Joe Rogan - The Truth About Lance Armstrong

Maybe these guys were, maybe the people who are drawn to those sports are the ones that are, you know, are drawn to be elite in those sports, already had a genetic predisposition. That's sort of my feeling is it's a bit of both. Isn't that the case with Lance Armstrong? Like doesn't he have a very large heart? Um, I don't know. Um, I think what Lance had that was pretty unique even amongst the world's best, which is what he competed with of course, I think his lactate threshold was a lot higher than most people. Genetically. Yeah. And then of course, and again, you know, I mean, I know it's such a controversial topic, although my view is, I think that every single cyclist, at least from 1991 till 2011, was on highly, highly, you know, augmented programs. So, you know, that Lance won seven of those years, um, in that context, just tells me that he was, you know, training harder and being more specific to the race. I mean, what people don't understand is like, I mean, Lance only peaked for one race a year. Like everything that that team, US postal did was geared for that one race. Um, and also when you really look at how much doping they did, it actually wasn't that much. Like, you know, when they were blood transfusing, it might have been two units over the course of a race. And I'm not saying that that wouldn't help. It would help a lot. But that's nothing compared to what people were doing just a few years before Lance came along. So Lance won, I think his first one in 99. The guy who won before that in 98 was Marco Pantani. Before that was going to be on Ulrich in 97. And before that was going to be Bjoern Rees. Bjoern Rees' nickname was Mr. 60 because his hematocrit was always over 60. That's frickin' sta- like how that guy didn't die of a stroke, I don't know. Is that from EPO? Yeah. Lance never had a crit over 50, to my knowledge. They would basically always titrate with EPO and or hemoglobin up to 50, which was the trigger. So, you know, but I think, and again, I've never, I don't know Lance at all. So I certainly don't know anything about him beyond like the little bits that I have read over time. But I do think his lactate tolerance was remarkable. Meaning, you know, we measure lactate in athletes, swimmers and cyclists when they're, you know, trying to figure out what their performance is. And as far as I can tell, there seem to be these two phenotypes. There's the one phenotype where people can tolerate staggeringly high amounts of lactate. And again, it's not lactate per se that is causing the pain that you're experiencing. It's the hydrogen ion that accompanies the lactate. So, lactic acid, the acid part of that is the hydrogen ion. And that's actually what's poisoning the muscle and preventing the muscle from having this effortless actin myosin act, you know, contract, release, etc. But we use lactate as a proxy because where lactate is high, the hydrogen ion is high. And there are some people who can just tolerate like incredible doses. I used to work with Olympic swimmers and I mean, there were just a couple of these guys like they could actually be standing with a lactate of 24. I mean, when I was competing, if I had a lactate above 16 or 17, I couldn't be standing. Like that was just too much pain. Like I was on the floor. If I was over 17, I was puking. And I saw dudes that could stand there at 24. In fact, one of my good friends, he won a gold and a silver medal in the Sydney Olympics and retired from swimming in 2004, then came back to swim masters. So, and was like he actually was trying to make a comeback to make the 2012 Olympic team. And when he was training for that, like I would poke him between races and I saw him get out of a 400 individual medley race, which is the hardest swim race of them all. The 400 IM is, I mean, you might as well just shoot yourself. It's so painful. He got out of that, had a lactate of 18. Two minutes later, not two minutes later, maybe seven minutes later jumped on the blocks and won a 100 breast race, you know, came out with a lactate of 21, that kind of thing. So there are those guys. And then I think at the other end of the spectrum, the word on the street is guys like Michael Phelps are at the opposite end of that, where they are so efficient at shuttling lactic acid out of the cell, back to the liver, where this thing called the Corey cycle actually turns lactate back into glucose that they never have high levels of lactate. Now, again, all of this is sort of, you know, speculation because I don't, I think they were very hush, hush about Phelps's numbers. But I heard from reliable and reasonable sources that he would rarely have a lactate of 8.0, including when he's breaking world records. Whoa. Which for me at 8.0, like I'm smoking and