ATHLETICS:Wada should visit the local coffee shop and they will find the best performance-enhancer on sale over the counter, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

I WAS having coffee with a famous runner during the week and she was telling me about these new athlete whereabouts rules. She wanted to talk “off the record”, but said she was seriously worried, and knew plenty of other runners were too.

So I ordered up another triple-shot, no-foam macchiato, loaded it with brown sugar and heard her out – promising that everything was “off the record”.

“It’s this Wada crowd,” she said, sipping on her large Americano. “They’re going totally overboard. They’ve cranked up the whereabouts rule, and we have to tell them where we’ll be, every day, every three months in advance. If they call three times within 18 months, and we’re not there, then they slap you with a two-year ban. Drugs cheat, scandal, all that crack.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve no problem with drug testing. But the crazy part is we now have to specify exactly where we’ll be for a 60-minute time slot, every day, between six in the morning and 11 at night. Including weekends. And if you’re not there that’s a missed test, too.”

This wasn’t exactly news to me. My main concern at that point was whether to order an Ambulance Chaser. We were in this Italian place in Ranelagh that use Palombini beans, the best in the business. But better to say something, so I asked where she told them she’d be for this 60-minute time slot.

“Right here,” she answered, “in this coffee shop. Everyone knows that I’m here anyway, between three and four every afternoon. For my caffeine fix. I mean I couldn’t survive without my caffeine fix. No runner could.”

And I just had to laugh. Here we were talking about Wada’s latest effort to crack down on drugs in sport, and if they came looking for her she’d be in her local coffee shop consuming the most popular performance-enhancing drug in the world. Crazy, all right.

Voltaire was rumoured to have a 25-cup-of-coffee-a-day habit, which is probably only 10 cups more than the average runner – or professional cyclist, or fighter-pilot, or late-night trucker, or anyone who regularly engages in a high-endurance activity.

Until five years ago, Wada considered caffeine an illegal performance-enhancing drug, at least in doses above 1,200mg, or eight cups of coffee. Then they changed their mind. Now, athletes are free to use it, before, during or after competition – even though it unquestionably improves endurance performance.

I know that because almost every athlete I’ve ever met has been hopelessly addicted to caffeine ever since they first laced up a pair of running spikes. But they don’t call coffee the amber liquid of life for nothing. They say it might cure manic depression, maybe even bipolar disorder, but coffee definitely gets you running quicker, and I don’t just mean to the bathroom.

It’s the common man’s gold, and, like gold, it brings the feeling of luxury, nobility and confidence. Although no matter what you call coffee, it’s still just a drink made from the fruit of a tree.

The perfect cup of coffee, as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand said, should be “black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love”, and even those who claim it tastes best with a cigarette have a point; nicotine doubles the rate at which the body metabolises caffeine.

Everyone has their favourite brew. For Henry Ward Beecher, it should be “real coffee – home-browned, home-ground, home-made, that comes to you dark as a hazel-eye, but changes to a golden bronze as you temper it with cream that never cheated, but was real cream from its birth, thick, tenderly yellow, perfectly sweet, neither lumpy nor frothing on the Java: such a cup of coffee is a match for 20 blue devils and will exorcise them all”.

Delicious – and some of the blue devils I know coffee can exorcise are tiredness, apathy and sluggishness, particularly when it comes to the second training session of the day. Coffee, an old coach once told me, can release fatty acids, without using a wrench.

But don’t take my word for it. For the past 30 years caffeine’s effect on endurance has been widely examined. Just last week the New York Times carried an article citing the more recent studies, and for Dr Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University in Canada, the only surprising thing is people still question the benefits.

“There is so much data on this that it’s unbelievable,” he said. “It’s just unequivocal that caffeine improves performance. It’s been shown in well-respected labs in multiple places around the world.”

Caffeine was discovered by a German chemist, Friedrich Ferdinand Runge, in 1819. He termed it caffeine to mean “something found in coffee”, but the benefits were known long before. For centuries, humans – and other animals – chewed on the leaves, seeds and fruit of tea, coffee, cacao, kola trees and some 60 other plants they realised elevated mood and decreased fatigue.

In the sixth century BC, the spiritual leader Lao-tzu recommended tea as an elixir for disciples of his new religion, Taoism. Caffeine is also called guaranine, when found in the guarana shrub, or theine, when found in tea, but these are all the same alkaloid compound, trimethylxanthine – or “the best part of waking up”, as Folgers like to say.

Sometime in the 1980s, Dietrich Mateschitz was working for a German cosmetic company in East Asia, and, crippled by regular overnight flights, came across a local Thai tonic named Krating Daeng – a blend of caffeine, an amino acid called taurine, and a carbohydrate called glucuronolactone. Mateschitz bought the rights to sell the product in the West, and renamed it Red Bull.

It’s the metabolites of caffeine athletes are interested in: theobromine is a vasodilator and increases oxygen and nutrient flow to the muscles; theophylline acts as a smooth muscle relaxant, opening the bronchioles and increasing cardiac rate and efficiency; paraxanthine increases lipolysis by releasing glycerol and fatty acids into the blood to be used as a fuel by muscles.

In plainer words, caffeine increases the use of fat as fuel, opens the lungs and improves heart efficiency. The performance improvement in controlled laboratory settings, using pure caffeine, can be 20 to 25 per cent, although in the true sporting setting the improvement averages about five per cent.

But another study suggested that 600mg of caffeine improved mental alertness as much as 20mg of amphetamine – and that’s a definite edge, no matter what the sport.

Wada claim the reason they took caffeine off the banned list is that some studies pointed towards a decreased performance, mainly due to dehydration. More likely, it was no longer possible to justify a ban on the most popular social drink in the world. Starbucks may have played a role, but 90 per cent of Americans now consume some caffeine on a daily basis, and they’re obviously not all runners.

There’s a wider debate here, and that’s the ethics of using a performance-enhancing substance on the basis of it not being banned. You could say the same about altitude training, or the use of creatine or ginseng or bee pollen or any food supplement. And if EPO were taken off the banned list tomorrow there would be plenty of athletes who would willingly indulge.

Not that the famous runner I was having coffee with ever suggested that, either on or off the record. She was still worried about Wada coming to test her during her coffee hour, and if so whether she’d still get her caffeine fix.