 |
Building muscle has high price tagDate: 10.12.2006
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team United States
"Mark" knew that before he ever injected that first steroid into his muscles to make them grow. No one wants to see an average, fit man with muscles built from years of faithful weight training and dieting. They want the bearded lady, the two-headed midget, the unexplained circus sideshow.
They want to see muscles that are unnaturally defined, bulging from the body in every direction. They want sculpted limbs and rock-hard torsos when they come to bodybuilding shows. If they wanted to see natural, they'd hang out at the gym and steal glances at neighbors on the treadmill.
So, even though Mark had lived his life soap-scrubbed clean, he knew if he wanted to be a competitive bodybuilder, he would have to do it with steroids.
He hated himself, at first. Mark, who didn't want his real name used in this story, had never been tempted by any kind of drug until he was 23 and started lifting weights regularly. He saw how easily his body accepted muscle, and he decided to give bodybuilding a chance.
In bodybuilding, to be successful, steroids are the unspoken rule. Everyone does it. No one is tested. And Mark has always wanted to be the best at everything he's done, so he'd have to do it, too.
He asked around at his Akron gym about how to get steroids. He went up to the biggest guys in the place, the ones who had the overgrown muscles that he wanted. They knew.
Until then, he had been intent on keeping his body clean because he strived to be an Olympic athlete. And he had watched an older brother die from a drug overdose, so he never wanted to go near any kind of drug. Besides, he hated needles.
But the desire to be big in an unreal way overwhelmed him, too. He was always the puny one in his large family, the smallest in his high school, so wiry at 5-6 that he wrestled at 132 pounds his senior year. He had always been muscular, but he wanted muscles.
So, he found someone who got him pills and an injectable steroid, and decided to do it right then, right there, as soon as he got it at the gym.
He thought he was going to die, that first time. But he popped a pill, anyway, and asked the buddy who got the steroids to inject him. They were in the gym locker room and he just wanted to get it over with. He didn't wince, he didn't cry at his loss of innocence. He felt the tiny needle prick, then went back into the gym, out to the weights and the machines that would make his muscles grow.
He hated it at first, but he did it because he knew what would happen.
"Your brain takes over because you start getting bigger," Mark said.
A student of steroids
That first time seems like it was both a lifetime ago and yesterday. Mark is 46 now, and steroids are a regular part of his life. He has 23 years of experience with steroids, he's found them both legally, in prescriptions from his doctor, and on the "gray market," as he calls the source who gets him the drugs for significantly cheaper through a shadier exchange.
He has a physician's reference book of steroids called "Chemical Muscle Enhancement, the Bodybuilder's Desk Reference." It lists all of the 15 or so steroids he has tried, plus dozens more. It tells what each one does, the side effects and benefits of them all.
He studied that guidebook and became an expert on the drugs before he took that first steroid, but he also found an adviser, his "Chemical Guy," who told him which steroids to take when.
He learned that pills are tougher on the body, having to go through the liver and kidneys where the body processes it. He discovered that pills are also easy to counterfeit, and he had to be careful his source was getting the real deal.
He now has a catalog of firsthand experiences. Anadrol, the steroid detected in Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson in the 1988 Olympics, makes him feel like Superman. After just two weeks on the drug, he feels like he can lift a refrigerator with ease.
Winstrol-V is his old standby, a milky white injectable that doesn't cause him to gain weight but makes his muscles hard and solid.
The newest kid on the block, human growth hormone that came on his gray market about eight years ago, truly is a miracle drug. "If I had money, if I were a millionaire, I'd be on growth hormone until I was dead," Mark said. "It makes your body younger."
Mark took Anadrol and Winstrol-V that first time, and over time, he added others and mixed up the combinations. He went through cycles, pounding his body with as much as 2,000 milligrams of steroids each week, then taking six weeks off to cleanse his system and ready it for more muscle-building steroids. He worked out five days a week. His muscles grew.
After nearly two years, Mark went from a scrawny 140 pounds to a bulging 167. He'd added 27 pounds of pure muscle for his first bodybuilding competition.
Then, he went to the competitions and something just as miraculous began happening: He started winning.
