And What | Learned From It

My long road to Boston certainly exemplified the adage that “It is the journey, and not the destination.” It is obviously a cliché, but after all those years of heartbreak and futile attempts when even | had started to doubt whether | had it in me, it just goes to show that if you want something badly enough and if the impossible dream seems to be just that—an impossibility—don’’t quit. | really believe that because the Boston qualifier did not come easily for me—just like the hundreds of thousands of others who enter marathons with that ultimate goal in mind—when it finally happened, it was just that much sweeter. Nobody appreciated having earned the right to go to Boston more than | did, and | will never forget that feeling coming down the chute at the end of that race in Albany.

Most important, | cherish the camaraderie, support, and best wishes of many close friends. Innumerable friends and colleagues had suffered with me through all the years and all the failures, and their outpouring of sincere wishes and congratulations when it happened is something that | will cherish. They knew exactly how much it meant to me, and they wanted to share in and be part of the celebration. It made it all worthwhile.

Now that my longtime marathon objective has finally been achieved, and with the benefit of some overdue maturity, | wish that | hadn’t focused so much on the BQ goal to the detriment of many other important considerations. In retrospect, | realize that | missed out on some of the thrills of running some spectacular courses over the years and appreciating just how lucky | was to be in some unique cities. And | probably could have performed better in many of those marathons if | had adopted a more relaxed attitude toward them and had gone in with the primary goal of having fun. After all, that should be one of the main reasons we do these exhilarating events. | now find myself being drawn back to some of those marathons to experience what | missed the first time around, and | also put greater weight on selecting destination marathons rather than simply BQ courses.

In closing (and | do apologize for going on and on) a few of my favorite quotations come to mind: » “To those who run, no explanation is necessary. To those who don’t, no explanation is possible.’—Unknown. » “It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.”—Anne Morrow Lindbergh. * “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”—Confucius. – “No doubt a brain and some shoes are essential for … marathon success, although if it comes down to a choice, pick the shoes. More people finish pl … marathons with no brains than with no shoes.”—Don Kardong. Kh

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

Ignore the Fad Diets, and as You Age, Increase Your Activity. Calories In Versus Calories Out (Burn, Baby, Burn) Is the Answer. Part 6.

Twelve DIET AND DRUGS

When Bob Kiputh was turning out those powerful swimming teams at Yale, he would have nothing to do with vitamins or special foods. His diet was simple. The Breakfast of Champions was a long workout for stamina; the Lunch of Champions was a grueling session for strength, and the Supper of Champions was an exhausting practice for speed. Hard work gives speed, strength and stamina, said Kiputh. Forget about vitamins and latest food fads. They just distract the swimmer from the business at hand.

Thirty years, a hundred food fads and thousands of dietary investigations later, Kiputh’s judgment still looks good. Most nutritionists now believe that vitamins and minerals given over and above those in a good mixed diet have no effect on athletic performance. The old Basic Four (milk, fruit-vegetable, meat and bread) give us all we need.

What we need has been established by the Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science and is known as RDA (Recommended Daily Allowances). These RDAs are, if anything, more liberal than stringent. Certain experiments have shown that any increase over these requirements does nothing for athletic achievement. This was proven for the protein requirement in a study done at the Marine officers school at Quantico. More red meat, it seems, failed to light any fire under the Marines. Similarly, the Air Force found vitamin C to be a washout when given to a large group of exercising officers at Maxwell Field.

So goes report after report. “There is no evidence,” writes Dr. E. R. Buskirk of Penn State, “that superior performance results from taking more of a single nutrient than required.”

Despite the negative evidence, athletes and coaches along with the general public continue to look for the super diet. Investigations of lockers will turn up such items as queen-bee extract, seaweed cakes, wheat germ oil, sunflower seeds and paperbacks on the latest in macrobiotic diets.

Sound physiology as far as food is concerned is ridiculously easy. A couple of programs on the Basic Four on Sesame Street could make dieticians out of pre-schoolers. But unfortunately, Americans tend to read directions on everything from a TV set to their own bodies when things go wrong.

No wonder Dr. Allan Ryan at the University of Wisconsin found a majority of varsity swimmers, basketball players and hockey players had diets deficient in RDAs for vitamins A, C and calcium. Diet to the college athlete is missing breakfast (that bed is too sweet in the morning), avoiding green and yellow vegetables (why change habits of a lifetime?), cutting down on milk (in favor of coffee, Coke, beer).

