Yeah. They seem like just the cycling equivalent to strides. Not sure who doesn’t do strides in the running world.
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Yeah, I had super low thyroid levels a couple years ago (my doc was surprised I could get out of bed every day) and I’m now on a pretty large dose of synthroid. I didn’t really lose any weight or get super lean. But I also wasn’t closely watching my diet at the time so it’s possible I just ate a bit more to compensate.
But you definitely have to be careful with taking a bit too high of a dose. I had my dose bumped up too high a year or so ago and I just got bad anxiety, I was hot all the time, and my HR was like 5-10 beats higher all the time and it would just pound in my ears. It was not fun at all. That stopped within a couple days of dropping the dose back down.
I wonder if 50% of those samples were taking synthroid just because high level athletes are more likely to get blood tests for that sort of thing so they are more likely to find out they have minor hypothyroidism. Also, I’ve read that there is possible links to high volume training and lower thyroid levels. So maybe the 20+hr training weeks lead to more of those athletes exhibiting the condition.
Page 212… Sprints of 6 - 7 seconds
I was impressed that he was doing sprint intervals all year long. Short ones in base. 30-45 seconds in build - even double days. And do another SIT workout on Friday if you don’t have a race on Sunday.
One thing is that LeMond is a high VO2max slow twitch athlete. He can probably do all these sprint intervals and not kill himself. A sprinter probably can’t do as many since they would go so deep.
His training model reminds of Fascat - decreasing intensity except Fascat does it with SS and base. Admittedly I haven’t seen a lot of Fascat plans.
Lemond:
Mon: off
Tues: SIT training (double day)
Wed: tempo to threshold intervals
Thurs: endurance
Friday: recovery or SIT if no weekend race
Fascat:
Mon: off
Tues: sweet spot
Wed: tempo
Thurs: endurance
Friday: off
I’m fascinated by the training plan. i can’t believe I never bought the book when I racing the early 90s. We were all flying blind with no plans. 
When LeMond talks about threshold intervals, he says do them at 90%. And then he only does 30 minutes or so. Where’s the 3x20 or 3x30s you hear people talk about today?
Or maybe, LeMond was such a phenomenal talent that he could have done most anything.
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I’ve only ever bought (and therefore seen) the base plans. Funny because I find myself naturally falling into this pattern at times when I’m not obsessively planning ahead and mapping it all out (which, these days, is most of the time, if I’m being honest).
Another possibility that I’ve heard from Iñigo San Milan (and possibly others) is many athletes are being misdiagnosed with hypothyroidism when they actually are overtrained and just need to back off for a while. He has said that people who are overtrained and feeling fatigued because of it are checked for hypothyroidism since fatigue is also a symptom of that, and that they are found to have high levels of TSH (or thyroid stimulating hormone to those of us who don’t have thyroid disorders).
I am not sure if he thinks that overtraining causes problems with TSH, or if he thinks that these are people who would otherwise have subclinical hypothyroidism that they would never know about. Or maybe it’s just as you noted that high volume training is linked with low Thyroid hormones/high TSH.
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Alberto Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project had his runners all on thyroid mediation, even if the athletes didn’t need it.
He was behind a huge micro-dosing scheme and would do whatever it took to get an advantage… even a small one. I don’t think it is as much as theses athletes have a medical issue more than there was something shady going on. But who knows.
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Salazar was certainly shady. He sounds like one of these mixologist soigneurs from the pro peloton. Some were trying anything. From the article:
Many of the drugs have no proven benefits for runners.
I think I read this in Hamilton’s book - that you only needed two things: blood doping to raise VO2max and cortico steroids to lean out while not losing power before a Tour. Everything else was BS. I guess he learned that from Ferrari.
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I’ve heard the host of the Consumate Athlete (Peter Glassford) describe a similar rhythm many times: hard day, medium day, easy endurance day, rest day. Glassford was coached by Steve Neal.
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I’ve heard this too. He said something like “how is it that almost every high level cyclist has hypothyroidism? They don’t”.
Salazar had all of his athletes go to a quack of an endocrinologist in Houston named Jeffrey Brown. He’d “diagnose” them with subclinical hypothyroidism and put them on small doses of levothyroxine. Why? As many likely know, thyroid hormones have pervasive metabolic effects. For those with hypothyroidism (not enough thyroid hormone), they have fatigue, weight gain, cold intolerance, and other symptoms. For those who are actually healthy, adding an extra whiff of thyroid hormone is like throwing gasoline on your metabolism. Of interest to endurance athletes, it’ll boost energy levels and keep weight off (this is why you can find many books [I refuse to call them pseudoscience because there isn’t anything scientific about them] about “natural” ways to boost your thyroid levels).
Energy deficiency (which is different from overtraining) causes thyroid suppression. Low total T3 is one of the earliest objective signs of energy deficiency in an athlete (its clinical utility, for my money, is +/-). I like to think about this from an evolutionary biology perspective: if you’re living in a time of food scarcity, you’re body will react to slow down and preserve/store energy. E.g., if you have limited resources, you don’t need to grow hair on your head.
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This pattern is as traditional as it can get. However, I wouldn’t call the first day hard. This was/is often sprint day. From a load and fatigue perspective this is not necessarily hard. I’d say all my training plans from 1988 until the late 1990s had this structure.
This was pretty much what Armstrong said in the recent Atila interview. EPO out of competition; blood bags in-competition. Intramuscular corticosteroid injection for a Wiggins/Froome/Armstrong type rider who is not a natural climber.
Everyone cheated except LeMond
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Lemond cracks me up. He went from ‘they are all doping’ to ‘motor doping’ and now to ‘I could have rode with Pogacar’ if I lost a few kgs and did altitude training. BTW, Kelly looks bored. 
The more Greg talks, the more I want him to talk less
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