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The Doper Next Door

My Strange and Scandalous Year on Performance-Enhancing Drugs

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The Doper Next Door

By: Andrew Tilin
Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
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About this listen

What happens to a regular guy who dopes? Surprised to learn that pro athletes aren’t the only ones taking performance-enhancing substances, journalist Andrew Tilin goes in search of the average juicing Joe, hoping to find a few things out: Why would normal people take these substances? Where do folks get them? Does the stuff really work?

But these controversial drugs often silence their users, and so his queries might have gone unanswered had Tilin not looked in the mirror and succumbed to curiosity. Soon wielding syringes, this fortysomething husband and father of two children becomes the doper next door.

During his yearlong odyssey, Tilin is transformed. He becomes stronger, hornier, and aggressive. He wades into a subculture of doping physicians, real-estate agents, and aging women who believe that Tilin’s type of legal hormone-replacement therapy is the key to staying young, and he often agrees.

He also lives with the price paid for renewed vitality, worrying about his health, marriage, and cheating ways as an amateur bike racer. And all along the way, he tells us what doping is really like: empowering and scary.

©2011 Andrew Tilin (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Art & Literature Gender Studies Journalists, Editors & Publishers Social Sciences
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interesting read good detail and content if at bit rambling at times. often disappears on an aside of pointless detail

good read

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I got through this quickly ... clearly I enjoyed it, not least because I am a cyclist at a similar life stage as the author. I would have like him to experiment more and take it a stage further but understand why he didn't . I would recommend

interesting insightful and compelling

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so much more than the story of a self confessed doper. I was disappointed at first but then found I thoroughly enjoyed this story in its entirety. well worth a listen. the narration is in my opinion, excellent.

not all what I expected

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Great idea for a book but not enough time was spent examining the performance enhancing effect of the drugs on sport, there was way too much psychoanalysis of his childhood & middle aged life.

interesting but neurotic

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Listened to the entire book in one go, and enjoyed it. Some parts of the story I found the protagonist irritating, but that goes to show how well it has been written.
After listening I discovered that Andrew Tillin has since been killed in an accident, very sad news, and gives the book a different feel.

Very well written and personal account

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The real scandal of this book if the fact that us masquerades as a sport book. In reality, the main body of the work deals with the authors dysfunctional mid-life existence and the padding is at the very least extreme. I was utterly bored by the authors 'bedroom life', where we are treated time and again to a Mills and Boon account of his attempts enact a physical relationship with his wife. It seemed as though the advertised topic of the book was just a prop to tell a meandering life story. The fact is that this book is about a man who dabbles with a female HRT programme modified for a male patient, including the use of the totally legal hormone 'testosterone'. Then he does some cycling on the side - where the hormone is not allowed. The zenith of achievement in this sport changing scandal is coming 7th in a local race with an FTP of 250W. The only real feat of endurance is actually getting to the end of the book.

Deception in all areas.......

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There was little in here about bike racing, or the effect of a doping "programme". It is essentially an account of a middle aged man and his dysfunctional marriage, written with a teenaged boy approach which is more like watching "American Pie" than an illuminating account of how a professional doping programme affects the arthletes undergoing it. I didn't download it to hear about his sex life, neuroses or psychoanalysis, I'd hoped for an insiders account of the epidemic of doping in sport. That is not what this is though.

I've never written an audible review but this was so disappointing that I felt I should. It is also narrated in a nauseating accent which makes the whole thing even less enjoyable.

Dull

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