In the Long Run
Copyright© 2024 by The Horse With No Name
Chapter 76: Documentary
Incest Sex Story: Chapter 76: Documentary - Mark and Lydia hit a lot of bumps during the cold war and fate eventually brings them to the other side of the globe, but even there the challenges don't end. This is the founding story of my planned "It's always the Germans" universe, which will be created when this story reaches the year 1998.
Caution: This Incest Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa mt/ft mt/Fa Consensual Romantic Lesbian Heterosexual Fiction Sports Incest Mother Son Light Bond Anal Sex Double Penetration Exhibitionism First Massage Oral Sex Pegging Petting Nudism
John
Whatever they had done in those training camps, it had definitely worked. It had been at least three years since Lydia had won a marathon as dominantly as she did in her first appearance of the year at Rio de Janeiro in April. She came nowhere near the world record, but her opponents came nowhere near her either.
She normally won by consistency, overtaking all other on the last ten kilometers. This time she had just left them behind at the half-way mark. One detail that I immediately noticed was that she didn’t only drink lots of water, but she also occasionally sucked something or other out of little packages, which looked a bit like these little packages of instant coffee you find in some hotels. She had not done something like that in the past, so this must have been part of their new plan.
But speculating served no purpose as we were about to find out within the hour. I had heard through our Berlin office that the screening of the documentary in Germany had made huge waves in the media and had been praised widely for its quality.
I had lost a fiver to Rhonda in a bet, because she had bet me that we would definitely get to see Lydia’s tits in it. We didn’t have much infos yet, but we knew for sure that she would appear topless at some point. We would get to see the English version and Rhonda got confirmation for winning the bet almost immediately when the broadcast was preceded by a disclaimer.
“This broadcast contains short sequences of partial female nudity in a medical context. Parental guidance is advised. This film was created by a German TV station in cooperation with international athletes. The interviews were produced in English and the original German narration has been re-recorded for an international audience.”
The opening scene showed four women on bicycles and we immediately recognized the voice of Phil Ligget, who had been used to dub the original German voice from the off.
Cycling has been rocked by series of doping scandals in recent years, and we are about to meet a group of people who are not shy to point out what is wrong with the sport. But they don’t leave it at that. They have made it their goal to show how a better, cleaner sport can prevail, and they have agreed to let us look behind the scenes.
Meet the main protagonists of this documentary. Lydia Karass, who sixteen years ago fled East Germany to escape attempts to pressure her into partaking in the state organized doping program. She has been a US citizen since 1988 and has won three Olympic gold medals for the United States in the marathon and the ten thousand meters. Additionally, she won five national time-trial championships in cycling and she scored three podiums in cross-country skiing this winter.
Nadja Jurisdóttir, born in Russia, now a citizen of Iceland. Like Lydia Karass, she left her native country to escape from rampant doping practices. For years she has been one of the main rivals of Lydia in the marathon, but she now competes successfully in cycling and cross-country skiing. She is also an aspiring racing driver and will be competing in the famed twenty-four hour race at the Nürburgring later this year.
Femke ten Haage of the Netherlands, a multiple national champion and Olympic winner in the time trial. As the first woman from a country that is known for dominating ice skating, she won three World Cup races in cross-country skiing.
Meredith Daxter, an Olympic champion in 1992 in the 4x100 meters relay, but also a US national champion in cycling. She retired last year at the age of only twenty-nine to concentrate on her second passion, the scientific side of sports. She has done a lot of work for a nutritional program that some experts say has the potential to revolutionize endurance disciplines.
The camera stopped panning along the phalanx of riders and switched to an inside scene. Lydia sat on the training bike on a roll and was pedaling hard. I heard Rhonda cackle triumphantly, because Lydia only wore cycling pants and shoes, but she was completely topless. Her entire torso and the arms were littered with stick-on sensors. Pictures of topless male riders hooked up to a lot of sensors were nothing unusual. American TV just never showed that female athletes did the same. German TV apparently had no qualms about it and they didn’t try to hide anything by clever camera positioning.
