Sam Fussell: I think for many sports for many decades, PED’s have been such a given and used by 100% of the top competitors in the world that it becomes a kind of club. Everyone in the club knows. Everyone in the clubs knows that the first rule of Fight Club is there is no Fight Club.
So many generations of track & field, Olympic Lifting, etc have gotten away with it that the current users really regard it as their right to do the same as their predecessors.
The ‘Brotherhood of the Needle’ becomes a kind of fraternity where drug use is universal among members and the common bond, but never discussed outside the fold.
The first time I was injected with steroids, I staggered right outside my living room to the front door, opened, it, fell outside, and vomited right onto the Welcome mat.
I had crossed the line.
Like everyone else, I was going to be the first person in history to do it ‘naturally.’
And then, like everyone else, I witnessed with my own eyes just what drugs can do.
Time and again, the ‘champions’ tell us, once they are dumb enough to get caught, ‘drugs never made a champion.’
Oh really?
You wanna compare the times of Marion Jones on drugs vs. off them?
Puh-leeze.
What I found with steroids is not only could I train once a day, balls-to-the-wall, but I could train twice per day, balls-to-the-wall. Not only could I have one orgasm per day with my girlfriend, but I could have three or four. Not only was I pleased when I woke up each morning ,but I literally could jump out of bed. They were like an amphetamine for me.
And in the gym, all of a sudden, there are no more limits.
Before, you could fail a lift and say, “Well, I’m not on steroids.”
But when you are on steroids, you no longer have that excuse.
The problem is when you are on steroids, your world gets very, very small because all of your friends are also on steroids. You end up speaking the same vocabulary as your friends (“What’s your cycle? What are you stacking? Are you ‘on’ or ‘off’?). And your best friends become your steroid dealers.
In the gym, the better you get at lifting, the more you become a walking billboard, in flesh, for your steroid dealer. People come to you to ask who is your dealer. You help with the ‘referal’ and either get a kick-back or get free supply, depending on the number of clients.
Well, you are led to believe it is free.
Until the phone rings at 1:00 in the morning and your dealer calls and he asks you to do him a favor, and, in his debt, you agree, whatever it is.
And what it turns out to be is your dealer picking you up at 1:30 in the morning and taking you to a 24 hour gym in Los Angeles, where he parks the vehicle, and asks you to accompany him over to that car with two guys in it. The guys get out of the car, and you arrive with your dealer.
The dealer talks to them about the money they own him.
The two guys look at you dwarfing the dealer and them.
And they pay.
That’s a best-case scenario that happened to me.
I will say, in direct answer to your question, that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more alive in my life than loading up 500 lbs on the Olympic bar in the squat cage.
I sit on the bench and I slowly and tightly wrap each knee.
With help and an outstretched hand, I am led up from the bench to stand on my two feet.
I square myself about ten feet before the Olympic bar.
I take it in.
There are is a spotter or two waiting by the weights, but I don’t even see them.
I hear screaming in the background, screams, in fact of encouragement, but they drown to just background noise.
I see my reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror beyond the Olympic bar, which has so much weight on it, it is actually bent.
One step at a time, I slowly walk towards the bar.
I slightly dip my knees, and nestle by upper back beneath the weight.
The screaming intensifies and the entire gym stops. Time now stands still.
I lift upwards, the full 500 lbs is on my back, and I’m right where I want to be: drugged to the gills, exactly where I am through tens of thousands of previous lifts, glued to that spot, as happy as a man can be.
Ecstatic, actually.
Physically ecstatic because I know every inch of my body is under my command and will do anything I ask of it.
And my body is, because of this, on fire.
Needless to say, having not touched steroids since 1988, this is a feeling I miss. I’ve never been even tempted to go back ‘on,’ but I remember the feeling of being perfectly suited, through years of training, to be exactly where I was and doing what I was doing.
Injury-free, no less, with ever single muscle in perfect working order.