About Kevin Murnane

I am a cognitive scientist, a freelance writer and author (Nutrition for Cyclists: Eating and Drinking Before, During and After the Ride), a musician (Parametric Monkey - stream on Spotify, Soundcloud and YouTube), a bookstore owner (Monkey Books - first edition mystery, science fiction, fantasy and more, listed on ABE books, Amazon and Biblio), and a retired house painter, children's theater actor & owner, and university professor. I'm also a regular contributor to the technology section at Forbes and I write a cycling blog called Tuned In To Cycling. You can follow me on twitter @TheInfoMonkey and contact me at murnane.kevin@gmail.com.

Thoughts on the use of EPO and blood doping in professional cycling

Posted on July 19, 2008 by Kevin Murnane

On Thursday July 17th yet another high-profile cyclist was thrown out of the Tour de France when Riccardo Ricco was taken into custody by the French gendarmes after he tested positive for a synthetic variant of EPO. This post is in no way intended to express sympathy for Ricco or to argue that what he apparently did was justified. As the rules currently stand EPO is a banned substance. Riders who use it are cheating and they should be kicked out of the race. Unless the drug test was a false positive, Ricco got what he deserved. Throw the bums out.

The issue I want to consider here is not whether Ricco should have been punished, but whether blood doping and the use of EPO should be prohibited as forms of performance enhancement. They are currently banned and there are good arguments for continuing to do so. However, I think there is an alternative way to look at doping and EPO that should be considered.

The use of performance enhancing drugs in competitive sports is an enormous problem. Many professional sports are addressing the problem by identifying banned substances, instituting testing procedures for those substances and legislating penalties to be applied to athletes who are found to have used the banned drugs. From professional leagues that are more interested in maintaining the image of being anti-drug than in actually dealing with the problem, to drug tests that are often not conclusive, to athletes that lie about their drug use or insist they didn’t know they were taking a banned substance the problem of performance enhancing drugs in sport seems almost impossible to solve.

And this is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. I think consideration of this issue opens up a world of deeper questions about what constitues performance enhancement, whether some practices that are currently considered as illegal forms of enhancement might be acceptable or even desirable at some levels of sporting competition, and what functions we want different levels of sporting competition to fulfill in our culture. Consider the following.

One of the desired ideals for sporting competition is that the competitors should begin from a level playing field, that none of the athletes be given an unfair advantage over the others. The competition begins on a level playing field and the athlete who has trained harder, who understands the game better, who is more skilled, who is better able to maintain focus during the heat of the battle wins in the end. At least that’s the way it should be. A fundamental objection to the use of performance enhancing drugs is that they upset this level playing field by giving the drug user an advantage that is not due to his training, knowledge or skill. Is this always true? It depends on how you look at it.

The amount of oxygen carried by the blood is an essential determinant of performance in sports. Oxygen is used to both carry energy to the muscles so that they can perform the work the sport requires and to carry waste products away from the muscles. Oxygen carrying capacity is especially important in long term endurance events such as road racing in cycling where athletes must sustain very high levels of performance for hours without a break. Many world-class athletes in high endurance sports have used artifical means to increase their oxygen carrying capacity in order to gain what can be a substantial competitive advantage.

Red blood cells

Oxygen is carried in the blood by red blood cells (RBCs) and an increase in the density of RBCs in the blood can greatly improve performance in endurance sports. The two methods most commonly used to do this are blood doping and the the injection of EPO (erythropoietin). Blood doping involves extracting blood from a donor, concentrating the blood so that it has a high proportion of RBCs, freezing the concentrate and then thawing it and injecting it into the athlete before the competion or during the competition in the case of multi-day events such as the Tour de France. The donor can be either the athlete himself (autologous blood doping) or someone else with a compatible blood type (homologous blood doping). EPO is a hormone that is naturally produced by the kidneys and that stimulates the production of RBCs in the bone marrow. EPO can also be made in the laboratory and this type of pharmaceutical EPO can be injected under the skin to increase the body’s RBC production. Ricco was charged with taking a variant of pharmaceutical EPO called CERA.

The use of EPO or blood doping can be difficult to detect. Subcutaneously injected EPO typically cannot be detected 3 to 4 days after injection yet it has its maximum effect stimulating high levels of RBC production approximately 3 weeks later. For that reason, banning an athlete for EPO use usually depends on catching him with EPO paraphanalia in his possession. In Ricco’s case, the manufacturer, F. Hoffman-La Roche, worked with WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) to develop a test for the drug. Homologous blood doping (using someone else’s blood) can be detected by DNA differences between the donor and the athlete’s RBCs. Autologous blood doping (using your own blood) is extremely difficult to detect and no tests are currently available that are considered reliable enough to use in competitive sports.

