Sweaty Secrets Revealed How Do Steroids Really Make You Sweat

In 16 weeks, Craig Davidson, a Canadian novelist, transformed himself into a hard-as-nails hunk by injecting illegal steroids. He loved his new body - but not the hideous side-effects. In this graphic account of being a 'roider', he recounts his hellish journey

T he needle is 21 gauge, 1.5in. A hogsticker. Forty of them arrived in a package from Greece. Ever received a package from overseas? You get that puff of air when you rip it open - air that's travelled thousands of miles. Foreign, like stepping into a stranger's house. The syringe wrapper has instructions in Italian, French, Greek and Arabic - not a word of English. But it's a needle. Operation is self-explanatory. I had put them out on my work desk a few days ago - an unignorable fact. An invitation. A threat.

What's inside looks like oily urine. 1cc of Equipoise - a veterinary drug normally injected into beef cattle - and 2cc of Testosterone Cypionate: 10 times the testosterone a man my size produces naturally in a week.

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It was going into my backside; plenty of meat there. But the sciatic nerve radiates from my hips; plus, if I hit a vein I could go into cardiac collapse. I tucked a bag of frozen corn beneath my underwear to numb the injection site. The hash marks on the syringe were smudged away by my sweaty hands. That couldn't be a sign of quality medical equipment, could it?

What if I died in this shitty apartment in Iowa City? I pictured the landlord stumbling upon my body, rotten and bloated. The newspaper headline: Dumbshit Canadian Found Dead with Needle in Ass.

The needle slid in so easily I wasn't aware it'd broken the skin. I aspirated and injected into the deep tissue. When I pulled it out a pressurised stream of blood spurted halfway across the room.

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A while ago I wrote a novel. A lot of first-time novelists don't stray far from home: their stories are drawn from their lives. This holds true for me: the main character is... well, me. That's not quite true: he's wealthier, pampered, more intolerant and dismissive. But his deep-seated fears, his inborn weaknesses - those things we share intimately.

My character goes down dark roads. For the sake of the book, I thought I'd travel those roads with him. He begins to work out obsessively. I began to work out obsessively. He joins a boxing club. I joined a boxing club. He takes steroids. I took steroids.

The thing is, I've never done drugs, so I lacked the ability to spot the dealer in a room. Such was my quandary when it came to steroids. Where to buy? Who to ask? I'd heard your local gym was a good place, but I didn't have a clue how to go about that. So I typed 'steroids' into Google, which promptly introduced me to an internet scam. I bought a bottle of what I thought was a steroid called Dianabol. But what I received was Dianobol, which, for all I know, were rat turds pressed into pill form. I won't go into detail about how I came to possess real steroids - or 'gear', as we 'roiders call them. The whole thing makes me look as stupid as I was. Suffice to say, the process involved an encrypted email account, a money order wired to Tel Aviv, and weeks of apprehension (had I been ripped off? Would agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration break down my door?) before a package arrived - pill and ampules and six vials wrapped in X-ray-proof paper.

Side Effects Of Steroid Use

Anabolic steroids hit US gyms in the early Sixties, courtesy of Dr John Ziegler, the American team doctor at the 1954 World Weightlifting Championships in Austria. He watched in horror as his athletes were decimated by a legion of hulking Soviet he-men who, he later found out, received testosterone injections as part of their training regime. Ziegler teamed up with a pharmaceutical firm to create the synthetic testosterone Methandrostenolone, better known by its trade name, Dianabol.

The biological function of anabolic (tissue building) steroids like Dianabol is to stimulate protein synthesis - that is, to heal muscles more quickly and effectively. New muscle is gained by tearing the long, tube-like fibres that run the length of our muscle; protein molecules attach to the broken chains, creating new muscle. While on steroids, your muscle fibres become greedy, seeking out every stray protein molecule.

