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Outside Magazine November 2003
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Drug Test (Cont.)

ONCE I STARTED THE DECA, I didn't even think about lifting weights. I wanted to get stronger, not bigger. Within two weeks, the pain I felt in my left knee after 100 miles or so—100 was now just a standard ride—went away, coming back only on the most brutal hills. My shoulder felt much better. And then one morning I stepped on the scale.

Two hundred and nine pounds.

I was stunned. I'd never weighed this much. When I first saw Dr. Jones, I weighed 195, which was high for me.

Immediately I hopped on the bike and rode like hell for a few hours. When I got back, I stepped on the scales: 201. I'd lost eight pounds on a not very hot day when I was drinking plenty of fluids?

"What's the problem?" Dr. Jones demanded when I told him I was freaking out over the weight gain. He had me stand on a machine that measured body weight and fat. I weighed 207, but my body fat had dropped to 6.5 percent, down from 10 percent.

"Don't give me this you're-getting-fat crap," he said in an exasperated tone. "You sound like some teenage girl. You've lost six pounds of fat and gained 12 of muscle. That's why you're heavier. And like I told you, the Deca supersaturates the muscle cells with fluid. That's one of the reasons your joints feel better."

At this point my little adventure started to feel pretty creepy, as if there were something inside my body taking over. Which, in a way, there was. I was getting big without trying. When I went for ocean swims, I had trouble getting into my wetsuit. I didn't look cut, though—it was more of a puffy, rounded bigness, making me look like a shorter version of Shaq. Without a jump shot. I did my final 600K qualifying ride for Paris-Brest-Paris on June 15, out of Princeton, New Jersey. This was 200 kilometers farther than I'd ever ridden. By now my HGH levels were 20 percent higher than when I'd started. My testosterone was 300 percent higher. My hematocrit level hovered around 50 percent. I weighed 205—a ten-pound gain—but my body fat was the lowest it had ever been.

We left Princeton at 4 a.m. on a misty, muggy morning. It was a strange course. The first 200 was flat and easy, then came 200 killer kilometers that involved 12,000 feet of climbing, then another fairly hilly 100 and a flat final leg. The whole thing would take me about 31 hours.

I'd been overseas the week before and was tired and jet-lagged at the start. During the easy section, I dragged along, barely staying awake. But when we moved into the hills, I started to feel stronger. I wasn't fast up the hills—but then, I never had been. My weight gain was a hindrance, but I had deep reserves of power and endurance. I rode through the darkness with an image of myself as some kind of tank, just moving along, unstoppable.

At 2 a.m., we took a break at a convenience store in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was Saturday night and the place was filled with kids coming and going to parties and dates. I got a glimpse of myself in the glass of a freezer door. I had a light on my helmet and a bunch of other blinking gizmos attached to my arms and ankles. My face looked like one of those "thousand-yard stare" photos from Vietnam.

What have I done? I wondered. I had a life once, and now I'm standing in the Easton WaWa in the middle of the night, looking like a cyborg, with thousands of dollars of drugs coursing through my veins. I started looking forward to the moment when the whole thing would be over.


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