We have already seen that amounts over the RDAs do not influence an athlete’s output. Can we conclude from the Ryan study that even the RDA amounts may be unnecessary? If the average college athlete is on a diet lacking the established essentials and yet is by stopwatch, tape measure, blood tests, cardiograms and lung capacity tests, superior in fitness to 99% of the population, what can we say about vitamins? Health foods? Organic vegetables?

“That’s cool, too,” or “Whatever turns you on,” seem the most appropriate. The battle, you see, is elsewhere. About 30 years ago at Yale, there was a coach named Kiputh who had a very simple diet. You begin the morning with. . .

* Eo *

At 5’10” and 143 pounds, I have been described as gaunt, hungry and even cadaveric. My appearance alarms my family and relatives. I am offered extra feedings and double portions to correct my malnutrition, and given turtleneck sweaters to conceal how scrawny I am. But the truth is that am seven pounds heavier than I was when I was a runner in college, and have triple the percent body fat I had when I was 21. The truth is that, along with millions of Americans, I am fat.

How fat is fat? Pick up your high school or college yearbook and take a look at yourself. If you were an athlete, either officially or unofficially, you will see yourself at ideal body weight and a normal percent of body fat. Otherwise, even then you may have gotten into areas of body fat which the most permissive of physiologists consider abnormal.

What happens next, we all know. As soon as sports end, as soon as we come out of training, as soon as play ends, just as soon does fat start taking over our bodies. When fun and games are replaced by work and marriage and living happily ever after, when we become domesticated and civilized, then and only then do we lose control of our bodies and what they were made to be.

Within a year, we gain the first pound. A few more and the waistline begins to go. In less than 10, the chin gets chubby. Those of us who were athletes go from looking lean and fit to looking “healthy,” a sure sign we are 10 or more pounds over the limit. And when later we are called “prosperous,” we know that the overweight tally is up to 20. The term “portly” which comes next simply means disaster. We may have financial assets in six figures, but physically we are into deficit financing.

The struggle against this slowly advancing glacier of lard begins before we attain our majority. It never ends. In this war against fat, you have to be a career man. There is no place for 90-day wonders or weekend warriors, no place for crash diets and two-days-a-week exercise. You must begin as a youthful athlete and end as one. You must know that any pound you gain after the age of 21 is neither bone nor muscle. It has to be fat.

The ease with which that fat can be deposited has always alarmed the ordinary citizen. Now it is beginning to alarm the scientists. One reason this gain occurs so readily is that we need more rather than less exercise as we grow older. Dr. Ralph Nelson of the Mayo Clinic has shown that a man who weighs 154 pounds at age 30, and thereafter maintains a constant level of activity on the same caloric intake, will weigh over 200 pounds when he reaches 60. In order to stay the same weight on the same exercise, he must reduce his intake by 11%.

The people who devise those innumerable diets we see month after month in the magazines and newspapers think that reducing the intake is the logical way to approach this matter. They have forgotten that man is the only animal that eats when he is not hungry. So diets do not work—unless man becomes more of an animal, unless he becomes engaged in a daily struggle for survival, either real or simulated.

We know this from watching communities like those of Vilcabama in Ecuador, Hunza in Pakistan and Abkhazia in Russo-Georgia, where people work hard and long hours until they are 80, 90 and 100 or more, and where the average daily caloric intake is well under 2000 calories.

What happens there is what happens to the animal in the wild. A man eats only when he is hungry and then only to cover the caloric requirements of his physical activity. So the diet which goes unobserved when the living is easy becomes unnecessary when the living gets hard and difficult and worth the effort.

How fat is fat? Just so much as it takes to alter our image, to blur our structure and blunt our function.

Eo * *

For medical discoveries, nothing beats a prepared mind and a long-suffering patient. Dr. Isadore Snapper found this out during a stay as professor of medicine at the Peking Medical School. His acute observations on otherwise superbly

healthy patients who bore their illness with unwavering endurance resulted in a medical classic, Chinese Lessons to Western Medicine.

It seems only a matter of time until we see a similar volume based on a study of the diseases of another group of otherwise finely conditioned patients who refuse to give in to their ailments—the athletes. It could be called Sport’s Subtle Sermons for Stumped Specialists.

