It’s funny, I ran for twelve seasons in high school and part of one in college (dislocated collarbone, kthxbye), I’m a biological researcher and for some reason I still thought that muscle fatigue comes from muscles using up their oxygen and switching to an anaerobic process that builds up lactic acid. It was pretty much accepted knowledge in the early 90’s as far as I can remember. It turns out that we were completely wrong. Also about Kris Kross, but we don’t need to go starting any lists. The answer has nothing to do with lactic acid and everything to do with leaky muscle cell calcium channels.
Highly trained bicyclists rode stationary bikes at intense levels of exertion for three hours a day three days in a row. For comparison, other cyclists sat in the room but did not exercise.
Dr. Lehnart removed snips of thigh muscle from all the athletes after the third day and sent them to Columbia, where Dr. Marks’s group analyzed them without knowing which samples were from the exercisers and which were not.The results, Dr. Marks said, were clear. The calcium channels in the exercisers leaked. A few days later, the channels had repaired themselves. The athletes were back to normal.
The lead investigator , Dr. Andrew Marks, developed a drug that selectively blocks leaky calcium channels.
[Dr. Marks] and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.
The implications of this study are fairly obvious and a bit disturbing. Assuming that the drug doesn’t have any unexpected effect like making you pass out and drown in your own puke, a free 10-20% edge means an almost certain prize for any competitive endurance athlete not racing Lance Armstrong. Long term questions and possible complications could pose a problem for FDA approval, but top athletes aren’t known for attending to such minutiae.
In 1995 Olympic-caliber U.S. athletes were asked in a poll, “Would you take a drug that made you a champion, knowing that it would kill you in five years?” More than half said yes.
If human tests show any reasonable promise endurance athletes will break down doors for this stuff (they’ll be better equipped to do it than if Marks had invented, say, an uber-TV remote). Look for extra demand if “rycal” drugs turn out to have less of a social stigma than shriveled balls or drinking two and a half cartons of cardboard merlot.
srv
Sheesh. It’s 2008 already, and that’s still my only Resveratrol option?
Birdzilla
They have to be able to have the stanima to keep going for miles nonstop sometimes
AkaDad
Biological researchers hate black people.
Ok, I’m done.
RSA
Cool! My wife and I were talking about aching muscles just the other day, and I gave her the (discredited) lactic acid story. Leaky calcium channels. At least it still sounds milk-related.
jcricket
I read the whole “it’s not lactic acid” reveal a little while back. Big shocker to me (competitive swimmer for 17 years, at the just-barely-not-national level).
Sign me up for drugs that make me TEH SHIZNIT for 5 years and then dead. By then McCain will have bombed us all into oblivion anyway, so who-da-fuck cares about living long and prospering.
jcricket
BTW, I think leaky calcium channels were behind the Blackberry outage today, since the Internet is a series of channels.
Jake
Where were these guys when my track coach was flogging us for miles and miles?
The Other Steve
Will this help Jonah Goldberg write for a longer period of time between Coke and Cheetohs breaks?
robuzo
So it wasn’t lactic acid after all? I’m not buying it. I enjoyed believing that lactic acid story. It was something I understood, something I was raised with, and I am not ready to give it up. When my muscles burn I know it’s the acid- acid burns! Calcium doesn’t burn! You liberal suckers subscribe to every new fad that comes down the pike.
Caidence (fmr. Chris)
holy shit
I always knew it was lactic acid. And it was wrong. Ha.
The last couple years have been about me learning that people are lazy and scientists are usually reporting on best guesses, or within limited budgets, instead of establishing proofs.
So, we can fix muscular exertion via calcium channels, snorting Orexin A should replace sleep, and stem cells gathered out of fat tissue can grow bone replacements.
I’m going to keep living just to see what mangled lump of flesh I become in my 50’s!
sidereal
Don’t worry. Even if it doesn’t actually shrivel your balls, studies will be invented, massaged, or misinterpreted to ‘prove’ it’s dangerous, like Ecstasy causing seizures, video games causing violent behavior, or HGH causing arthritis. Because nothing can stand in the way of the power of prepackaged morality narratives.
Phoebe
How were YOU wrong about Kris Kross? I thought they were girls and they turned out to be boys. I even saw them shooting a video on a sidewalk in NYC and I thought they were girls. “Aaaaw! You go girls!” I said something along those lines, but I was on the opposite sidewalk, and nobody heard me.
Paul
I’m reminded of the plot of the Larry Niven/Steven Barnes novel Achilles Choice.
(Not a bright star in either of the writers oeuvre, but still…)
Andrew
We actually seem to use lactic acid as fuel too!
Bob In Pacifica
Being old, I’m from the old school. I thought feeling tired meant you were doing good. Well.
Carnacki
The “early adapters” will be the military. They use amphetemines and other drugs to keep soldiers and pilots operating longer now.