non-tested divisions, where if you're tested, you're, they're assuming you're natural, and if you're non-tested they're just doing whatever they want, essentially.
Yeah. Do we have something like that where when you sign up, and you decide let's say some guy who's in their 50s decides, "Hey, my health and wellbeing's gonna be better if I get on this doctor-approved testosterone replacement therapy. I understand that removes me from being able to qualify for age groups, but I'd still like to do that event.
Can I go in there and check that box that allows me to still participate, but just not get it put in the results?" Yeah, I think that totally makes sense, and that solves the problem outside of the professional realm to me. I- it's like- that's why originally with, post-Cocodona, when it was Cam Haynes who was in the spotlight with BPC 157, I was like, "I just don't care about this."
It's, it, ultimately, if you're not trying to be competitive y- in a, in the, in an ultra I, you can be juiced to the gills, and it just doesn't really matter to me from my perspective, or I really think from, like- A grand arc kind of moral perspective about wanting fairness in sports.
Although I can see it when you relate to age group records and results and stuff like that. So I do get that it is still a factor, but it's just so much less relevant maybe to me at this point in my life that it's hard for me to be like, "Oh, that matters just as much as the professional side."
But I do think outside of the professionals here, if you just had a little checkbox that was like, "I do not wanna be included in competitive results because I am viola- I I'm purposefully violating whatever doping policy the race might have." There's races that don't have any doping policy, and so they're allowed to have that, in which case, who cares?
They're basically the Wild West version of the race. They're the bodybuilding competition that people assume it to be, that doesn't matter, and that's okay, too because you know what you're signing up for. But yeah, I think having that checkbox solves the problem outside of the professional space.
But it does- I don't really see that doing anything to solve the problem within the professional space, where we w- ultimately someone who's, is attempting to gain a competitive advantage is, never going to admit to that because it's like that's outside of the financial incentives.
It's not as if they're willing to cheat in one way, it's not as if they're willing to be honest in another way. So I- it's it's ... they're two separate kinds of conversations in my mind. And I think that ultimately, like right now, all we're doing outside of a few races is drug testing, all we're doing is relying on the norms of competitive sport, which are just this total pie in the sky idealist's fantasy.
Like you've kinda said, where there's just like we've gotta address the human nature problem, I think, before we actually are gonna be able to figure out a way forward. Yeah, it's like the the sim- the, the problem-solving scenario is like some sort of like indisputably 100% accurate lie detector test
Yeah . Or I guess a way to test where it was cheap, easy to do, and could basically unearth everything you could possibly have done, which I think is, ... now you, then you're getting into a lot of just like health infringement type stuff. But a- and just, a- again, at this point, fairy tale stuff.
So scenarios until that something would get developed that could actually get us to that level of rigor. The one thing I do find that's worth talking about that I haven't yet with respect to that, where do we carve out access points for people who would otherwise disclose? Because I actually, like I get this is an individual thing to some degree, but I'd put a big emphasis on personally for so- someone who's like willing to be upfront about this stuff.
Yeah. If someone is willing to ... Like me, I find it way less agreeable when somebody gets caught and they were just kinda hiding it and we caught them versus someone who's just "Yeah, I do this stuff," and then, but then also participated. It's like, okay this person like clearly wasn't trying to hide, and their biggest agree- the, the biggest thing they did was they said okay, actually come and tell me I can't come into this event versus ver- versus them actually like self-policing that side of things where they're going into the fine print of this to determine whether like this is a tested or like a, a banned substance event or one that just doesn't do any sort of have any sort of regulations with regards to that.
Because, like, when if a person's gonna be upfront about it, I think when you have an honor code system in place, that's really like the best we can expect out of people is to be upfront and honest about what they're doing at the end of the day, and then course-correct for mistakes in a way that's charitable to them so they don't feel like them being transparent was such a bad idea that they'll never wanna do it again, or more importantly, the people who are watching them.
And I think that's one of the things that I find to be the most potentially problematic and kinda gets to, like I was talking about in the beginning, where sometimes activism I think works counter to the actual goal, is I saw a lot of people watch the Cam Hayne stuff and think to themselves, "That's what transparency gets me."
And now all of a sudden there's a group of people who maybe would've otherwise been upfront and transparent about that are feeling like, "Yeah, I better keep this under wrap because- Yeah ... if I don't, then, people are gonna be telling me that I can't do what I wanna do and get themselves..."
Or just eliminate a scenario where we start thinking about this proactively and then give them a path forward with transparency. So I do worry about that. Yeah, 100%. I think you're right about that, and I think you have to respect the fact that Cam and Mike both were upfront about the use of BPC 157.
Especially Mike, because I think he knew from v- like watching Cam's experience what was about to happen to him. Yes. So I think he kn- he knew what was gonna-- that this was gonna be a bit of a firestorm for his life. And so I do respect the fact that they were honest about it, and that's part of what inspired me in the article I wrote to just be honest about the fact that I, prophylactically used prednisone, which is also on the banned substance list f- during Cocodona to help deal with the, my, my previous breathing problems that I had there.