The first two chapters may already have been written. First, there’s Tom Bache and “The Case of the Million Dollar Knees and the 15 Dollar Shoes.” Then there’s Gary Berthiaume’s “Case of Competition Colic.” Bache is the ex-Marine distance runner who suffered through two years of agony with knee pains. Perhaps his knees weren’t worth a million dollars, but the medical talent that was treating them was. And during all that time, his feet were entrusted to the care of a pair of $15 shoes. It was only after two years of suffering, pills, shots and therapy of all sorts that Tom Bache put some arches in his shoes and cured his knees.

Gary Berthiaume has a different problem. Every time he entered a long, tough race he came down with severe stomach pain. Sometimes he would have diarrhea and blood as well. When not running hard and at all other times he had little or no trouble. He sought help from the experts, had x-rays and tests. Nothing abnormal was found. The diagnosis: too much stress during the race and too much nervousness anticipating it.

Berthiaume’s response was typical. First, he kept running regardless of the pain. Then he rejected the diagnosis. He knew other men were running as hard without symptoms. And as for being nervous, his attitude was the same as a former surgical giant who, when told that a patient’s problem might be psychological because he was so nervous, responded, “Nervous? Of course he’s nervous. The question is what else is wrong with him?”

That was Berthiaume’s question. Stress obviously played a part. He only developed symptoms after a hard run. But he was peculiarly susceptible to these abdominal complaints, and no one knew why. Investigation of the food was the obvious procedure after the x-rays and other tests were normal. He had no known allergies, and even varying his pre-race meal didn’t help. He continued to experience pain severe enough to double him up soon after the race was over.

He finally reduced his pre-race feeding to bread and milk, but he still had trouble. There, as it turned out, lay the answer.

Unknown to Berthiaume and to many who were treating him, a man can be done in by the two most innocent items on his diet, bread and milk—the “staff of life” and the “perfect food for young mammals.” Many men it appears cannot live by bread at all, much less alone. And milk after the second decade of life is something most Greek Cypriots, Arabs, Ashkenazi Jews and American Negroes should shun. These people from traditional non-milking areas (and this includes among others the Bantus, Chinese, Thais, Greenland Eskimoes and Peruvian

Indians) can have bloating, gas and stomach pains, along with loud noises, after even the small amounts of milk used in cooking.

According to Dr. Theodore Bayless of Johns Hopkins, an expert in this problem, only about 8% of people of Western European extraction have this problem with milk, which is based on a deficiency of lactase (the enzyme that digests lactose, the milk sugar).

Gary Berthiaume was not in that 8%. He could tolerate milk. Bread, or more specifically, gluten (protein found in all grains except corn and rice), was his difficulty. In its full-blown state, the inability to handle gluten is called “sprue” after the Dutch word sprouw, meaning chronic diarrhea.

It now appears that some of us may have sprue. Most don’t, but many, when placed under stress, can be symptomatic. When the rat race pushes us too fast, or too far, our bowels will let us know. Gluten is always there in our diet, in the bread and baked goods, in the cereals and cereal products, and hidden in soups and gravies, ice cream, wheat germ, mayonnaise and even beer and ale. You can’t eat a thing without reading the label.

We should not be surprised that milk and toast, considered the perfect foods for any stomach disorder, have been shown to be the major causes of most of humanity’s intestinal malfunctions. Long ago, Dr. Richard Cabot predicted that of all the things the medical profession had done the most embarrassing would be the diets they prescribed for their patients. It took Gary Berthiaume and his competition colic to prove he was right.

Eo * *

The fuel content of an ordinary 150-pound human being is approximately 166,200 calories—1200 in carbohydrate, 25,000 in protein and 140,000 in fat. Yet this 150-pounder, fortified by extra calories at breakfast, must have a coffee break two or three hours later or get the vapours.

Why? The answer is low blood sugar. Most of us suffer from it because we eat the wrong breakfast—or, if you go along with veteran marathoner Aldo Scandurra, from eating breakfast at all.

“When I get up the day of the Boston marathon,” Scandurra once told me, “T don’t eat at all. I take a large glass of hot water, have a bowel movement, and I’m ready for that race at noon.” And what about energy for that long 26 miles? “T have enough already stored up,” he replied. ““There’s no sense upsetting my system with more.”

Scandurra is physiologically correct. In the fasting person, the blood sugar stays in a straight line well within the normal range. Only after a meal does it rise, thereby calling for an outpouring of insulin (a hormone of energy storage). When the insulin accomplishes this task, the sugar level drops and you usually know it.

