Human Limits

With the Tour de France set to start at the end of June, Major League Baseball in mid-season and international track and field winding up it, seems like a good time to review a few developments in the world of doping.  Where to start?

Baseball

The big doping news in baseball center around reports (starting last winter) that a Miami “clinic” was providing performance enhancing drugs to a number of high profile players.   Major League Baseball has obtained the records from the clinic and is considering action including the suspension of a large number of players.  The take home messages from this story include:

• Drug testing, both the tests and the way they are administered, remain beatable.
• High profile cases are frequently more about paper and financial trails than testing.
• Baseball seems to be taking this more seriously than in the past.

Track & Field

In April there were reports that some high profile distance runners were being treated with thyroid hormone “replacement” therapy.  Here is a link to a thoughtful analysis by the Science of Sport blog.  It raises a number of questions about therapeutic exemptions for athletes with real medical conditions.  The other big issue here is that if heavy training and competition alters key hormone levels should the athletes be permitted to use supplemental doses to get their levels back to “normal”.   This is a slippery slope and could lead to a situation where upper limits of normal for hormone levels and hematocrit are established and “doping” up to that level is allowed.  Perhaps the biological playing field would be level but what about individual variation and the challenge of working with what you have?  At some level this might already be happening with the use of low dose doping programs designed to fly under the testing radar.  For those of you wanting a deeper dive on this topic the links above are excellent and cover a lot of ground.

Cycling

A colleague sent me a link to a Velo News (the bible of Cycling) article on a new analysis of power outputs on iconic Tour de France mountain climbs.  The data come from a number of top cyclists over the last ~30 years and provides a color coded index of suspicion related to who might have been doping on what climb when.   The idea is that if you know a rider’s power output in watts/kg you can make reasonable estimates of oxygen consumption and that some of these power outputs would require people to be working at VO₂max for prolonged periods of time, at altitude, at the end of long rides with multiple climbs.  This is a collection of circumstances that seems physiologically unlikely at best.   The article is an interesting read and here is a link to the full analysis being published as a one time magazine and also a podcast interview with the author.

Summary

At one level the news is depressing and it appears that doping goes on more or less unchecked with ever more sophisticated “work arounds” to beat the testing.  At another level perhaps the testing, analysis and detective work are getting good enough to keep the lid on things to some extent.  This has been likened to having enough speed limit enforcement on the highways to keep most drivers close to the speed limit.  Perhaps this is the best we can hope for given the money and fame at stake in professional sports.

In my last post I made the point that no one should be that surprised that the government is collecting all sorts of electronic data and using it to try to detect and track suspicious activity by potential terrorists.  The revelation that a low level security contractor was responsible for the leaks and what to do about them and him has generated all sorts of debate.   That having been said, this whole incident makes me think about the post World War 2 “Red Scare” and the emergence of the so-called national security state after World War 2.  One of the justifications for the national security state is and was that “no one wants another Pearl Harbor”.

The extended quotes below come from the CIA website and are comments that President Eisenhower made at a news conference following the Soviet downing an American spy plane in May of 1960.  Eisenhower was a great man who understood the limits of military power and coined the phrase the military industrial complex warning about the perils of the national security state.  Here is video of Eisenhower’s farewell speech on January 17, 1961.   It seems to me that many of the issues he warned about in this speech and also discussed after the U-2 incident are still with us, and much of what he warned about has come to pass.  One question stemming for the tracking program is just how much tracking should we tolerate based on the concept of “no one wants another 9/11”.   I don’t have an answer for this complex question but it is certainly something that we all need to discuss and consider when we think about the kind of country and world we want to live in.

click to watch

 Excerpts of Ike’s Comments About the U-2 Incident

 “I HAVE MADE SOME NOTES FROM which I want to talk to you about this U-2 incident. . . .

“The first point is this: the need for intelligence-gathering activities.”

“No one wants another Pearl Harbor. This means that we must have knowledge of military forces and preparations around the world, especially those capable of massive surprise attacks.”

“Secrecy in the Soviet Union makes this essential. . . .”