And I'm sure, I don't know the actual names of what's in my inhaler that I was using, but I'm sure those are on the substance list too. So I would i, i- in a world where we were being tested, and I had, I've reached out to Aravaipa about this, I would have had to get TUEs for both of those things, which I am quite confident I would've been able to obtain with my s- history of very serious medical concerns at that race.
But without the incentives t- to be transparent, like you're talking about, then we just have this anomalous space where people can look at, let's just, I'll just use myself as an example at Cocodona, look at my performance this year and be like, "Hey what changed from l- the previous years?
Like, how was he able to not end up in the ICU half dead this year, and then was this just magic?" I don't know, I could talk about allergy shots, but that's only half the story. And so hopefully, if we can establish a bit of a more welcoming space for that kind of transparency, then we can have these conversations.
Because ultimately one of the things that also just, I think, gets missed, especially in relation to ultras, is just, like, how bad these are for your health at the moment. Like when I w- ended up in the ICU after Cocodona, I had a bunch of blood tests done, and I showed them to my friend who's an ER doctor, and she was like your blood markers are, like, you're basically slowly dying.
You're, like, y- you're, like, entering early stage kidney failure. Your markers of cardiac tissue breakdown are really high." And sure, I was having other medical issues on top of it. Let's just cut everything in half. But still, you're doing something incredibly extreme. And so when we have this extreme sport, extreme endurance capacity, and w- mental willingness to go through that, there's gonna be this aspect where potentially, and definitely, I think, in many cases, it's gonna be safer to be using things on that list to just not even gain a competitive advantage, but just survive in a sense.
Like in, in my case, I don't think prednisone was making me a better athlete other than it was helping me avoid h- getting pulmonary edema again because of allergic reactions, and so it's like, where's the balance here? Where's- What do we want to establish as far as the norms of people pushing themselves past boundaries that potentially medications could have helped them fix?
Does that make sense as a question to ask, yeah. And h- here's where I would place that, 'cause if we're looking, if we truly wanna look at fair sport and even playing fields, you didn't do anything to acquire that allergy. You didn't go out and do s- something stupid and got that allergy.
That's just something you were born with. So if we're looking at it through the lens of how do we create a level playing field that with situations like that where they're trying to get you to be able to perform like a normal human being would in that environment with respect to your ability to breathe when you're exposed to that particular plant that triggers that for you or environment that triggers that for you.
I think most people would probably think that yeah, if that's the, if that's the case, then why not? It's not yeah, it's not something, it's not like EPO or something where you're going to also acquire this additional benefit that goes above and beyond your physiological capabilities.
It's just removing a variable that is arguably not intended to be there with respect to limiting your performance. I guess someone could make an argument though that they'd say "Hey, that's just the cost of doing sport," and like- Yeah ... "Too bad for you. You can't do Cocodona. Pick a different event."
I, I, if there's gonna be a counter to it, I guess that would maybe be it. But I think most people probably would be more sympathetic to that scenario. And to to touch on what you said too, it's like you reached out to Aravaipa and they basically told you, "Don't bother," and I think that's probably because they either are aware that if you were to go through the therapeutic use exemption process, you would get cleared for that particular scenario.
And I think that's the next piece to this que- this topic is just what does the average person do in a situation like that if they decide to themselves, "Hey, I wanna make sure I'm doing this right and following the events like- policies with that 'cause I think some of this gets scary to people because they think asthma in the endurance world is like something like 15 to 25%. Huge, yeah. So yeah, we can assume a good percentage of people are on some sort of medication or inhaler, and I think when people of that population hear these topics, they probably feel bad. They probably feel like, "Oh, I've been cheating this whole time," when in reality, this goes back to what I was kinda saying before.
This is where it's really important to get into that gray area and the nuance of TUE use or TUE processing is because a lot of these people probably aren't. Because a lot of the introductory inhalers for things like asthma and stuff like that, if you go on... So if someone really wants to test this, I'll give you an example of what I've done in the past.
So I'll give you a current example, actually. So I had a blood clot this summer, so I had something come out of left field that was like unpredictable, I didn't realize was the case Never crossed my mind that a blood clot would be a scenario which pulled me off of a starting line of a race, and that I would end up in the hospital with it, and things like that.
And one of the, one of the things they do when you end up in the ER with a blood clot is they put you on a blood thinner to make sure that clot stops progressing, and that it doesn't break off and turn into a pulmonary embolism. So they put me on a blood thinner called Eliquis. So immediately I'm on medication, right?
So my first thought is like, "Okay I should check to see what this means for me, because if it's something I have to be on for a longer period of time, I need to know whether it's something that could potentially get me into a situation where I need to apply for a TUE," and stuff like. So I go onto a website called Global DRO.
And you enter that medication, and then it'll tell you whether it's totally unregulated, meaning you can just kinda use it as the doctor prescribed, or if it's in competition versus out of competition. And then on top of that, they'll give you thresholds too. So if it's something where it's like it's permitted out of competition, it's regulated in competition, but you can use it below this threshold because this just brings you back to normal versus become-- creating some sort of safety issue or performance benefit.