Suddenly the monitoring device beeped and Lydia stopped pedaling. The camera panned away to a shot of Mark taking a long piece of paper from the machine that looked like one of the over-sized receipts Rhonda brought home after going berserk in a Supermarket.
The man overseeing this procedure is Mark Jason Harris, a physiotherapist and partner of Lydia Karass. He explains what we have just witnessed.
“This test is akin to running a car until it runs out of fuel to find out its range. An athlete’s glycogen storage in the muscles and the liver is comparable to a car’s fuel tank. That storage is built up by carb loading. You have probably seen pictures of Tour de France cyclists eating large bowls of pasta. That is an athlete’s equivalent of refueling your car. This process usually takes one to three days.”
“What happens when the fuel runs out?” an unseen interviewer asked.
“You bonk,” Mark explained. “That’s a cycling term for running out of energy. Cycling fans will probably remember the Galibier stage of the 1998 Tour de France when favorite Jan Ullrich bonked spectacularly and lost nine minutes and the yellow jersey. He had simply run out of fuel. We have just tested, how long it takes for Lydia’s glycogen reserves to run out. The result: Ninety-five minutes. If she were to run a marathon without taking in additional carbohydrates, she would bonk on the last ten kilometers.”
It is apparent that nutrition is a vital part of managing an athlete’s energy reserves, but they can hardly eat more pasta during a marathon or a Tour de France stage. This is where the second career of Meredith Daxter comes into play, as she explains...
“Glycogen storage, to stay with the car analogy, is actually your reserve tank,” Meri explained when the camera had panned to her. “Theoretically it can never run out if you manage to feed the athlete enough carbohydrates. The problem so far has been, that it is almost impossible to take in as many carbohydrates as you burn through, so you will slowly drain your glycogen reserves. The goal therefore is to maximize the intake of carbohydrates in order to minimize the rate at which you have to dip into your reserves.”
The team around our protagonists believes the answer lies in space, or more precisely with the people who fly there. Since the beginning of manned space flight, astronauts and kosmonauts have been feeding on pastes from tubes, a highly concentrated food. Daxter, in cooperation with the Technical University of Dresden has been working on highly concentrated gels to be used as food supply during competitions.
Rhonda cackled when the shot showed the monitoring equipment that beeped again and a topless Femke freed herself from the sensors. She put on a bathrobe before facing the unseen interviewer.
“It isn’t exactly a gourmet meal,” Femke explained to the camera without being asked a question. “To be brutally honest: it tastes like liquid crap. But it has some advantages over the energy bars we normally used up to now. For starters, you don’t have to chew. That saves energy and doesn’t interrupt your breathing. Secondly, the body absorbs it faster and that is important if you want to maximize the carbohydrate intake.”
“Are there any tangible differences?” the interviewer asked. “The season is still young. Is it too early to say if this method works?”
“You can tell on the first day that it works,” Femke replied. “We were in altitude training earlier this year and Lydia just loves to torture the raw stuffing out of us. At forty she’s still the best damn climber out of all of us. My big muscles are a boon in a time trial, but a curse in the mountains. The only way for me to climb is by brute force, which takes much more energy. With a better way to top up, I was climbing better than ever before. Mind you, I won’t win a mountain stage anytime soon, but I will lose less time.”
As you will notice, some of these interviews have been conducted late in the production process although they appear relatively early in the feature. We asked Meredith Daxter if she wasn’t concerned that she could give away too many of their trade secrets.
“We actually want to give them away. First of all, nobody knows our recipe, and we’re not going to give that away, but the main point is, any professional team can come up with their own solution. It would finally end the use of horrible substances like anabolic steroids, which can almost literally turn women into men. The whole point of these substances is to make athletes more durable, so they can train longer and harder. You can have the same effect if you don’t run out of energy in the first place.”
This sentiment is seconded by Lydia Karass in a more robust fashion, after all these very substances were what made her flee her own country.
