LAKE PLACID – Walking from the back of High Peaks Cyclery to the storefront, manager Brad Crosby covered the spectrum of what fuels endurance sports like Ironman triathlons – from nutrition, to supplements to cheating.

Along one of the back walls of the cyclery store are three carts. Each has five rows, chock full of the kind of carbohydrate-loaded treats that, come Sunday, about 3,000 Ironman Lake Placid competitors will tape to their bike frames or stuff inside their uniforms.

Ranging from powder mixes to energy bars and packs of gels to gummy chews, it’s this feast that fuels the 140.6-mile course.

“It’s like rocket science for some people,” Crosby said. “You ask them what their nutrition program is and it’s crazy.”

At the front of the store, the former cyclist approaches a bike on display and runs his hand along the spine of its frame, to the seat. It’s inside this seat, he explains, a battery can live to power a tiny motor that can make or break an athlete’s race.

“If they take the power coming out of that battery, and they have a little shaft that runs down here that spits out 15 watts,” Crosby said. “Fifteen watts might not be a whole lot, but for you or I going up a hill, if my bike is producing 15 more watts, I’m going to shoot up that hill a lot faster than you are.

“And it’s out there. It’s already been happening.”

If what Crosby describes sounds like cheating, it’s because it is. It’s been dubbed “mechanical doping” by those in the cycling world. This year, the Tour de France has developed a detection method with the French atomic energy commission that uses thermal imaging cameras to detect anomalies in bikes. Checks are made during the race as detection devices are pointed from roadside motorcycles, something Crosby viewed during one of this year’s peloton stages.

“For as much time as (the World Anti-Doping Agency) is trying to come up with strict doping regulations and tests, you’ve got doctors who make five times as much as those guys do to figure out how to help people dope and not have it come up on a test,” he said.

But is this kind of cheating, and the more traditional form of doping by performance-enhancing drugs, taking place at an event like Ironman Lake Placid? Crosby, for one, said he doesn’t believe there is enough of a financial stakes at Ironman Lake Placid for it to occur.

To combat the problem, Ironman does have an anti-doping program. Considering the hefty cost of administering anti-doping tests, though, testing of amateurs is few and far between.

Each age-group athlete who accepts a qualifying slot for the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii or the Ironman 70.3 World Championship is subject to in- and out-of-competition testing in compliance with the World Anti-Doping Agency. This means that 40 swimmers who qualify for Kona from Lake Placid this weekend will be required to sign Ironman’s Anti-Doping & Qualifying Slot Waiver for Age-Group Athletes.

The waiver provides additional notification and consent to Ironman. But athletes are not automatically put into the Ironman’s registered testing pool or required to file whereabouts information – the kind of information area Olympians provide so that United States Anti-Doping Agency officers can knock on their door and ask for samples. And the selection criteria for in-competition testing is not publicly announced.

Premier triathlon coaches, dietitians and athletes in Lake Placid this weekend say doping is a reality in the sport they love, a problem both with the pros and some of the amateurs in the crowd.

“(Ironman is) starting to (increase testing of amateurs) which is great,” said Jesse Kropelnicki, a triathlete and multiple-time qualifier from Ironman Lake Placid for Ironman’s World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. He is also the founder of QT2 Systems personalized training and nutrition planning.

On Friday, Kropelnicki tended to his business’s tent at the Ironman village at the Olympic Oval. He works with six registered dietitians and a team of coaches helping more than 700 amateur endurance athletes.

Some amateurs, Kropelnicki said, take triathlons more seriously than the pros. That’s why he describes the “Core Diet” nutrition plan he founded and the second-by-second data analysis his personalized training business provides as “perfect” for amateur triathletes.

“The Type-A personality that gets into triathlon, they are usually successful people because of that; therefore, they have the disposable income to spend on crazy detailed coaching,” he said.

“We are a match made in heaven for those people.”

Kropelnicki doesn’t know if these people are going beyond his services and cheating through motors, though he can imagine how much it would skew a race.

“If you just had a motor that added 10 watts, 10 watts is worth around 8 minutes on this course,” he said. “…Think about how much power that is. You put in a 25 watt (light) bulb. That uses like no power.”

What about drugs?

“The three years I was doing (the) Kona (World Championship), they weren’t doing any age group testing for amateurs,” the Boston-based Kropelnicki said. “But for pros they were. It’s random, and they have a very specific way that they try to target who they may test.

“I haven’t personally seen or experienced any doping in all of my years doing this. Just rumors. … There are some people I talk to who say it’s all over the place, but I’ve never seen it.

Over at Mirror Lake, two more elite triathlon coaches echoed Kropelnicki. Jeffrey Kline of Portland, Oregon is the CEO and founder of PRS Fit, a company that trains 300 endurance athletes globally. Kline, a 2013 finisher of Ironman Lake Placid, said, at the amateur level, he thinks there are few people who dope.

“But at the elite level, it’s going on,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure to succeed. It’s just like any professional athlete. … It’s here, and Ironman probably does a pretty good job of testing.”

Sherianne Nelson, like Kropelnicki, has qualified multiple times for the world championships. The Scottsdale, Arizona-based competitor and coach last went to Kona in 2014. There, she had to fill out the requisite testing forms in advance. She said the testing was similar to how a security agent at an airport gate selects a passenger at random to check their luggage.

But Nelson estimated a tiny fraction of racers were tested like this.

“They pull you right then and there to test you before the (world championship) race,” she said. “I have friends that are pros, and they do have to let a committee know where they are at all times.”

“I have one (amateur) athlete that does bring (doping concerns) up,” she added. “But I say, ‘you have no control over it, so let it go. Just go race your race.'”

On the other end of the Ironman nutrition and supplement spectrum are amateurs like Greg Kasko of New Jersey who take the competition, and the way they fuel themselves, much less seriously.

On Friday morning, Kasko held his second annual “Bacon Meat & Greet” alongside the south shore of Mirror Lake. Wearing a shirt that read “Bacon is Meat Candy,” Kasko hosted a fundraiser where more than 200 people ate the 46 pounds of bacon, 600 sausage links and five pounds of pork roll he and helpers cooked.

In a sport where high level coaches like Kropelnicki say the big three of “sodium, carbohydrates and fluids” are crucial to in-race nutrition, the pound of bacon Kasko consumed before finishing last year’s Ironman Lake Placid was his form of fuel. Though, he admits, it was very unorthodox.

“I put some bacon in a plastic bag and stuffed it in my wet suit sleeve as a joke,” Kasko said of last year’s race. “I’ll dry it out, and then cut it up into small little pieces like beef jerky and that’s what I’ll eat on the bike – 16 slices of thick-cut bacon.”