Stuart Stevens has found fame and fortune as a political strategist. He is one of the half-dozen or so campaign consultants in America who actually understands both politics and strategy and isn’t just grifting the needy, well-heeled marks who often find themselves compelled to run for office.
He has advised campaigns of all sorts, at all levels, from Bob Dole to Haley Barbour to George W. Bush. Sometimes it seems as though half the Republican Senate caucus owes their seats to Stevens. In 1986 he got an actor from The Love Boat elected to Congress. In 2012, in atonement for his sins, he was given the task of trying to drag Mitt Romney into the White House.
But Stevens is also one of my favorite writers. He’s written a campaign book that is uncommonly good. But also a book about traveling China’s Silk Road, which is great. And a book about his father and college football, which is transcendent. And in between these and his campaign work, he has written a series of long, reported essays for Outside magazine.
In 2003, Stevens wrote the definitive piece on a subject that has long fascinated me: steroids.
I’ve never really understood why people take steroids. This lack of understanding comes from both a failure of imagination and a paucity of experience, in much the same way that, not having tried narcotics, I’ve never understood why people do drugs, either. “What’s the big deal?” I thought.
An amateur athlete, Stevens was asking himself the same question. So in order to figure out the answer, he went on the juice for a year and wrote about it.
He started by meeting a beefy guy at the gym who gave him veterinary pills used to bulk up livestock. But he blanched at this regimen and instead went under the supervision of a physician who specializes in “anti-aging” medicine.
Stevens began by taking HGH, then testosterone, then EPO, and eventually Deca, a basic anabolic steroid. The result was that he became Superman. His vision got better, his skin cleared up, he added muscle effortlessly. And when he did sports? Lights out. Stevens found that the steroids didn’t improve his performance around the margins or make him a little faster. They made him a lot faster. Not a 1 percent improvement; closer to 20 percent.
I had a vaguely similar experience this summer. In June I spent an extended period at a high altitude, around 8,000 feet. I run 30 miles or so a week, but while I was at altitude, I didn’t run at all, instead hiking between 5 and 7 miles a day.
When I came home and went for a run, it was surreal. Usually I run five or six miles at the plodding, embarrassing pace of about 9:15 per mile, at the conclusion of which I’m pretty gassed.
My first day back at sea level, I ran seven-and-a-half miles at an 8:15 pace and was practically laughing at the finish. The next day I ran 10 miles at a 7:55 pace. I hadn’t seen a “7” in front of a mile split since I was in my 20s. And I wasn’t even especially tired at the end the run.
I was Superman.
On the third day, I did another brisk 10 miles, a little faster. And suddenly I realized that I was running in a zone fast enough that qualifying for the Boston marathon—a longtime dream of mine—wasn’t out of the question.
That’s when I began to understand why people take steroids. It wasn’t just that I was fast again or young again. I was the übermensch version of me—better than my best self. And it all made me giddily optimistic. I went to bed each night excited about running the next morning. I told everyone I know about the transformation. The feeling was, in the literal sense, euphoric.
On my ninth day, the reversion started. I had wanted to go out for a 13-mile run but felt tired and quit after 12 miles. A few days later I was having trouble keeping the pace under the eight-minute mark. I felt like Superman with someone jabbing a spear of kryptonite between the ribs, slowly sapping me of my powers. Three weeks after that, I reverted mostly to form.
It was only then, as my system returned to normal, that I understood why people went on the juice. Being me—the real me—was depressing compared with what I’d been.