joking, like that's fine. But for, you know, he was so efficient at getting rid of it that, yeah, he could, you know, set the world record in the 400 IM and have a lactate of 8. Again, I don't know if this is true, but I've, there's certainly a plausible mechanism by which it could be. Well, it's fascinating that this could potentially all be engineered, right? That like through use of CRISPR or something else, you could take all these various facets of performance enhancing, you know, modalities, extend a person's ability in so many different ways and create a super person. Yeah, of course. It's interesting, right? Once you start genetically doing it, if you could, does it become cheating in the same way? Like would we, would we have it if you have someone like Phelps who has this genetic predisposition to getting rid of lactose lactate and you take someone like me who probably has none of that. And you know, you juice me up to his level. Is that cheating? I mean, I don't know. I mean, those are the questions. I mean, this is why people like Daniel Coyle, who are so critical of Lance Armstrong say, because on the one hand, you'll have camps that say, look, it's the great equalizer. Like, why don't we just let everybody dope and just steroid argument with them as well? Well, and frankly, it's more my argument. But I have a different reason for arguing that way, which is I think having done these sports and nowhere near at the high level that those guys do it. I just know how destructive they are. Like the Tour de France is the most unhealthy thing on the face of the earth. I've heard that it's healthier to do Tour de France on steroids than it is to do it off steroids. Absafucking lootly. When those guys finish the Tour de France, they are osteopenic. I mean, their bone density has eroded. Their muscle, they have lost so much muscle mass. I mean, it is a devastating, grueling event. Now, nothing's going to completely ameliorate that. But like, if we think that like watching these guys kill themselves, riding six hours a day, hitting peak thresholds of, you know, six watts per kilogram, if we think there's anything physiologically reasonable about that, we're out to fucking lunch. But is that the point? I mean, isn't that the point is that you can push your mind to do something your body absolutely doesn't want to do. So you should be rewarded for for that. You know, and these guys are in a league of their own. I mean, professional cyclists are some of the toughest athletes out there. I mean, obviously, every athlete at the peak of their game is remarkable and no disrespect to like the best running back in the NFL. But like you can't even compare that to what a guy does for workload for sure. Yeah, for just the pain, like the absolute sheer discomfort and the physiologic torture and the duration of it and all these other things. Well, you see it in their faces, too. Those guys, like when they retire, they look like they're 10 years older than they are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they've lost all of the fat. A lot of them, you know, they just if you don't have fat in your face. I mean, you age dramatically. They just look exhausted, too. I mean, it looks like it's just drained them like they've forced to live 30 years inside of 10. Yeah. So it's like what if we just say, guess what? Everybody's allowed to use whatever amounts of EPO blood testosterone to be at the 80th percentile of what we consider normal. So everybody's allowed to walk around with a hemoglobin of 14.7 or up to 14.7 or 15. People would cheat that, right? Wouldn't they? I mean, if you allow people to use a certain amount. But I also think like the testing on this stuff is so like, it's so JV. Now, there's this idea called the biological passport that was introduced many years ago, which basically said, look, we're going to develop a signature for every person. And now if you deviate much from your signature, that'll be the trigger. And the argument again by certain people, and I think Daniel Coyle argued this a lot in one of his books that he wrote, Ripping Apart Lance, was the reason doping is unfair, because everybody does it. Argument doesn't hold water is because if you're a person who naturally lives at a hematocrit of 47, you're only getting a slight improvement going from 47 to 50. If you're a person who naturally lives at 43, you going from 43 to 50, you get a much bigger advantage. To which I say, yeah, but that's true on a relative basis, but an absolute level. If everybody's walking around with a hematocrit of 48 to 50, they still have the same oxygen carrying capacity. It does level the playing field. The concern though, isn't, I would believe the concern is you don't want people to think that the only way to do this sport is to take drugs.