Michael Hughes

How? Well, you feel as if you need a coffee break. More specifically, that could range from fatigue and yawning or actual drowsiness on the one hand, or a feeling of jitteriness or a light sweat on the other.

The treatment is usually coffee and a Danish. Other therapies include all those quick-energy foods and candies and drinks we see advertised in the press and on TV. The effect is almost immediate. Zing goes the blood sugar—back up and even past normal. This again calls on the insulin to deposit the extra calories. And thus we go on and on depositing high-octane fuel in an already full tank, depositing fat on top of fat when all we had to do was call on the energy we already had stored for use.

Can this be done? Can low blood sugar be cured without diet or treated without jelly sandwiches, candy bars and fruit juice? Can we raise our blood sugar any time we want to?

Why not? Children and athletes do. What do grammar school students do at 10:30 in the morning when they get the same feeling that sends grown men and housewives to the kitchen or the snack bar? They have recess. They get out and raise a sweat, and in the process elevate their blood sugar. They then come back to the classroom renewed and intelligent, becoming more docile, more teachable. The transformation is a physiological one.

And what of the athlete? He has the same meal. He has been advised to have a relatively high carbohydrate meal before his event. If nothing else, it is more easily digested. Then he waits the two to three hours. Insulin, the hormone of energy storage, is doing its work. His blood sugar starts down. He begins to yawn (spectators mistakenly marvel at how casually he seems to be taking the race), or gets into a light, clammy perspiration. Does he then look around for food, something to raise his blood sugar. Of course not. He knows he is ready to

release this power he has crammed into his muscles and liver. This is what these feelings mean to an athlete.

So he does the only appropriate thing, the natural thing for the human animal. He goes into physical action. That action, for reasons we did not know until recently, has to be intense enough to cause sweating and prolonged enough to call on what has been described as that “miraculous refreshment and renewal of vigor”—the second wind.

We now read that there is a good scientific reason for all of this. The pancreas, which produces insulin, a hormone of energy storage, also produces glucagon, a hormone of energy release. Further, when the athlete exercises he stimulates the production of glucagon, with the result that all the fuel he has stashed away in the last meal—and the past week and past year, if necessary—begins to pour out into the blood. Voila, the blood sugar rises.

There is a time, the Bible says, for everything. There is a time for low blood sugar. There is a time for high blood sugar. There is a time for insulin. There is a time for glucagon. There is a time for meat, a time for bread, and a time for nothing at all. The problem is finding the right time.

kok Ok

Has the energy crisis of the athlete been solved? Is there a “best” diet for athlete performance and endurance? An eat-program that will bring the athlete to a peak effort Saturday after Saturday? An optimal pre-event meal?

The answer to all of these questions, if we can believe research already done and extrapolate work now in progress, is a clear, firm, unhesitating “yes.”

The athlete does have a diet available to him which can improve his endurance capacity as much as 100%, his maximum performance 5-10%. He can eat a prescribed pre-event meal which will insure him the best and quickest use of the energy it contains. And he has a quantity of effective quick-energy drinks he can use freely during the contest to maintain his stamina.

The “‘super-compensation diet” was discovered by Swedish physiologist Eric Hultman. Its aim is to get maximum storage of sugar in the body as muscle glycogen. It is this glycogen which is the essential source of energy for muscle during strenuous exercise.

Using cross-country skiers as subjects, Hultman found that by manipulating diets and training schedules he could give the athletes super-normal stores of this readily available energy substance. Eventually he came up with a program incorporating three fundamental steps:

1. A prolonged exhausting workout which depleted the stores of glycogen in the muscles.

2. Three days of low carbohydrate intake. It made very little difference whether the athlete took a high-protein diet, high-fat diet or starved himself. What was required was abstinence from carbohydrates in any quantity.

3. Three days of high carbohydrate intake. The athlete was given large amounts of cereals, bread, fruits, vegetables, honey, jelly, etc. This caused the super-compensation and deposition of glycogen stores up to twice or three times normal.

Control subjects who were given a high-protein diet or a balanced diet after the exhausting workout failed to show this rise. When exercised on bicycle ergometers, those on the high protein diet had a maximum work time of 57 minutes, those on the balanced diet had a maximum work time of 114 minutes and those on the super-sugar diet lasted 167 minutes.