At first nobody was willing to credit Ziegler's creation for the amazing gains glimpsed in the first test subjects. Nobody - not least the weightlifters themselves - could get their heads around the idea that a tiny pink pill could be responsible for their newfound strength: lifters added 30lb to their bench press and 50 to their hack squats virtually overnight. These lifters had been taking vitamins for years; they knew the value of pills was minimal. The only thing that convinced them was when Ziegler cut off the supply: the lifters surrendered all their gains and lost the feeling of euphoria experienced while on the programme.

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As the Sixties progressed and the results became known, steroids made their way from the hardcore weightlifting gyms of North America into mainstream society, trickling down into baseball clubhouses, Olympic training facilities, and health clubs. Though Dianabol is still perhaps the most popular, today's users can choose from over 40 steroids in the form of pills, patches, creams, and injectable compounds from A (Anavar) to W (Winstrol). Illegal unless prescribed, it is still estimated that one in every 100 people in North America have experimented with steroids at some point in their lives.

I had a misconception that being 'on steroids' involved the ingestion or injection of a single substance, but that was quickly dispelled. Many steroids on their own are either singular of purpose or not terribly effective. This is where 'stacking' comes in: you can put on mass (75mg of testosterone), promote muscle hardness (50mg of Winstrol) and keep water retention to a minimum (50mg of Equipoise). This stack is injection-intensive: Testosterone and Equipoise twice weekly, Winstrol daily. Eleven injections a week.

But that's only steroids - you need other drugs to stave off the potential side-effects, which include: hair loss, gynecomastia (build-up of breast tissue due to increased oestrogen, aka gyno; aka bitch tits), testicular atrophy, cranial and prostate swelling, erratic sex drive, liver impairment, haemorrhoids, impotence, cysts, acne, abscesses, renal failure. Hair loss, gyno and testicular atrophy should be considered absolute rather than potential hazards: you simply cannot expect to alter your body's chemical make-up without your body reacting.

Facts You Didn't Know About Sweat

My own steroid cycle went as follows: Dianabol (10mg tabs, 3 per day for the first 4 weeks); Testosterone Cypionate (500mg per week, 10 weeks); Equipoise (400mg per week, 10 weeks); Nolvadex (anti-oestrogen drug; 1 to 4 pills daily, depending on week); Proviron (male menopause drug, 25mg daily); HCG (Human Chorionic Gonadotropin, which is derived from the urine of pregnant women; used during Post Cycle Therapy to restore natural testosterone levels - 500iu twice weekly, administered with an insulin needle).

Believe it or not, it's a fairly mild cycle. Including diuretics and cutting and hardening agents, professional bodybuilders may have 10-15 substances floating around their system at any given time. Like alcohol or drugs, a body's tolerance builds up over time; top pros need to inject 2, 500mg of Testosterone or more, weekly, to receive any effect.

Three days into the cycle, my nipples began to itch: onset of Gynomastia. Dump enough testosterone into your body and your system counters by upping its oestrogen output, which leads to a build-up of breast tissue. After long-term use, it can get so bad that some users require surgical breast reductions. I woke up on the morning of day four and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of myself in the mirror. My nipples were the size of milk bottle tops, stretched smooth as the skin of a balloon. The skin had formed into swollen pouches that looked like the rubberised nipples on a baby's bottle. I appeared to have breasts. Pendulous, malformed breasts.

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Or was I just chubby and still out of shape? I didn't know. I gave them a jiggle. I couldn't tell if it was fluid build-up or actual flesh. Could a person grow new flesh overnight? I didn't want tits - it went against the purpose of the exercise. I gobbled twice my daily allotment of anti-oestrogen medication. A week's worth of double Nolvadex doses got the gyno under control. But by then my hair had started falling out.

I have a scalp of unruly, bushman-like red hair. While I've never been keen on the colour and its tendency to coil into ringlets when grown out, there has always been plenty of it. Then one morning I was showering, I looked down at my shampoo-foamed hands, and saw dozens of red strands between my fingers. Soon they were everywhere: on my pillow, between my teeth, falling into the pages of books while I read. I became hyper-aware of the way wind felt through

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