In addition to relying on blood tests that are specific for EPO use or doping many professional sports use hematocrit as an indicator of illegal performance enhancement. Hematocrit measures the proportion of the blood volume that is composed of RBCs. Hematocrits above a certain level are taken to be abnormal and are officially used as indicators of doping or EPO use. The UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale), the organizing body of professional cycling, has set 50% as the upper allowable hematocrit level. If a rider tests with a hematocrit above 50, he is banned from competition.

It is often cited that the “normal” hematocrit range in adult males is between 41 and 50. This is the two standard deviation range which encompasses approximately two thirds of the general population. The upper level of the three standard deviation range for hematocrit is 54. Approximately one third of the general population falls outside the two standard deviation range that is cited as “normal”. More to the point, approximately one sixth of the general population (about 16.6%) will have naturally occurring hematocrit levels above 50. We can also expect that those individuals with higher than normal hematocrit levels will be disproportionately represented in the population of endurance athletes because the increased oxygen carrying capacity of their blood gives them a natural advantage in endurance sports. The UCI recognizes this problem by allowing exceptions to the 50 hematocrit rule for cyclists who have a long and consistent history of hematocrit measures above 50 as indicative of a naturally occuring high hematocrit level.

All professional endurance sports ban both EPO and blood doping as illegal forms of performance enhancement. Should they do this? If we consider them as a means of gaining an unfair advantage over the opponent, which is the way they are currently used, the answer is clearly “yes”. However, I think another perspective is possible.

Everyone has a naturally occuring hematocrit level that is genetically determined. This natural hematocrit is not subject to training, it is what it is. Natural factors such as training at high altitude or anemia, and artificial factors such as the use of EPO and blood doping can temporarily increase or decrease hematocrit but they do not affect the base hematocrit that each of us is born with. This means that independently of any steps the competitor may take to increase hematocrit, some endurance athletes have a competitive advantage because of their genetics. In other words, with all other things such as training regimen, skill level, knowledge of the sport, strength of will and competitive focus held equal, the endurance athlete with a naturally high hematocrit will have an advantage over the athlete who was born with a low hematocrit.

With regard to hematocrit, a critically important factor in endurance sports, the playing field is not level. The low hematocrit athlete starts at a disadvantage that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that is relevant to the sport. It’s not about training regimen or intensity, it’s not about knowledge of the sport, the competition or the opponent, it’s not about trained skills and it’s not about heart, will or desire. It’s about which sperm happened to fertilize which egg when the athlete was conceived.

Suppose we shift the common perspective on the use of EPO and blood doping. Rather than think of them as a means to unbalance the competition by giving an athlete an unfair advantage, suppose we think of them as medical technologies we can use to level the playing field so that some athletes don’t begin the competition at a marked disadvantage because of their genetic inheritance? Viewed from this different perspective, EPO and blood doping could be used to bring all of the athletes up to the same hematocrit level so that the competition could be decided on the basis of factors the athlete can control such as training, knowledge and desire.

Under the current system EPO and blood doping are used surreptitiously by some athletes to give them an unfair advantage over their opponents. These techniques unbalance the playing field. However, if we make EPO and blood doping available to any athlete who wants to use them, these technologies can eliminate a naturally occurring advantage that benefits some athletes but not others. The technologies level the playing field.

How might EPO or blood doping be used in this way? Set a hematocrit level as a cut off point such as the level of 50 currently used by the UCI. Competitors may use any means they wish such as training at altitude or using EPO to bring their hematocrit up to this level. The athelete is tested before every competition, or in multi-day events such as the Tour de France before every stage, and they must have a hematocrit level below the cut off. Under this system hematocrit level would function like weight levels in wrestling or boxing. If you don’t make level, you can’t compete in the event. You’re not labled as a cheater, fined and banned from the sport. You simply cannot compete in the current event because your hematocrit level gives you an unfair advantage.

This approach to the problem has several advantages. First, by reorienting our thinking away from the view that these medical technologies are a means of introducing unfair advantage to the view that they are a means of eliminating unfair advantage we reorient the relationship between the athlete and his sport. The athlete is no longer a cheater who is afraid of discovery and the organizing body of the sport is no longer treating its athletes like criminals to be caught. Second, medical technologies that currently are used in secret and not in the best and safest of ways would be used in the open and in much safer conditions. Third, as athletes strain to get as close to the cut off point as possible without going over and being eliminated from competition, our knowledge of how to use technologies like EPO and blood doping would increase and the conditions under which these technologies can be safely used would become better understood. Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, a playing field unbalanced by genetic factors is leveled so that competitions are less likely to be determined by the DNA of the athlete’s parents and more likely to depend on what the athlete has done to prepare for the event.