This conclusive laboratory demonstration was confirmed in field trials on runners by another Swede, Bengt Saltin. In a 30-kilometer race, runners on the high-carbohydrate regimen had a mean time of 135 minutes versus 143 while on the balanced diet.

The answer to endurance and performance, then, is to stockpile sugar in the form of glycogen, and to do this you must first drain your muscles of this glycogen and then cause an overshoot by stoking up on high-carbohydrate foods. Protein, the traditional food for strength and vigor, is of little use. Glycogen, Hultman learned, is synthesized 10 times faster from sugar than protein.

The optimal pre-event meal is now obvious. It must be more of the same: easily-digested high-carbohydrate foods that the athlete knows agree with his stomach and bowls, taken early enough to be in the muscles as glycogen when the gun goes off. Forget the beefsteak. It won’t help.

The way I see it, Hultman has come up with something we knew from the earliest times. Our caveman ancestors, when successful in the hunt, would have some days of gorging on protein and fat corresponding to the first three days of Hultman’s schedule. Then he would like as not have an exhausting unsuccessful hunt. Now reduced to roots and herbs, one would expect him to lose strength and endurance, perhaps perish. But he is almost miraculously restored by this seemingly inadequate diet and again has a successful hunt.

* Eo *

If it is next year, not this, that you plan to exercise at the “Y,” start on the low-cholesterol diet, quit smoking, see a relaxed you at work and your own man at home, you may join the hundreds of thousands of Americans who risk a heart attack or stroke this year.

The game, however, is not entirely up. There is a chance that procrastination may be safe, if you follow the latest advice on the latest wonder drug—“an aspirin a day keeps the doctor away.”

Aspirin, say the experts on blood clotting, can prevent the platelets-clots that form in the arteries of our brain and heart and cause heart attacks and strokes. The platelets are microscopic particles in the blood which become very sticky under certain circumstances and aggregate into crowds called clots. Aspirin reduces this adhesiveness and keeps these vagrant platelets from loitering around and causing trouble.

This startling information may be of no benefit to those in whom aspirin causes asthma or skin rashes or even stomach hemorrhages, but the rest of us may now have a lifetime until we reorder the priorities of our life.

An aspirin a day seems a lot more scientific than an apple, although it doesn’t have the biblical ring of the forbidden fruit and doesn’t make us think of the Song of Solomon, or the 11th labor of Hercules. The apple has gone the way of the buggy whip, wood-burning stoves and homemade bread. It has been replaced by a chemical. Aspirin, the product of the technological age, has become the drug for the diseases of that technological age.

Antibiotics, you see, have killed the old killers and left the field to the degenerative diseases, heart attacks and strokes. The thrust of medicine has turned from cure to prevention—how best to prevent heart attacks, how best to forestall the stroke.

Our friends, the scientists, have not replaced the known preventatives—diet, exercise, avoiding tension, stopping smoking. All these measures prevent the hardening of the arteries that precedes these episodes. But the aspirin, which has no effect on this narrowing of the blood vessels, can prevent the small clots that finally clog them.

This property of aspirin has been suspected for some time but never taken seriously. Back in 1956, Dr. L. L. Craven reported that he had given 8000 of his patients aspirin in two-tablets-a-day doses for a period of 10 years without observing a heart attack or a stroke. But it wasn’t until three or four years ago that researchers came up with definite evidence that aspirin was indeed effective in preventing arterial clots.

They are also finding other things that affect the stickiness of platelets. Some are obvious. Emotional stress, smoking, and a diet rich in egg yolk and butterfat increases this stickiness. A five-mile walk and other types of endurance exercise tends to keep the platelets apart.

All of this has led one researcher, Dr. Lee Wood of the City of Hope Medical Center in California, to write, “I suggest that men over the age of 20 and women over the age of 40 should take one aspirin tablet a day on a chronic long-term basis.” This routine, says Wood, would lessen the incidence and severity of arterial clotting diseases. In additional support of this view, he points to the low incidence of heart attacks in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, patients who usually take aspirin on a daily basis.

We are moving toward an exciting and unexpected change in our life-styles, a change brought about in the coming decades by our leisure activities and sports and athletics. We are moving toward a climate that will breed another more physical, and because of that, more intellectual and more spiritual man.

