What Mircobes You Running?

Before anything else, I've been meaning to mention this for the last few days:

Apologies for my tardiness.

However, the festival runs through the 25th, and you've still got time to get in on this tonight:

I would totally go see this tonight if I could:

A Sunday In Hell Trailer Amedeo and Simone Pace Score (Blonde Redhead) from Bicycle Film Festival on Vimeo.

But I can't, so I'm not.

Moving on, a number of people have forwarded me this, so now I'm subjecting you to it:

To be a professional cyclist, one must have guts, microbiologist Lauren Peterson says, and she doesn’t just mean that in the metaphorical sense. Peterson, herself a pro endurance mountain biker, has theorized that elite cyclists have a certain microbiome living in their intestines that may allow them to perform better, and if you don’t have it, well, there may soon be a way to get it. . . .

Oh yeah, this is going exactly where you hoped it wouldn't:

Peterson hosts Prevotella in her gut, thanks to a fecal transplant she administered herself three years ago. Her donor? Another elite athlete.

So how do you pull off an amateur fecal transplant with a fellow athlete?  I just assumed you'd go butt-to-butt, but in fact what you do is you perform a "reverse enema:"

But through chance, she came across a donor, an elite long-distance racer, who had his microbiome mapped and screened after a case of food poisoning, which showed he was otherwise healthy. So Peterson took antibiotics to wipe out her own gut bacteria and essentially performed a reverse enema.

“I just did it at home,” she said of the February 2014 procedure. “It’s not fun, but it’s pretty basic.”

Incidentally, "Reverse Enema" is also the name of my pop punk band, and that's exactly how Brooklyn Vegan reviewed our first album:

Anyway, the story leaves certain questions unanswered (chief among them being #whatpressureyourunning on that reverse enema), but results are results:

Within a month, Peterson said, she began feeling better than she’d felt in years. She said before her transplant she was having trouble just training on her bike; just months later, she said she began winning pro races.

Of course, there is no way to prove the fecal transplant, opposed to other changes she may have made in her lifestyle or even the placebo effect, was the cause for her rebound.

And sure, it's all too easy to laugh at stuff like poop and enemas (in fact I'm laughing even as I type this), but keep in mind this is someone who's been suffering from the effects of Lyme disease, which can be debilitating, and if this relieved those symptoms then that's no joke.

Still, my concern is that fecal transplants and reverse enemas will fall into the wrong hands.  Yeah, you know which hands I'm talking about: Fred hands.  Freds are like North Korea in that if you allow them access to any sort of technology or information they'll turn around and use it against society.  (To wit: Strava, power meters, Zwift, the list goes on.)  Given this, all it takes is for one Fred to read that certain intestinal microbiomes are performance-enhancing and before you know it they're all sticking tubeless sealant injectors up their ass before races:

Which means doctors are going to be seeing a lot of this:

Don't think this is dangerous?  Well consider which publication broke the story in the first place:

Bicycling is the Fred bible, and not only do they name all the performance-enhancing microbes:

In addition to Prevotella, Petersen has identified an archeon named Methanobrevibacter smithii, or M. smithii, which she believes is also significant. Archeon are ancient microorganisms that have managed to survive for millions of years in hostile habitats like sulfur springs and deep in the ocean. They also live in the human digestive system, where they have specialized functions. Like Prevotella, Elite cyclists often have M. smithii, but it’s less common in amateur racers. That’s significant because M. smithii also appears to be a performance-enhancing microbe.

But they even mention carbon!

What does it do? In science terms, it thrives on hydrogen and carbon dioxide and other bacterial waste products in the gut. In 12-year old boy terms, M. smithii eats the poop of bacteria. Yes, everybody poops, even bacteria, and it can have detrimental effects on your health. Namely: buildups of hydrogen and carbon dioxide can prevent the other bacteria in your gut from properly breaking down your food for fuel, which is bad news if you need calories for that sprint.

Performance enhancing and carbon?  That squirting sound you hear is a thousand self-administered reverse enemas.

But of course like any other cutting-edge Fred tech you pay a high price for being an early adopter:

“What we’re learning is going to change a lot for cyclists as well as the rest of the population,” says Petersen. “If you get tested and you’re missing something, maybe in three years you’ll be able to get it through a pill instead of a fecal transplant. We’ve got data that no one has ever seen before, and we’re learning a lot. And I think I can say with confidence that bacterial doping— call it poop doping, if you must— is coming soon.”

Shoulda waited for the pill.