And that particular product cleared all of that. And but as someone on an inhaler for asthma, they're probably gonna go on there, and they're gonna do that same process that I just described there. And in most cases, they're gonna find out that their inhaler is regulated to some degree, but it's below a threshold they're probably not using.
So their doctor will tell them "For your asthma, you should take X number of puffs per day or X number of puffs per this timeframe." And then if they go on World-- If they go onto the Global DRO website, and it's something where let's say they're doing four puffs per day, and Global DRO's threshold to it being illegal is 20 puffs per day they're not engaging with that product to the degree where they even need to fill out a TUE.
So we have a whole group of people that I fear sometimes see some of these conversations and think "Oh man, am I cheating?" And it's like, no, you're not probably cheating. And even if you are on something that goes over the threshold that would be regulated with that sort of stuff, there is... And this brings up another topic: what expectation should we have for a middle of the-- a random middle-of-the-packer who has asthma and is on an inhaler?
Should they have to go and fill out a TUE? The other interesting thing I found with that too is like you actually can do that. Like my thought was that they would-- like that was maybe not even an option available. Apparently, it is, which I think begs the question of like what happens if people in the, the entire community uniformly starts actually engaging with that protocol?
Or that probably overruns the system. I can't imagine they have the infrastructure- Yeah ... to tolerate that level of inquiry. They do have a pre-register form you can fill out. And just, it kinda basically clears the, or answers a bunch of questions as to whether you even need to fill out a TUE.
So you go, you have to get through that before you get to the TUE process of filing that form and all that stuff. But so a lot of people are probably gonna fill that out, and they're just gonna get sent back saying, "Hey, this isn't-- you're not engaging with this product in a way where you need a TUE." And then they're just gonna go back to using it the way they had before in what is a totally normal manner that no one would, no one should necessarily care about.
But then the ones that do go above that, and they do have that whole, like they've met all those requirements by documenting, getting the doctor's notes and all that stuff, and they file for the TUE. I wonder about just like the structural capacity to tolerate that 'cause then we're back to that same thing, like we have this honor code regulating these folks.
Is the incentive for them to still go in and fill out that TUE, or is it something where they could look at it and be like, "This would be a T-- I would get a TUE for this if I went through that process, so I'm not even gonna bother doing it because I'm not gonna get tested anyway." I don't really know what the direction that would be more preferable in that scenario would be when given the whole honor code regulatory process that we currently have.
Yeah, if I'm thinking about being that middle-of-the-pack runner, and many athletes I coach are in that kind of realm, it's like fizzy jobs, family, super time-consuming passion with ultra-running. Do we-- Like how much do we really wanna throw in this time-consuming, complicated process to them, it's-- I just-- This-- that's why with the Cam Haynes thing, it's just like I just don't-- I, I-- It doesn't strike me as something super necessary to address, and I'm sure that I'm, like, cutting out, like with age group competition and masters records and that thing.
But it's unless you're-- u-unless there is real financial gain from you within the sport that doesn't have to do with you having your own platform already, it's like I'm just not that worried about the TUEs and this minutiae for those people. I'm sure there's gonna-- you could bring up a case where I would be-- I would see the merit, but I just-- It's, it-- I'm s- I'm much more-- And maybe it's just 'cause of where I am in the sport right now and who I am friends with and who I happen to, to be thinking about when I'm talking about these things.
But I'm just so much more focused on the 10, 20, 30 people who are racing for the win than I am for people below that as far as these different forms of potentially violating rules and norms versus what we want to change those rules and norms to be. Does that all ma-- Does that kinda make sense?
Yeah. Yeah, I would say, like-- So wh-what would your thought then be with-- so you know how-- Have you ever seen, like, when they do these USATF championships for track, and they have the 80 to 84 division, you'll see these old guys and old women sprinting the 100-meter dash and stuff like that?
Yeah. What would you do about that group? 'Cause, 'cause I think that's where that argument kinda gets to- Ah ... if you take it to its conclusion, is is it hypocritical of us as athletes who are competing for podium spots, records and course wins, and things like that, to think that a person in that scenario shouldn't also want the same level of potential even playing field as us?
Man, m- honestly, my first reaction is I'm like, there's a certain age where you should probably be on all the juice 'cause- ... you're like, you're deteriorating anyway, I do think there's gonna be, A- and I'm gonna use an example that I know a little bit about, but not very much, and so I'm gonna be as vague as possible.
But like when women are going through menopause there's a lot of different hormonal interventions that doctors can do to help ease that process. I'm sure a lot of those hormonal interventions would violate some kind of either rule or norm with fair sport in relation to WADA or kind of any of the over-- the, the organizations in charge of these things.
But- It sh- it just seems like we should be able to figure out a way where any given individual can do A, what is best for their health, but also still compete. And it's like maybe there's like an age bracket where, okay, here's where the rules become a little bit more expansive and we make it easier to get TUE for testosterone replacement therapy or things that are harder to get when you're, in your prime at the peak of possible human performance.