Pictures of Mark at his prime - in his early- and mid-30s - show his tanned muscles rippling in bodybuilder poses. He is Atlas, with muscles so massive that he could carry the world on his shoulders. His hair is thick and styled so meticulously that not a strand is out of place. When his muscles are flexed, he looks strong enough to smash a bus.
As he won, he continued taking steroids and he grew even bigger. He gained dozens of pounds more of solid muscle. He climbed to 235 pounds, and dieted down to 3 percent body fat when he competed.
It came with a price, though.
The year he won his biggest competition, he spent about $17,000 on steroids. Through his job as a personal trainer, Mark found a financier who helped pay for all the drugs that made him big. If he'd had more money, he could have easily spent $30,000 to $45,000 on steroids, he said. A three-week supply of growth hormone, the drug that he says makes everything about him younger and better, costs $400. If he gets it on his "gray market," that is. If he gets growth hormone with a prescription, it costs $1,500.
And he got divorced - a product, he reluctantly admits, of his sport and his obsessive need to get bigger by spending long hours in the gym. Soon after his first marriage ended, he met and married Katie. He was her trainer at the gym, and now Katie dabbles in bodybuilding competitions, too. She understands.
The result of use
Mark now calls himself clean. Though he hasn't competed in three years, he works out regularly and has hopes for one more swing through the bodybuilding circuit. Right now, he takes one shot a week, a steroid called Deca, prescribed by his doctor to bring his testosterone level up to normal. After years of pounding his body with artificial testosterone, his natural production has dropped to one-third of normal.
The result of use
Mark now calls himself clean. Though he hasn't competed in three years, he works out regularly and has hopes for one more swing through the bodybuilding circuit. Right now, he takes one shot a week, a steroid called Deca, prescribed by his doctor to bring his testosterone level up to normal. After years of pounding his body with artificial testosterone, his natural production has dropped to one-third of normal.
His wife, Katie, injects him. Mark hates needles. For a while, Katie couldn't stand them, either, and refused to inject him for about six months. That was after one of Mark's two hospital stays because of steroids.
That came after a routine shot several years ago. He doesn't even remember what the steroid was - "I've taken so much stuff," he said, shaking his head. But that time, as Katie plunged the needle into the muscle in his glute, Mark felt his body burn and tingle. "That's weird," he thought. He told her to inject the drug. She did.
Instantly, the right side of Mark's body turned eggplant purple. Katie started screaming, panicking. Was it a bad drug? But he had used that bottle of steroids before. Was he having a heart attack? Some kind of horrible reaction? Mark didn't know, either.
They rushed to the hospital, Mark told the emergency room doctor the whole story - he's always careful to tell the truth of his steroid history to doctors - and they ran tests. Still, no one knew what had happened. Finally, another doctor examined Mark, and understood what he was seeing in the brilliant plum-colored skin: a chemical burn.
When injecting the steroid, Katie had plunged into scar tissue that has built up from so many shots, and that prevented the needle from reaching the muscle. She had injected the drug just beneath the skin layer, the doctor said, and the body's natural response was to attempt to burn off the foreign substance.
That meant bright purple skin. Four days later, after intravenous antibiotics and slices into his skin to remove infection, Mark came home.
Mark shrugs off that reaction as one of the few hazards of steroids. He's not afraid of the side effects of the drugs. His doctor has even told him that steroids are perfectly safe if you use them correctly. He says he has encountered none of the nasty reactions like acne or violent mood swings.
"My theory is, if you were a jerk before steroids, you'll just be a bigger one with them," he said, laughing.
These days, Mark isn't sure whether he has what it takes to compete in bodybuilding. His thick body is less defined, his wavy hair has given way to a shaved, bald head, and he sports a graying goatee. He looks like a bouncer at a club, someone who used to work out a lot.
But he thinks he has one more push in him. The steroids are tougher on his body now that he's had 23 years of drugs, he realizes, but something about the competition calls to him, still.
"Guys like me are in the sport basically because we want to be big," Mark said. "We want to be the best. It's stupid, I know. We would do it for free because of the attention."
People want to see freaks, and Mark is happy to oblige.
|
© Anabolic Info
|
|
 |
