Monday, June 09, 2008
Saturday, June 07, 2008
food for thought
Man, I didn't realize how long it'd been since I last posted. Anyhow, things are good, it's beastly hot-and-humid (there should be different words for the heat here and the heat in, say, Las Vegas; they're completely different things), job is going well, family all seems to be doing very well, etc. etc. The reason I'm writing is because I've been reading a lot recently as I got ready to start working out again (IT band finally okay, joined a gym on Thursday and am ready to get this show on the road) about exercise and training. There's a blog I particularly like (cfrostyrun) about training for ultimate, by an elite-level club player in LA who's got a lot of good things to say about how to train in sports-specific ways, that is, for ultimate and not for cross-country or weight lifting. This morning he linked to a 2001 article by Malcolm Gladwell about steroid use and cheating in sports. Here's how he concluded:
For a long time, I've been a defender of elite athletes who take PEDs, because those drugs are simply another way in which elite athletes can improve their performance, like Lasik surgery for Tiger Woods or phenomenally expensive coaching and equipment not accessible to the likes of you and me. But there's something wrong with the comparison that Gladwell makes between PEDs and Ritalin, Prozac and plastic surgery. I'm having a hard time articulating exactly what I mean, but here's a shot. Athletes who take PEDs are already freaks of nature, separated from the masses by extraordinary strength, endurance, speed, quickness and obsessive drive. It's not like Ben Johnson was some schlub who took HGH and a bunch of other stuff. He was already above and beyond, and people like him are not competing with normal people, they're competing with each other, in a highly formalized, regulated world. Leaving cosmetic surgery aside, because it's not pharmaceutical and thus the comparison fails right there, Ritalin and Prozac are not for the already-strong. They're designed to make up for perceived deficiencies in the people to whom they're prescribed. People close to me have been on versions of each of those drugs, and many others, with the aim of allowing them to function with some kind of stability in day-to-day life. If you want to get all fundamentalist about it, you could say that in times past those people would just have been weeded out; unable to compete with "normal" people, they'd have died or failed to reproduce. But that seems perverse to me. Big pharma sells us all a bill of goods in a lot of cases. But not always.
This bears more reflection, but at the moment I should check to make sure the dogs haven't devoured the mail. Oh, one more thing before I go. Dad and I went to see "The Fall" last night at Bethesda Row. My advice is: Go see this movie. It was absolutely magnificent. But don't take small children.
Even as we assert this distinction [between achieving elevated performance through better training vs. through pharmaceuticals] on the playing field, though, we defy it in our own lives. We have come to prefer a world where the distractable take Ritalin, the depressed take Prozac, and the unattractive get cosmetic surgery to a world ruled, arbitrarily, by those fortunate few who were born focussed, happy, and beautiful. Cosmetic surgery is not "earned" beauty, but then natural beauty isn't earned, either. One of the principal contributions of the late twentieth century was the moral deregulation of social competition--the insistence that advantages derived from artificial and extraordinary intervention are no less legitimate than the advantages of nature. All that athletes want, for better or worse, is the chance to play by those same rules.
For a long time, I've been a defender of elite athletes who take PEDs, because those drugs are simply another way in which elite athletes can improve their performance, like Lasik surgery for Tiger Woods or phenomenally expensive coaching and equipment not accessible to the likes of you and me. But there's something wrong with the comparison that Gladwell makes between PEDs and Ritalin, Prozac and plastic surgery. I'm having a hard time articulating exactly what I mean, but here's a shot. Athletes who take PEDs are already freaks of nature, separated from the masses by extraordinary strength, endurance, speed, quickness and obsessive drive. It's not like Ben Johnson was some schlub who took HGH and a bunch of other stuff. He was already above and beyond, and people like him are not competing with normal people, they're competing with each other, in a highly formalized, regulated world. Leaving cosmetic surgery aside, because it's not pharmaceutical and thus the comparison fails right there, Ritalin and Prozac are not for the already-strong. They're designed to make up for perceived deficiencies in the people to whom they're prescribed. People close to me have been on versions of each of those drugs, and many others, with the aim of allowing them to function with some kind of stability in day-to-day life. If you want to get all fundamentalist about it, you could say that in times past those people would just have been weeded out; unable to compete with "normal" people, they'd have died or failed to reproduce. But that seems perverse to me. Big pharma sells us all a bill of goods in a lot of cases. But not always.
This bears more reflection, but at the moment I should check to make sure the dogs haven't devoured the mail. Oh, one more thing before I go. Dad and I went to see "The Fall" last night at Bethesda Row. My advice is: Go see this movie. It was absolutely magnificent. But don't take small children.
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