So maybe there's like this ladder of expanding criteria that allows for more flexibility as, as people get older because I do think from a just pure longevity perspective, like there's not gonna be that many 80-year-olds able to compete the way they might want to be without some sort of like significant intervention that could potentially violate the rules, right?
So I just-- I, I see how complicated that could become, but it's just like my latitude for potential actions based on wanting to optimize for health as a human being expands greatly as you zoom further out from here are the people competing at the very peak of the sport regardless of age.
Yeah. I think that those are some interesting points too, 'cause I th- I think there actually is like a medical path forward for menopause. I don't know to what breadth in terms of-- 'cause there's obviously more than one route you can take with that process. I think a lot of the standard ones though, you actually can get a clearance for that.
And that kind of... That's actually an interesting topic as a whole too, 'cause I think people are maybe less aware of how much medical-based stuff you can actually get clearance for. It just requires doing all the work required to go through that process. So this is where I think the BPC 157 is just complicated because let's imagine a world where the BPC 157 gets through the human trials that we need, and it's determined to be safe and effective for certain situations.
Let's just use Mike's example 'cause that's the one everyone's familiar with at the moment, let's say they re-redetermine in the next couple years that if someone has a debilitating back issue that... My understanding is Mike's back issue goes back to when he was a kid too, right? Didn't he have an accident at a ski resort or something like that?
Yeah, he had a ski accident where he broke his back, and so he, if you see, he posted a picture of his MRI- Yeah ... and he's got a whole structure in his spine, yeah. So l- let's say we get to a point where BPC-157 is determined to be a viable step to take before you decide to go to surgery with respect to helping a situation like that.
In that scenario, Mike is able to go and file for a medical use exemption to probably get that procedure done, just like if someone got in a massive car accident and ended up in the hospital, and they put him on all sorts of stuff to, keep them alive and which probably goes across some sort of regulatory stuff in some cases.
Then, no one's gonna argue that a person shouldn't be able to rehab themselves back from that car accident in a way that the doctors deem the most appropriate in the meantime before they get back to competing. So I think the issue with the BPC-157 is we have this cross
We have this g- knowledge gap that we're trying to close at the moment as to where that actually fits within that so that the governing bodies are actually able to grant a medical exemption for something like that. And right now they just don't have that, so it's basically on their list just basically outright banned, which I think just almost overcomplicates the question because that's just not a normal situation.
Usually the products that people are using and leaning on have been put in this position where there's a path forward for medical clearance if they meet the criteria. It just happens that this one is caught in that kind of transition phase of development and wherever it ends up.
It could als- I should just be clear, it could also go the other direction where they determine, "Hey, there's a big safety risk with this," or there's- Yeah ... this just plain doesn't work, so we would never require you, we would never give you a, a pass for this because all the evidence points towards it not helping you in any way that would be good for your pers- p- specific medical condition.
But I'm trying to imagine that world where it would get to that point, because then we're having a totally different conversation. Then we're having a k- conversation around Mike making a decision where he should have gone through the process first and then got the clearance to do it, so he's ... there i- th- there is a retroactive process you can do.
They're gonna weigh h- they're gonna They're gonna probably still penalize a professional athlete for not ... They're gonna argue they should know better, and that they should have got- ... done that preemptively. But if you're just some random middle-of-the-packer and you're on a banned substance for a medical reason, and you admit to it, and then all of a sudden you're getting approached about that, they're all
The actual process is much more friendly to that person, where they can- Yeah ... oftentimes retroactively address that- ... assuming they're able to actually check all the boxes and not have any sort of penalty. I don't know how or if that ever happens, just because I don't know what scenario in which the testing bodies are going to be, like, coming after a middle-of-the-packer anyway.
But in theory, it would be easier to retroactively get that clearance without having a, a ban placed on you, or a suspension- Yeah ... I should say I think you're right that it's totally possible five, 10 years down the line that we're in a different world in regards to BPC 157. And if we take the anecdotal evidence and the somewhat small amount of animal-based trials essentially that show possibilities for increased healing of tendons, muscles, bones, that sort of thing, i- if we assume that all of that's going to shake out in a way that is positive, then hopefully we end up in a world where people can get those medical use exemptions, and we can help athletes avoid surgeries.
Imagine if we could prolong every ... y- let's look at someone like Lionel Messi. It's if we have the best soccer player ever tearing his ACL c- like in the middle of his career, that could potentially affect him forever. And if we have a way to intervene that's non-surgical, less risky, and prolongs this person's career, all of us benefit, not just that individual.
Because we as fans theoretically want to see this person succeed because it's for entertainment and to see what humans are capable of. So it's like we could end up in a world where we're able to do that, and I also say in the article I wrote, and you just mentioned it too, we could also end up in a world where we find out where BP- that BPC 157 causes heart failure two decades down the line because of some mechanistic process that we currently don't understand.
There's also just this whole other added piece where it's a black market drug at this point, and you don't really know what you're getting. It's, it I... There was one other study I looked at that I didn't mention in the article, but that was like tested, 20 different companies claiming to provide BPC 157, and something like 40% of them didn't even have the peptide in what they were claiming was the peptide.
