The author, an amateur endurance athlete with a deep curiosity about the abuse of drugs in sports, explores the issue in a fascinating, in-depth, first-person account of eight months doping interspersed with the history of chemical cheating in athletic competition. Where athletes score, what the drugs feel like, the inconsistent controls on doping in amateur sport, the risks to one’s health, the seamy world of doctors who get rich ‘treating’ where there is no ailment (except normal aging or poor athletic performance)…

Throughout this experiment, I’d been e-mailing people whom I’d encountered on various Web sites, like Extreme-Athlete.com, where steroid users get together and compare notes. That night I went to one of the bodybuilding sites I’d joined and listed what I was taking: the HGH, the testosterone, the EPO, and now the Deca. I thought I was really pushing the limits, but, tellingly, I was immediately mocked for my timidity and puny dosages.

“Dude, why not just take aspirin?” wrote a guy who called himself the Great One. “Try like 600 milligrams of test and 400 to 600 of Deca a week, girlie boy. And what’s with this human growth stuff? My mom takes that. Why not Dianabol?” he wrote, referring to a particularly potent anabolic steroid. “You afraid of getting strong?”

It was standard practice on these sites to close messages with a quote or a quip like “I may die, but they’ll need a big coffin.” —Outside [via boing boing]

Intriguing and scary.