But now in mid-passage between the flabby American and the paragon he will become, we need acetylsalicylic acid in small doses to save us. While we are marking time, unwilling or unable to make the commitment to a fitness program, the best advice may be one that we used to joke about: “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

* Eo *

What’s in a name? The overweight matron calls them “diet pills.” The crosscountry bus driver calls them “bennies.” To the cramming student, they are “pep pills.” The addicts call them “uppers.” Olympic physicians use the term “ergogenic aids.” To Sports Illustrated’s Bil Gilbert, they are simply drugs.

These names and uses of the amphetamines suggest that they are at once legal and illegal, helpful and harmful, addictive and non-addictive, even moral and immoral. The time has come, according to Gilbert, and other spokesmen for the sports world, to take a stand on the use of these substances in athletics. Unfortunately, the debate over the use of drugs in athletics suffers from the same defect as the debate over the use of drugs by the general public. Lack of information.

The effect of amphetamines on performance is an area where conjecture and myth have been substituted for facts. What reports we do have suggest that amphetamines are bad news in complicated problem-solving sports like football. Not only do subjects lose the ability to solve the problems, but like the three-martini wizards they think they are doing a fine job. Misjudging performance is a common characteristic of athletes under the influence of these drugs. Experiments with swimmers showed that to a man they felt they swam faster with the pills, but their times were either the same or slower than the control runs.

This is a major theme of MIT professor Jerome Letwin, who says that any skill that can be recorded, measured or quantified deteriorates under the drugs even though the user thinks he has surpassed his usual performance. Reasons for this are easily seen with pot and other hallucinogens. But why should it happen with a stimulant like amphetamine? What may happen is that the immediate psychological lift of the drug is accompanied by use of body energy, while still at rest. In this way, the athlete loses some of his reserve energy.

The danger is that he may exceed his safety limit as did the English cyclist Tony Simpson. Simpson, under the influence of amphetamines, collapsed and died while climbing a 6000-foot mountain during the 1967 Tour of France. Unfortunately, he may not be the last of the bicyclists to succumb to drugs. The professional cyclist faced with the grueling Tour of France, a 21-day 3000-mile ride worth $200,000 to the winner, is willing to take chances. Simpson, after all,

was careless. It was 90 degrees and he was using “speed,” the most dangerous of all amphetamines.

Jacques Anquetil, a five-time winner of the Tour, is an admitted amphetamine user. Anquetil has said, “I dope myself. Everyone dopes himself. Those who claim they don’t are liars.”

In such instances, the pep pill is a whip administered to a tired horse. Its primary effect is on the psyche, to increase ambition and dull pain. But it cannot increase the total available energy. And the normal instincts of survival may be dulled, with ensuing collapse—perhaps with fatal outcome.

Gilbert’s extensive investigation of the problem, however, has led him to conclude that “the cold objective point is that drugs do not kill or corrupt enough athletes to constitute anything but a very minor health problem.” He is against drugs because they remove the “drama and mystery” by fixing the outcome.

Some, including Dutch physician E. J. Ariens, are willing to accept this possibility by allowing free use of drugs as long as they are prescribed by a licensed doctor. This may be a startling approach to many of us, but this permissive attitude is growing rapidly among many researchers working with drugs—mostly with marijuana.

Any long-term settlement of the drug situation must take into account this presumptive evidence of the widespread, nonchalant use of “grass” by the younger generation. They have come to a consensus about “soft” drugs. Marijuana may be illegal, they are saying, but it is no worse than alcohol or even (according to some) coffee and cigarettes. On the other hand, “hard” drugs are for freaks and losers.

My guess is that athletes will continue to find the greatest ““ergogenic aid” is hard work and training.

Eo * *

It comes as no news to us working stiffs that caffeine is being touted as the best drug to aid athletic performance. The New York Times quoted Dr. David James, a chemist in Switzerland and a former world class sprinter, as the source of this information. According to James, the use of caffeine laced with a little niacinamide—one of the B-complex vitamins—was widespread among European athletes.

James studied 30 Swiss athletes and discovered what every coffee drinker knows: caffeine delayed fatigue and increased motor activity. His work confirmed that of the Cleveland Clinic’s Robert Mercer. Mercer told an Ohio State symposium on sports, “If your athlete feels tired or nervous and feels the need for aid to increase his efficiency, I suggest that you give him a cup of coffee.” All other drugs thought to increase strength or ability, he said, were either risky or useless, or both.

My own impression, as someone with a Ph.D. in coffee, is that we’ ve been had. All those reams of stories we’ve been reading about athletes winning because of