So it's like you could just be getting something totally different. And so like to me, there's this like a definite risk factor there with like you don't know what you're getting, and I'm sure that there's more or less reputable sources for these things. So all of that being said, it's like there's one or two worlds I think we're like likely to end up in regards to the peptide in particular, and it's possible that we end up looking back at this whole Mike McKnight, Cam Hanes kind of brouhaha thinking they were on the edge of something that ended up being really helpful."
If ultimately this conversation expands to the point of how we can adopt a specific protocol for a medical intervention that turns out to be successful, we'll probably look back and thank those two for urging this conversation onward, so to one or another degree, right? But we don't know for sure.
There's just so-- You just don't know. And like- ... that's the big gray area. New-- That's the big injection of nuance that we want here. It's like nobody knows enough about BPC-157 to be able to confidently state almost anything at this point. And so that's-- Like, the fact that it's o-even on WADA's list is I guess they're r-probably relying on the phrase and the poten- Safety and probably spirit of the sport, I would guess.
Or they might actually- I would s- ... argue performance. Yeah, I was gonna go, you could probably make an argument for all three. The safety one I think is obvious, and then the potential for increasing performance is there 'cause recovery is performance. I think that's a legitimate point. And you can see how it fits those criteria, but it doesn't fit them in a way that, you-- we talked right at the beginning of the conversation about how the word doping is being applied to all these different situations.
It doesn't fit them in a way where I highly doubt, and right up front, I'm friends with Mike, I'm friends with Cam, I like them both, so I could totally be thinking through my biased lens here. But I really doubt that Mike was sitting there thinking, "I wanna gain a competitive advantage." I want to-- Do y-y-- I don't think there's any intention to do wrong to his fellow competitors in the way that if you were doing EPO, there obviously would be.
So I'd like, from a cosmic justice lens that has nothing to do with a given set of rules, I just doubt that he was doing something that we could be like, "That's, that is a moral wrong," as much as it is a violation of the rules. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I think it also highlights a a, a thi- something I've been thinking about with this topic as a whole too, and it kinda goes back to what you were talking about before is like maybe we should be more aware of potentially older athletes being able to preserve their livelihood for longer periods of time.
I think it's one of those things where, like- If we just take BPC-157 out of the discussion, or it can be part of it, but just one of many things, like these sort of things like that, those are developing and gonna continue to develop, and I just don't see a scenario in which 10 years from now we don't have better av- like drugs and medicines available to help with things like recovery or surgery preven- prevention, things like that, or just general higher quality of life where, you know, as a human species we've accepted this natural progression of just you get to this age and these things happen.
You get to that age and these things happen. And if we do-- Let's just scen- build a scenario where we come up with like this, this range of drugs where it's like basically rock solid strong evidence that they don't have a meaningful enough downside to combat the upside of somebody's quality of life being better than the physical detri- deterioration that occurs as you get older.
How does sport even grapple with that? Because it is something where you have to decide then I participate in sport, therefore I'm gonna age like these like historic humans while all the rest of society is moving on to these new classes of drugs that are extending quality of life by a noticeable margin."
Or does at that-- Is that something where we can just say, "Hey, that's a bridge sport's gonna have to cross when we get there, but we're not there yet," and in theory there's a path forward where maybe we start making those sort of scenarios a little more applicable when we get to that point? I think it's-- I think the answer is what you just said, in that we're not quite there yet, and I don't know.
We're clear... Just the fact that you and I are having this conversation and haven't been able to particularly articulate this very obvious path forward to deal with the substances we have now. Like we-- there's no way that we can have the conversation to be like, "What about regenerative medicine in the future?"
Yeah. It's like-- so I do think it'll be a bridge we cross when we get there, but I also-- I do think it's a bridge we will have to cross because if you listen... And I don't know how much weight-- it's not like I'm even close to an expert on the topic, but if-- I've listened to plenty of podcasts with people all involved in the regenerative medicine space, and it's not that uncommon to be listening to one of those and have these people say "It's the, the baby boomers are the last generation that's gonna s-continue to die at eighty years old."
We're going to start extending lifespans with relative frequency to a hundred, hundred and twenty years. And so I do think, I wanna be involved in that project, right? Like I'd love- Yeah ... to see, I've like-- Personally, I have a goal of living at least to 2100 so that I can live through three different centuries, you know- Interesting
or live in three different centuries. I think that's cool. So i-if if those come along I wanna be a part of that process just as much as the next person, as long as the people I love are there with me, and so from a human perspective we've got to be open to the idea that the rules, the norms, the ideas we have about this will change.
And I think if you're-- if we're just grasping onto an older world that at some point is no longer going to exist, I think that will be a shame for everyone involved. But that's-- I do think it's a future problem. I think it's probably a nearer term problem than many people think.
But yeah, it's-- I, I don't think yet that we've got it figured out enough to where, with very few exceptions, there's not many 50 to 60-year-olds competing at the very top of the sport anymore. Or at this point, there are-- again, there are exceptions, obviously, like Ludovic's winning Hardrock.