The underlying issue here is how professional sports in general and cycling in particular should respond to advances in our scientific understanding of the anatomical and physiological factors that affect athletic performance and the medical technologies that are developed from this understanding. New technologies in the fields of drug treatments, prosthetics, and genetic engineering have the potential to substantially alter human capabilities and performance levels. How should sport respond to this advancing knowledge? One possibility is that medical technologies could be evaluated individually to determine whether they can be used to enhance fair competition if made available to all of the competitors as opposed to unbalancing competition when they are only used by those who are willing to cheat.

Is this the right way to think about EPO and blood doping? I don’t know but it’s worth considering.

Cycling with Cars: Riding Defensively

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Kevin Murnane

Many new cyclists or cyclists who are thinking about using their bike to commute to work are anxious about riding in the road with traffic. It’s not as scary as it looks and in many circumstances riding with cars is actually safer than riding in segregated bicycle lanes or what are euphimistically called “bicycle paths”. If you’re going to be at all serious about road cycling or are going to commute to work you are going to have to share the road with cars. How to ride a bike in traffic can be a controversial topic that generates discussions informed by passionately held ideologies and beliefs. The advice and opinions expressed here are based on many years and tens of thousands of miles spent sharing the road with cars. I ride with cars every day and I don’t want to be killed, maimed or seriously injured on the bike. These are some of the ways I’ve found to most effectively accomplish those things. Keep in mind that there are no hard and fast rules about riding in traffic. You have to evaluate and adapt to each situation separately. Riding safely with cars involves riding defensively and riding the line, among other things.

Riding defensively boils down to always being aware of where the cars are and what they’re doing, and knowing about, and being on the lookout for, the situations that most frequently lead to collisions between cyclists and motorized vehicles. If you hit a car or a car hits you, you’re going to lose almost every time. It doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong and it doesn’t matter how much of a hardass cyclist you think you are. What matters is physics. Cars have a lot of mass and you don’t. That gives slow moving cars a lot more momentum than fast moving bicycles and that means the cyclist loses. Don’t want to get hit? Recognize the circumstances in which cars hit bikes and avoid them. Ride defensively.

Intersections. Intersections of any kind – cross streets, side streets, traffic lights, parking lot entrances and exits, driveways and so on – can be dangerous for cyclists and an entire post could be devoted to them.

Picture from http://www.slowtwitch.com/

Here I’ll only discuss one particular type of collision that can occur in an intersection; the car makes a right hand turn and hits the cyclist who is riding through the intersection on the right hand side of the road. This is widely thought to be the most common way a car hits a cyclist in urban settings. Washington DC, where I live, was reminded of this several days ago when a young woman commuting to work on her bike was hit and killed by a garbage truck turning right. Drivers may be looking for pedestrians in a crosswalk when they turn right at an intersection but they usually aren’t looking for something going as fast as a bicycle moving past them on the right. Whenever you are in a situation where a driver may turn right, watch for it. What do you watch for?

Directional signals. Always look for a car’s flashing directional signals – never trust what you see. Drivers will often turn without using their directional signal. This can be expecially dangerous when they turn right. Less frequently, drivers will signal a turn and then not make it. You can sometimes read a right hand turn that is not signaled from the car’s front wheels. Drivers who are stopped at an intersection and plan to turn right will sometimes turn the steering wheel while stopped to prepare for the turn. Be aware of vehicles that swing left before they turn right. A slight jog to the left can indicate the vehicle is going to turn right. SUV drivers tend to drive like this. Always be wary and alert at any kind of intersection and never take a car’s movement path for granted.

Parked cars. I mentioned this problem in the post about riding the line. When you are passing cars parked along the side of the street, always try and see if there is someone inside the car. If there is, approach the car with care because they may open the roadside door suddenly to get out of the car. People in cars look for oncoming cars but they almost almost never look for cyclists before they open the door. Sometimes they open it just as you go by and knock you over out into the roadway; sometimes the door opens a split second before you arrive and you smash into it and catapult over the handlebars.

Some people recommend that you ride far enough out in the traffic lane so that opened doors won’t touch you. However, this can be impractical if there is a lot of traffic, especially fast-moving traffic, on the road. You can ride close to the parked cars without hindering traffic as long as you’re vigilant and careful. If you see someone in a car, slow down as you approach. This gives you more time to see whether they look like they’re preparing to exit the car or just sitting there waiting. It also gives the person in the car more time to see you. If their window is open, call out that a bike is approaching. If there is someone riding behind you, call out “Person in parked car” so the other cyclist knows to be careful.

Underestimating your speed. If you are riding fast, drivers will consistently underestimate your speed. The faster you’re going, the more of a problem this can be. I’ve seen this happen time and time again. A driver is pulling out of a side street, they see you coming, they start to pull out anyway and then jam on the brakes in a panic when they realize you’re right on top of them.

