Kapler: Giving up the PED guessing game
From Gabe Kapler at Baseball Prospectus on August 20, 2013:
I admit that my relationship with weight training was born out of insecurity. My bloom was tardy and the pictures of a minuscule, undeveloped, preadolescent me juxtaposed with my Little League teammates haunted me through the 10th grade, when I finally began to expand physically in both directions.
While I certainly sprouted in high school, I am to this day attempting to shake the association with that tiny 12-year-old boy. And it’s that mindset that ingrained insanely regimented and admittedly neurotic eating practices as a young adult, like taking a bite of ice cream and, if I deemed the taste unworthy, spitting it out into the bushes so as not to ingest the fat content.
That was the tip of my idiosyncratic iceberg related to food. For years I survived on a diet of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and rice and beans, without a vegetable or berry in my repertoire. I learned to eat fast food in the minor leagues by throwing away buns before it was sexy to wrap a burger in a piece of lettuce.
Those echoes of childhood neuroses drove me to an obsessive quest for muscle; I did pull-ups on dugout ledges, always leery of the former absence of size in my back. And that muscle, in the era in which I played, meant that I would be suspected, without evidence or reason, of using steroids.
Read the full article here: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=21574
Originally published: August 20, 2013. Last Updated: August 20, 2013.