Jeff Browning's still going strong, incredibly, and so there's like these people you-- who are like bright stars that ultimately someone young like me wants to shoot for that kind of longevity. But I do think we're gonna see that more and more. And if that-- when-- as that becomes common, it's going to elicit questions of "All right, so what are these people doing?
What can I do to be more like that?" And I think once we have "Hey, here's this list of medical interventions or lifestyle interventions or a combination of both that you can do to extend your career, to extend your longevity, to extend your health span and your lifespan accordingly," sport's gonna have to adjust to that because, athletes are humans, and it's just not going to-- it would be so unfair to let that evolution pass people by just because, "Oh we want some-- we want, air quotes, 'purity' in, in running," or whatever the activity happens to be.
Yeah. The reality is in an alternative universe and i-if Nike developed the drug class, it would get accepted immediately. Yeah. But that's actually something that I find interesting about this topic too, because when I think about what is this-- how is the sport gonna respond to technology? 'Cause we do have precedent with that.
Sport's been around forever; we've seen it adapt to technology over the years. The big one in our lifetime has been super shoes, right? That's something where at the top end of that market, you're looking at upwards to five percent efficiency, which can translate to two to three percent performance benefit.
That's huge. We're getting up into- Huge ... like heavy hitter performance enhancement territory with that sort of a return. And the one thing I found-- found really interesting was how quickly the running world adopted that. It was something where I thought to myself when I first started seeing some of those initial claims come out with Nike's ZoomX foam- Was that I was like, "Huh, I wonder if this is gonna be, like, distasteful enough to a group of people that I thought prior to that would be a little more resistant to the whole spirit of the sport argument," right?
Like how is that the spirit of the sport to introduce a product that has a 3% performance improvement? And it was generally accepted by everybody. It was just like, I was really surprised how quickly... there were some rumblings in the earliest parts where I think, and there still are, but there were some rumblings about, "Oh, should we really do this?"
But it kinda skated through that pretty effortlessly to the point where now when you go to any big city marathon or road race, it's hard to find people that aren't engaging with some sort of performance foam. Yeah. And I think that's probably a sign of like maybe there's some variance in people's psyche with respect to this is a product I put on my foot and I take off my foot, so you kinda have that option to go with or without it versus, a class of drugs that are lifestyle-enhancing improvements that people would start taking on a more frequent basis with low risk in a hypothetical world being something where there's really-- you can't really go back at that point.
You've already engaged with it and it's their sort of type of a thing. Maybe they behave differently around that, but generally speaking, I think the sporting world has shown that it's open enough to technological advancements changing the sport drastically that if we get to that point and those questions start getting asked by the right people and the right organizations, it'll be something that they just start to treat differently than we do currently or accommodate in a different manner.
Yeah. That's an interesting example too because we have another sport in swimming that totally went the opposite direction with- Yeah ... we, there were super suits around for a long time that helped a little bit with flotation and, having... I was in early high school I think when they got banned, so I was a competitive swimmer when the super suits were around, and I do remember them.
They made an obvious difference and- ... swimming went the opposite direction and totally banned them. And a- and just recently, the last super suit world record was broken, but it took a long time. And so y- I do think there's two obvious paths that you can take, and I don't know. Hopefully, the super suit one and the outside of the body tech that could help has less to do with the human flourishing piece.
And so hopefully if you're adding in the kinda regenerative medicine, that sort of tech that we are able to have the conversation outside of a pure performance perspective and we can talk about the totality of being a human being. But I do foresee there being conflict at l- at the very least on the edges of all of these developments.
Yeah. Yeah, there's, there, there'll always be detractors no matter what. Yeah. Totally. Or hyper advocates too, for that matter. It's both ends of the spectrum. So- you've already got that. You've got Bryan Johnson- The biohackers yeah. Yeah, which, it's like I get so frustrated by this whole conversation where I see people who are, like, clearly unhealthy, like physically unhealthy, being like, "I stop optimizing for everything.
It can't be healthy to optimize for everything." Yeah. And I'm like, "Okay you might be making a reasonable point, but you could clearly be served by optimizing for things a little bit more." And then you see the biohacker side where they're, like, measuring nightly erections, and you're just like, "What?"
"What, what's happening here?" This is totally insane. And so I, it's like I, again, it's like the two poles there are d- absolutely bonkersville crazy, but somewhere in the middle is the path towards- There's some sanity in there somewhere ... actual flourishing. Yeah it's insane. Yeah. Yeah.
It w- it is interesting because like we definitely live in a time frame where technology advances quite quickly. It's not a slow grind the way it maybe would have been in the past. So I think just our ability to have to respond to these things are also on fast-forward, which, it's, it, p- it's the complicated part of it too, and I think that's probably where a lot of that BPC 157 lands is the whole like the accelerated s- pace at which these things are moving now versus our ability to reformulate and catch up and provide the evidence of safety and all that stuff just is a little bit behind where it would need to be in or- in a perfect world, and that's how we get into these situations.
Yeah. And you just throw in their human propensity to tribalism, the inefficiency of bureaucratic regimes. It's like we have a lot of work to do in order to properly address the many things that we know are coming our way along with what we know is already here. And that's why it's good to have these conversations.