” . . . ever since the beginning of my administration I have issued directives to gather, in every feasible way, the information required to protect the United States and the free world against surprise attack and to enable them to make effective preparations for defense.”

“My second point: the nature of intelligence-gathering activities.”

“These have a special and secret character. They are, so to speak, `below the surface’ activities.”

“They are secret because they must circumvent measures designed by other countries to protect secrecy of military preparations.”

“They are divorced from the regular visible agencies of government which stay clear of operational involvement in specified detailed activities.”

“These elements operate under broad directives to seek and gather intelligence short of the use of force–with operations supervised by responsible officials within this area of secret activities. . . .”

“These activities have their own rules and methods of concealment which seek to mislead and obscure– . . .”

“Third point: how should we view all of this activity?”

“It is a distasteful but vital necessity.”

“We prefer and work for a different kind of world–and a different way of obtaining the information essential to confidence and effective deterrents. Open societies; in the day of present weapons, are the only answer. . . .”

“My final point is that we must not be distracted from the real issues of the day by what is an incident of a symptom of the world situation today.”

click here for video

The news over the last couple of weeks that the National Security Agency is routinely tracking all sorts of electronic communications as part of the “War on Terror” has gotten a lot of attention.  It has raised concerns about government as big brother, privacy, and when the government is justified in “following” people.  This is part of a big data mining effort trying to figure who potential “bad guys” are communicating with and then connect the dots associated with their networks to prevent acts of terror.   The idea is that monitoring so-called metadata can provide all sorts of information and in fact tell you a lot about a person or group of people.

Thoughts About Tracking?

Last March I asked “Who is Tracking You?” and pointed out many of the issues associated with all of the data that is floating around out there.  In light of that post, I guess I am not surprised by the fact the Federal Government is casting a wide net on communications metadata.  A so-called “total information awareness” program emerged just after 9/11 and was widely criticized.  The program was thought to have been canceled but appears to have been merely “rebranded”.  So here are a few observations related to our lives in the era of big data:

•  Any data that can be mined will be mined.

• All data is fundamentally mineable.  Even data that was not created digitally can be digitized and then mined.  This has happened with pre-digital books and magazines as part of text mining, and provided information about social change based on how word use changes with time.  For example the use of the word “women” has increased dramatically since the 1970s.

• There are four fundamental kinds of snooping:

1. The Gladys Kravitz on steroids effect or just plain snooping by someone with access to a database.  Here is a link about someone targeting women via Minnesota driver’s license data.
2. The dog ate my homework….this happens when a lap top or thumb drive with things like medical or banking records are lost.
3. Hacking by criminals looking to make money.
4. Governments, businesses or even political campaigns looking to mix and match data for some reason.

• Some data is part of crumbs or footprints we leave behind doing various transactions or just living in an electronic world.  Some is data that is intentionally gathered for example when the cashier asks for your phone number when you check out of certain stores (your phone number can be linked to all sorts of things).  Some is data that is passively collected and can be used later like video surveillance tapes.  As the Boston bombing shows getting information out of images can also be crowd sourced.  The final way personal data becomes available is via what we voluntarily disclose on social media as part of the societal phenomenon of Oprahization.

• The final point is that who knows where the government ends and the big IT and communications companies begin.  None of this happened without the collaboration of the big companies.  How hard did they fight to not give up the data?  When electronic copies of the internal corporate memos are leaked (one of the positives of all of this) it will be interesting to wade through the doublespeak and see just how willingly the big boys collaborated with the Feds.

End of Privacy?

I guess the overwhelming conclusion is that we have entered the “end of privacy” era.  We are all addicted to the convenience and efficiency of the electronic world and I doubt that for most of us there will be any going back.  Our Oprahized world suggests that a lot of people are embracing a world with no privacy.

