The morning of my last marathon, I drank coffee and ate an energy bar. During the race, I downed sport drink and energy gels, and I wore CoolMax gear and lightweight but well-cushioned shoes.

No rational runner would say that these manipulations are cheating. We see them as acceptable applications of science to our too-hard primal activity. But what if, swimmer-like, I donned apparel that would shave another fraction of a percent from my time? What if, sprinter-like, I took the marathoner’s equivalent of creatine, a legal substance that would improve my muscles’ ability to fire as needed in my event? And what if, for the two months before the race, I found a way to "sleep, work, watch TV or talk on the phone" while "boosting EPO production, red blood cell mass and VO2 max," the result being that I improved my time by as much as 8 percent?

The last speculation comes straight from the literature of Colorado Altitude Training, makers of the Colorado Mountain Room. For $14,500, the product simulates altitude of as much as 15,000 feet in a room in your home. It’s based on the burgeoning live-high/train-low philosophy, which advocates being at high altitude in your sedentary time to gain the known benefits of altitude, but training at sea level to allow more productive sessions. Controlled studies have shown that the live-high/train-low method improves sea-level performance in well-trained runners.

Brother, can you spare $14K?

Curious about the issues raised by the prospect of getting better by sleeping, I called Larry Kutt, CAT’s president. I asked him why I shouldn’t feel cheated if the guy who beat me in last week’s 10K had been using his product. Kutt replied that there are three "A"s that determine results—aerobic, anaerobic and altitude training—and if you haven’t paid attention to all three, then you haven’t done all you can about your performance. "It’s a little like saying, ‘That guy went to the weight room, and I didn’t, so that’s not fair,’" he told me.

Perhaps, but it doesn’t cost $14,500 to join a gym, nor do you get stronger merely by sitting in the weight room. To the last point, Kutt answered, "Why is it that work is considered intrinsically good and honorable, while being smart about your training isn’t? It’s intelligence, not work, to eat complex carbs instead of a Snickers for dinner."

"Put us strongly on the anti-cheating side," Kutt said more broadly. "We want to see cheating eliminated," a goal which he says the mountain room helps to achieve because it obviates the need for cheating by providing a safe, natural, legal alternative. By definition, of course, Kutt is right—unlike taking EPO, using the mountain room isn’t cheating, because doing so breaks no athletic rules.

Yet "not forbidden" doesn’t necessarily mean "conduct you brag to your kids about." If someone drafts off of me until sprinting by in the last 100 meters of a windy 10-miler, he hasn’t cheated, but neither has he earned my full respect. Should I have the same feeling that he was being unsporting if, by using the mountain room, he was ahead of me from the start?
Ethics are largely a spectrum of gray; time and new circumstances force us to constantly reassess where on that continuum we demarcate what’s unacceptable. Writing about pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart opined, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligently doing so. But I know it when I see it." Similarly, most of us can’t offer an ironclad definition of unsporting behavior, but we know it when we see it.

Today, using the mountain room meets my don’t-tell-the-kids test. Being intelligent about your training shouldn’t require being rich, and perhaps I’m naïve, but there is something more honorable about running 15 miles before work than achieving some of the run’s benefits by sleeping in. Then again, Stewart wrote in 1964; what was pornographic then is nearly fare for preteens now. In 20 years, when genetic manipulation might allow us to dictate our muscle-fiber types, will technology’s evolution make me as blasé about the mountain room as I am about Gatorade?

Ultimately, nearly all of us compete for personal reasons, against ourselves and the clock, and we mostly use other runners as a means to getting the most out of ourselves. The flip side of most of creation’s apathy about our performance is that the internal stakes are that much higher. We all must sleep with ourselves every night.

Rather than naïve, maybe I’m just hypocritical. In the months before my last marathon, I regularly received massage, an indulgence I couldn’t afford ten years ago. This doesn’t feel unsporting, because it allows me to get the most from my work, rather than causing physiological changes on top of those initiated by training. Still, please be gentle as you push my back toward the wall to defend the difference. Would I be so accepting of massage if it cost $1,000 per hour and was therefore forever out of my reach?

Given the mountain room’s cost, I knew that Kutt wouldn’t make manufacturers’ not uncommon offer to curious journalists of a free product. I was glad to be spared the temptation. I’d like to think I’d say no, but I’m not so sure.

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