I think both of us approach these things in a similar way, in terms of being open-minded and you have much more technical knowledge than I do, and so it's like I-- that's why I always appreciate listening to you about these things. But it's the black-and-white thinking that is going to grind, like throw, throw sand into the gears and stop them actually grinding because it-- that, that doesn't propel anything forward.
That doesn't change the conversation. It doesn't even open up avenues for suggestions. It's just like it's, it-- that's the death of progress, nuance, all of those things that we actually want to see both in society and in the space that we occupy. Yeah. Yeah, I'd had one other topic that I think is probably worth introducing here that kind of fits within all the stuff we've talked about, where we looked at like the professional side of athletics and that being like this focus point because there is the career aspect to it versus like, all right, this is a hobby and, it's not necessarily impacting people's, other people's careers in a meaningful way with respect to the doping and cheating in sport.
What are your thoughts like influencer stuff? Because that's something where you don't necessarily need to be performing in most cases, not performing at the very top of the sport. So you're sitting at this like at best probably sub-elite category or lower, but you are doing this like oftentimes like human development, like performance chasing activity that you're showcasing, drawing attention to yourself, and therefore monetizing and making, in some cases, a lot more money than the athletes are.
Do you think that changes the calculus at all with respect to-- 'cause that's a totally unregulated group of people as well, where no one's really testing those people unless they end up actually getting good enough to get within some sort of professional side of the sport. But they're very much flourishing and career-oriented with respect to their endeavors.
Oh, much more complicated, I think the influencer scene. It's just, it's so strange from a s- ugh. Speaking as someone... We all- I talked to you about this for my article that I wrote a while back about influencers and interviewed you and Dylan Bowman, and so we all kinda came at this from a similar point of view of having this professional side of our careers, but also this influencer side.
And so there's this, I have so many complicated and contradictory feelings about the entire influencer economy, period, that inform- Yeah ... how I feel about this specific question as well. But to focus on the substance, performance-enhancing drugs kinda question I think there's two, two different questions here.
One is the, the, the moral quandary of people recommending unsafe things. And so- ... bPC-157 is since we've been talking about that it's useful to focus on. The actual outside of fair sport and somewhat related but ethical quandary that seemed dubious to me with Mike McKnight in particular was that he said he recommended the peptide to athletes he coaches, right?
And that, I could see those conversations going two ways 'cause I could see him saying, "I used this thing. I think it helped me. Do with that what you will." Or I could see him- which I don't really find problematic at all 'cause that's just honesty, or I could see him saying, "You should take this," in which I do think that is problematic given it's still what we don't know about it, right?
So there's two different menus for, or two different avenues for that kinda conversation to go. And so if you picture that sort of same dichotomy in relation to influencers, it's like if an influencer's being honest about what they're taking, they're telling people about their experience with the thing, and they're saying, "I'm not an expert.
This is what I do. Here you go. Informa- that's it. You are getting one anecdote." Then I do think the more responsibility falls on individuals consuming that content to make their own decision. But i- if a person is saying, "Here's what I do. This works. You should go do it, too," again, there's there's, that, that's a very different thing.
If you think about free speech and where in the law where we draw lines there's a difference between saying, "I wish so and so didn't exist," versus, "You should go kill this person." Like- ... the first one, distasteful, not good. Second one, illegal, right? And then it's similar in the moral sense with the influencers, I think.
All of that being said , I think there's real gray in between the two poles there where- I do certainly believe that there are, are people in the ultra space, people in the lifting space who are n- have financial incentives to use their platforms, both probably because they're partnered with companies selling dubious products, but also because their use of said products also gets them more clicks and follows.
So there's like this, again, where you circle back to incentive structures that we've talked about a lot. I do think that one in particular is both very muddled and par- and concerning I don't know. I talked to one person originally when Mike McKnight stuff started to kick off on social media, who was like, "I think the influencer problem, that is the problem with doping in the sport of ultrarunning."
And I don't agree with that. I think that it's probably a problem at the, the, the top of the sport from a performance perspective more than it is a problem of the influencers. And so I think the influencers have more of a problem. They-- I see them causing more of a problem on the societal level, where we could be encouraging people to, A, take unsafe things, B, be experimental in ways that may end up harming them in the future.
And it's like what you talked about with your diet. You were very careful as a low-carb athlete to say, "This is what I'm doing," and not be proselytizing, and I think there's not that many people that draw that boundary for themselves, right? So this is a really complicated way of-- I don't even know if I actually answered any questions, but vomited a lot of just "Ah, God, I don't know how to deal with that," at you.
But it is just not-- I don't have clear thoughts about that whole venue, because I don't even have clear thoughts about the influencer economy as a whole. As a whole. It's all so muddled. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It creates a lot of scenarios where I think it gets easy to start contradicting yourself quickly, regardless of how you feel about it.
So then it becomes this really hard-- And it's new enough, too, right? It's like this isn't something that we've been grappling with for a tremendous amount of time in the grand scheme of things. So it's another one of those things where we're trying to adjust to this landscape in a very quickly accelerated fashion.