“At some point, back in the early eighties, some team doctor would offer you a pink or a blue pill. We all knew what it was – Oral Turinabol. The pink one was the lesser evil. It only had one milligram of Chlorodehydromethyltestosterone. Just think about how many substances I just rattled off that you don’t want in your body. Then there was also the blue pill, which had five times the dose. That was an express ticket to becoming a guy within two years. Pardon my graphic description, but after I had seen an older team mate with a clitoris the size of a thumb hanging out of her vagina for the first time, and she had to shave off a beard every morning, I decided to get the hell out of dodge because they began to pressure me into taking these pills too.”
“Have you ever taken them, or perhaps been tricked into taking them?” the interviewer asked.
“I’ve never taken them, and I’m sure I’ve never been tricked. My coach at the time had our backs. He could do little about the older athletes who had joined our group while already being on ‘the program’, but he fought tooth and nail for us younger athletes. He made sure we brought our own food instead of eating in the canteen, so they couldn’t smuggle the pills into our food.”
“Do you know what happened to your coach?”
Rhonda clutched her mouth when she could see that Lydia was becoming visually emotional.
“He was punished, because the authorities suspected him of having facilitated my flight to West Germany. He was incarcerated in Bautzen, one of the jails for political prisoners. The West German authorities literally bought his freedom and brought him to West Germany. He later became Nadja’s coach and helped her train in Germany instead of Russia, to get her away from the same practices.”
The scene changed to Nadja sitting in what looked like a hotel lobby. As the only one who didn’t speak English well her interview was in German and we had to read the subtitles.
“Thomas, Lydia’s former coach, saved me from getting involved in doping. The USSR was copying the East German system. But the pressure was not nearly as big as it had been for Lydia. The GDR had sixteen million people, we had over two-hundred million, so there were enough athletes to choose from. If you were good enough without doping, they let you live in peace, in a way. They still tried to offer me drugs, but I could decline without too much problems. After the USSR collapsed, everyone soon knew that Thomas was the coach to go to if you didn’t want to have anything to do with pills and injections.”
“Is he still your coach?” the interviewer asked, but Nadja shook her head.
“He retired years ago. Lydia is my coach now, and we have coaches in our cycling team too.”
The team that Nadja mentions is Team O’Connor Airlines-Phillips from Groningen in the Netherlands, a top-tier women’s cycling team that all four of our main protagonists have ridden for in the past or are still riding for. This team is unusual in the fact that its Directeur Sportif, the sporting director is a self-confessed doper, who nearly died of a heart attack caused by EPO use. That ended his career and he decided to prevent others from suffering the same fate by creating his own team of riders who are competing without the use of performance enhancing drug, as he explains himself.
“Erythropoietin is a drug used to treat people with an inability for or deficiencies in producing red blood cells. In a healthy person it boosts the red blood cell counts and allows more oxygen to be transported to the muscles. As a downside, it makes your blood thicker. That’s what nearly killed me. It had turned my blood into ketchup as Lydia called it in her interview last year and my heart couldn’t cope anymore.”
“You started using this drug in the mid-1980s,” the interviewer asked the DS. “How wide-spread is the use today?”
“It’s all over endurance sports these days. As a rule of thumb you could say, any competition that goes beyond ninety minutes has athletes using EPO in it. Unfortunately there is still no reliable test that can tell natural EPO from synthetic one, especially since synthetic EPO has a short half-life. Even if they find a test, you just have to evade doping control for a few hours.”
“What is the point then for running a clean team?” he was challenged.
“You have to understand one thing. It’s not the riders who walk up to their team bosses, asking if they can get some drugs. It’s almost always the team pushing them to accept pharmaceutical help. There may be a handful who did that, but in the overwhelming amount of cases riders are talked into using PEDs. I want to provide a safe haven for riders who categorically don’t want to play Russian Roulette with their health.”
“Yet your team has a rather impressive amount of wins. What is the point of doping if you can be just as good when you compete clean?”
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