Week 2 - The drugs might work - Day 9 of 112

This morning's run out on paper looked simple enough and not too taxing. 1 mile jog warm up followed by 16x200m reps at 5km pace or 40 secs with a 200m recovery and a 1 mile warm down to finish with. Now, I have not run 200m since I was at school and I recall a time of around 26 seconds but maybe my memory is a bit hazy so I thought how difficult is this going to be. Well by the time time that I looked at the Garmin to see how many I had left I was already in a bad place wanting the session to end there and then. I thought to myself that if I had maybe another 4 to go then I could hold on and complete these.  I looked at the Garmin and it said that I still had another 9 to go. Nine more bloody reps, nine more times where at the end of each interval I look like a lurching idiot, nine more time where my HR will max out at 175bpm .......... call the paramedics! 20 minutes later, I crawled off the oval at West of Scotland Cricket Club in Partick session done and made my way home with the lactic acid coursing through my veins completely smashed and looking forward to my porridge. I got home and downloaded the stats. I was meant to do 40sec reps - I never ever hit the mark once. What a sufferfest.

Lactic acid is the marathon runners nemisis and there are ways and means that you can reduce/buffer this by way of circuit training or drugs. By reducing the lactic acid you should be able to go faster  for longer. The drug of choice which I have been looking into is xendurance.com which claims to reduce lactic acid by 15%. All above board, tested to the hilt and compliant with IOC, IAAF etc. John Newsome http://www.imtalk.me/ who introduces one of the podcast that I listen to has tried this and swears by it. The question that I have, taking aside any medical issues, is whether or not this is cheating/gaining an unfair advantage. In all the sport that I have done I have never ever considered supplements but I played in an era where these dietary supplements were not the norm. Nowadays I understand that even Glasgow Hawks U16 team are all told what they should and shouldn't eat and monitored constantly. Should I open the box?

Here are the numbers

4.91 miles - 7.48 mile pace - 157 avg bpm - cadence avg 81 - fastest rep 40.29 - slowest rep 50.97