A follow up to the recent Secretariat post from the Wall Street Journal.

click here for link

The Belmont Stakes horse race will be run this Saturday.  Forty years ago Secretariat won the 1.5 mile race by an incredible 31 lengths.  His time of 2:24 is faster by 2 seconds than the next fastest time posted over the last 40 years.  Some have argued that Secretariat’s run at the Belmont in 1973 is the greatest performance in sports history.  The video below shows this remarkable feat.

click here for video 

Last summer during the Olympics I posted a number of videos of people like Bob Hayes and Jim Ryun and also wrote about the role of relaxation and rhythm in sports.  Note the length of the great horse’s stride and how little Secretariat’s head bobs.  From what I can tell his jockey never uses the whip.  Have you ever seen such power and relaxation at the same time?

Humans Still Getting Faster

One other piece of brain candy related to this is that as a result of selective breeding over several hundred years horses may have reached a plateau in terms of performance.  The figure below is from a fascinating 2008 paper that shows this for the three Triple Crown races.

By contrast, the data from humans suggest that we are still getting faster, at least in some events.  The human to animal comparison is confused by major changes in training, technique, equipment, and (unfortunately) doping for humans.  There are also more humans competing at a high level than ever before as the population grows and more people from more countries participate.  Things in horse racing have been relatively stagnant by comparison.  As I mentioned last summer when reasonable assumptions about artificial tracks are made it is unclear if performances are physiologically better now than in the 1960s.

Summary

Thinking about records and the limits of performance is an interesting intellectual exercise that can shed light on all sorts of things and fuel a lot of fun arguments.  Watching a performance like Secretariat’s always leaves me with a sense of awe.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Almost all of the data I show in this blog comes from studies in humans or various population databases.  I am going to make an exception today and show you some data about what happens when mice that are genetically modified to age early are also subjected to exercise training.

Mitochondrial Aging the Key?

One idea is that a prime driver of the aging process is a loss of mitochondrial function over time.  The mitochondria are small energy factories in our cells.  When they become defective the idea is that byproducts released from the mitochondria damage cells and cause aging.  The picture below shows what happens when the system responsible for DNA proof reading in the mitochondria is absent in mice.   The animal on left is a control while the animal on the right is aging prematurely due to the genetic alteration.   The mice are called progeroid because they have features associated with a rare form of premature aging that is seen in humans called progeria.

Exercise Keep Mitochondria Healthy

Exercise keeps our mitochondria healthy as we age and it also stimulates muscle and other tissues to increase the number of mitochondria in each cell.   So what happens when porgeroid mice exercise trained for 45 minutes per day three times per week for five months?   The pictures below show the hearts of the mice.  The panels on the left are from wild type (WT) that is genetically normal.  The middle panels show an enlarged heart from porgeroid animal that was sedentary.   The right panel shows that exercise training blunted the response seen in the sedentary animal.

The authors concluded that:

“Here we show that 5 months of endurance exercise induced systemic mitochondrial biogenesis, prevented mitochondrial DNA depletion and mutations, increased mitochondrial oxidative capacity and respiratory chain assembly, restored mitochondrial morphology, and blunted pathological levels of apoptosis in multiple tissues of mitochondrial DNA mutator mice. These adaptations conferred complete phenotypic protection, reduced multisystem pathology, and prevented premature mortality in these mice. The systemic mitochondrial rejuvenation through endurance exercise promises to be an effective therapeutic approach to mitigating mitochondrial dysfunction in aging and related comorbidities.”

These data and the conclusions drawn from this study clearly confirm and explain what is happening in the master athlete super agers we have discussed before.

Today’s post is short and in preparation for the fact that many of us eat out more during summer vacation and when we are on the road doing all sorts of different things.   The chart below is from a study of more than 3000 people in the New England area eating at national fast food chains.   The key finding is that people in every age group under estimate how many calories they are eating when that grab a meal at a fast food outlet.

There is also recent evidence that better labeling reduces the number of calories purchased at fast food restaurants by women and not men.   Finally, we tend to eat more when we eat out and the consumption of either pre-prepared food or eating out more are factors contributing to the obesity epidemic.   The implications of this data are pretty obvious and start with clear labeling of the food we buy in whatever venue and then paying attention to the labels.  Especially for men!