And you said something that I found interesting, too, 'cause my general thought is I value transparency, because if I see someone doing something, I wanna know how they got there and what those inputs were. So if I'm being-- If information's being withheld, then I have a misconception of what it actually took.
So I value transparency for that, that regard. But with the influencer community, you do have that situation where it's in the name, right? Influencer. So if they're doing something, the assumption is that people are going to follow suit more or less. So then it's like maybe you don't want them to be transparent about certain things, because if it's something that would be derogatory to the degree where it's harmful to the people listening and following them- That could be a problem.
I think at the end of the day, I would still value transparency, and I would hope they would leave it with a caveat where they were like, "This is a fri-" like if they're doing something that's fringe and potentially dangerous that doesn't have a lot of evidence behind it just be upfront and say that too, and just say, "Hey this is a risk and this is the risk involved here.
Don't assume because I'm doing it, it's perfectly safe." I think that would probably clear the bar for me personally with respect to whether I find it to be preferable or not preferable, because then I think it's on the person listening to do their homework and say "Okay, this person was upfront about the risks of this.
If I'm gonna engage with it, I have to be awa- I'm now aware of those risks, and if I'm not doing any further homework to decide if I wanna do it or not, then that's on me at that point," because I don't think we need to get to a place in society where we're, like, we're nannying everything up to such a degree that, yeah you have to assume everyone's this vulnerable victim and can't make a decision for themselves either.
Yeah, 100%. I agree with everything you just said with the added dose of cynicism that I just don't think that is ever likely to happen. It's a fairy tale world. Yeah, it's I just I wish that- And I like for me, I personally attempt to, like if I'm talking to an athlete I will give them my opinions on diet, right?
Like me, I'm not a dietician, but I'll give them my opinions. And I always caveat it with "I am not an expert. This is what I do. I'm not recommending this to you." I'm just like, "I will answer questions honestly," but I will just caveat it like crazy, right? But that requires this upfront effort and self-reflection to know that my little dose of anecdotal evidence doesn't apply to the rest of the world.
And we already talked about how much people love the anecdote, people love the personal story, and that's just one thing that I see so often when talking with other people is they put so much weight on that piece of evidence. They put so much weight on the story their friend has told them about something.
"I did this. It worked for me." And they're like, "I know someone who that happened to," and like that affects the way they view the world so much more than looking at a statistical analysis being like, okay, 2% of people have had success with that thing. Sure, 2% of the population is some number of millions of people, but ultimately it's not a safe bet, and it's like that's a, that's such a like a com- it's not that complex, but it's complex over i-i-in the communication channels that influencers are operating. Like that is a difficult message to put in a 15-second clip that's not gonna be ratioed by the Instagram algorithm.
Yeah. And how do you, how do we deal with that? There's so many features of that particular conversation that are like so separate from, the, the doping Instagram and like what is, what PEDs are these is person A, B, or C on? Like there's so many features on a societal level that we'd have to correct to be able to get to our own little niche and be able to make it healthier in that regard that I just like I don't even know how to, I don't even know how to start.
Yeah. Yeah. Because it, it does, th- this is just something that doesn't just affect our world. Like we are such a niche community and so I bet that this conversation is happening in huge ways in other venues that we don't hear about because we are in our own little bubble, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We covered a lot, that's for sure. Yeah. So hopefully it was engaging enough across the board that people will listen to all of it, but I think we definitely how- how about this? If you didn't listen to all of it, then don't comment as if you did. That's an excellent piece of advice.
I actually put that in the cap- Maybe I should've said that in the beginning. Yeah. I put that in the caption of my Instagram post with my Substack article in it. I was like- Yeah ... if, I'm not gonna respond to comments if people don't seem like they read it. So m- maybe we filtered out the level one arguments because the people that are making the level one arguments are probably not gonna listen to a two-hour podcast in the first place, yeah. They're like, "These two guys are droning on forever." Awesome. Kilian, you know it's always fun to chat with you. I'm glad we were able to kinda have our ideas kind of collide a little bit with respect to your Substack article and this topic for the podcast episode. Before I let you go, if you don't mind, just sharing where people can find you the Substack post that will work pretty similar w- or be a good maybe supplemental piece of material to this or vice versa.
I think the listeners will probably appreciate it. Yeah, totally. I- I'm on Substack, The Run Tough Mindset, all spelled how you would assume. And then on Instagram, just @kiliankorth. Kilian has one L. And if you have gotten through a couple hours of the podcast, I've got a documentary coming out on August 1st- Great
on YouTube. Forged in Failure, gonna be streamed at 5:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, with a Q&A. If you happen to listen to this in the next few days and you're in Moab, Utah on July 30th, there's an in-person screening at 6:00 PM as well. Little plug there if you got all the way through. Right on. Yeah.
Yeah I should've... I had that in the back of my mind before we started recording, that I needed to mention that, because I know there's a lot of hard work put into that, and it looks like a really exciting, worthwhile documentary to watch. So we'll put links to all that in the show notes for folks that wanna check any of that out.
Thanks, Zach. Always love talking to you, man. All right. Take care. You too.