This happens so frequently because of the way people identify objects in the environment. We take in information from the world around us and use bits and pieces of it to identify objects like “car”, “tree”, “guy on a bike”. We then fill in the bits and pieces with what we already know about these objects based on our past experience. For example, when you see a car you process just enough to identify it as a car and then use what you already know about cars to formulate a prediction about what it’s going to do next. It may turn right, it’s unlikely to jump up on it’s hind wheels and salute as you ride by. People see you riding, identify it as “a person on a bike” and predict your speed based on what they know about bike riders. If you’re going fast, most of the driver’s experience has been with slower moving bike riders. Based on their prior knowledge and experience they are likely to underestimate your speed.

Underestimating your speed can be a problem in two situations. The first is any time a car is going to pull across your line of movement either by coming out of a side street, driveway or parking lot entrance or by turning left across oncoming traffic. The second is when you’re going straight on a road that has a right hand turn lane leading to an access ramp to a cross street. You are riding the line separating the through road from the turn lane because you’re going straight. Some idiot is afraid to pass you on the right in the turn lane and decides to pass you on the left in the through street and then cut in front of you onto the ramp. You’re going faster than they think and they make a screaming high speed turn in front of you or jam on the brakes in a panic stop when they realize they’re not going to make it.

Learn to recognize the circumstanes where underestimating your speed can be a problem and be alert.

Evaluate, predict, plan, adapt and execute. When you’re approaching an intersection or any circumstance that might pose a problem for a cyclist such as a car parked on the side of the road, road debris or potholes that you must navigate around, or loss of the shoulder as the road narrows to go over a bridge examine the upcoming situation. Are there any moving vehicles around? Where are they? How fast are they going? What are the potential dangers for a cyclist?

Based on your examination of the current situation, predict what the circumstances will be when you arrive at the problem point. Where will the cars be? What will they be doing? Might the car in front of you turn right? Does that guy who wants to pull out of the parking lot look like he’s underestimating your speed?

Use your prediction to formulate a plan of what you will do when you arrive at the problem point. Should you slow down to hit the intersection after the only car you can see has gone through it? Speed up to get there safely before the car arrives? If you speed up or slow down are you going to be in trouble if the guy makes an unsignaled right turn?

Constantly reevaluate your plan as you approach the problem point and adapt it to changing circumstances. Vehicles moving faster or slower than you first thought? Pedestrians or cars appear that you didn’t see before?

When you hit the problem point, execute the plan. Getting to the problem point and then dithering about what you should do can be dangerous because any cars or pedestrians in the area may have been formulating their own plans and when you do something unexpected at the last instant because you lost confidence it can mess everybody up and lead to accidents.

Use your ears. In order to ride defensively you need to be aware of what’s going on around you. You can see what’s in front of you. You can see what’s behind you as well if you turn around and look. However,

I'm a Dumb Ass

looking behind you and continuing to ride a straight, sure line takes practice and you can’t be looking behind you all the time. Make use of all the information available to you, both visual and auditory. Listen for cars or bikes coming up behind you. Learn to estimate their speed from their sound. Know when they are going to pass. Never wear earbuds and listen to your iPod on your bike like the guy in the picture on the left who not only has earbuds but special shields to block out external noise so he can hear his iPod better. Wearing earbuds on a bike is like having “I’m a dumb ass” tattooed on your forehead.

Know your route. Whether commuting or training, most riders ride the same route time and time again. Learn your route. Know where the danger points lie and be prepared for them. Learn where the bad sections of pavement are that narrow your options of where on the road you can ride. If you go through an intersection with traffic lights, learn the signal pattern so you can accurately predict what state the light will be in when you arrive. Is it a smart light that responds to waiting traffic? Learn the typical taffic patterns at an intersection. Are right hand turns frequent or unlikely? The more you know about your route, the better your chances of accurately predicting what will happen when you arrive at the danger points.

Aggression, timidity and defensive riding. Riding defensively doesn’t mean you can’t ride aggressively. The agressive rider who thinks everybody is looking out for him and he always has the right of way is a danger to himself and everyone around him. The cyclist who rides hard and fast is often easy for drivers to predict and if she rides defensively as well, she’ll avoid potentially deadly situations.

Likewise, riding defensively doesn’t mean you should be a timid rider. Accurately predicting what the situation will be when you arrive on your bike is an important part of riding defensively. Just as you are predicting where the cars are going to be when you get there, they are predicting where you are going to be. Timid, frightened riders who lack confidence are more likely to do unexpected things, are more difficult to predict, and often make their ride more dangerous than it needs to be. Be aware, don’t be scared.

Riding defensively is all about learning to recognize the circumstances that pose a danger to the cyclist and learning to predict when those circumstanes might occur in order to minimize the danger as much as possible. You can recognize a potentially dangerous situation 1000 times and nothing bad happens. It’s easy to lose focus, to lose awareness, to take it for granted. Bad idea because the 1001st time might be the one that saves your life.