91Èȱ¬

Athletes must submit samples out of competition as well as during championships

First, the one-hour issue: the requirement to specify where you'll be for an hour a day, seven days a week, for three months in advance. In a moment, the morals; first, the practicalities.

I'm a relatively well-organised individual. My time-keeping has improved with age and responsibility. For most of the month I found this part easy - 0700 to 0800, my flat. When I was elsewhere - covering cricket, visiting parents or friends - I notified the system in advance or by last-gasp text.

I also discovered how easy it is to go wrong.

Early last Thursday morning I drove down to Bath to do a piece with European 400m hurdles champion Dai Greene. Because I spent the night at my flat in London it didn't even occur to me that any update was required, not even when that 0700-0800 slot passed with me on the M4 somewhere between Reading and Swindon.

Had the testers come calling, I would have had a missed test clocked up against me. Three of those in 18 months and I'd be staring at a doping suspension and a life ban from the Olympics.

If I could make such an error once in five weeks, could a disorganised yet clean 19-year-old fresh into top-class sport do the same over a much longer time period? Almost certainly.

Now the ethical part. Is it fair to ask an athlete to provide such detailed information (training locations and times also have to be logged for every day of the year) to a group of people they have never met?

In an ideal world, no. But sadly we don't live in an ideal world.

Therefore, to ensure that fans can truly believe in what they see - and that those who cheat clean athletes out of medals and moolah are more likely to get caught - it seems to me that on balance it is a sacrifice worth making.

What about the online Adams programme (Anti-Doping Administration and Management System) that athletes have to use to update their whereabouts?

Even those who work with it every day find it clunky. It looks old-fashioned, takes time to understand and doesn't work well on mobile web-browsers. Neither is there a smart phone app which, when you look at the age demographic of most athletes, doesn't make much sense.

UKAD does offer a great deal of help to athletes who struggle with it though - long tutorials, a 24-hour helpline, and constant text reminders if you've failed to return all of the required information.

But given that Adams is designed and controlled by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) rather than UKAD, I called its director-general David Howman, ready to give him my feedback.

"We should have a new version by November," he told me. "It'll be far more user-friendly, far easier to update, more intuitive. It has a user-guide built into the system, and I think everyone will be pretty pleased with it. The frustrating thing has been how long it's taken to put into operation."

What about the smart phone app?

"That'll be down the line. We're certainly looking at applications, but we need to make sure firstly (that) it works, and we've got quite a few other projects related to Adams and the whereabouts system that have a high priority."

Which brings us neatly to security. One of the best functions of Adams is the ability to change your whereabouts information by text, right up to 60 seconds before your assigned hour begins.

But it is worrying that you don't have to answer any security questions or enter any passwords or PINs before being able to do so. As long as you have the UKAD text number - and every athlete does - you could text in claiming to be anyone, changing the details of a rival's hour from any mobile you like.

Howman said: "We're aware of the loophole, and we're trying to close it."

Even those British athletes who unequivocally support UKAD's system have one big question: while supporters can trust their performances, do their big rivals from other countries have to go through the same level of testing?

"You can pretty easily bracket it into the developed nations and the developing nations," said Howman.

"You look at the developed nations and they have the resources, the nous, the history, and you don't need to worry about them quite as much. We've looked at the developing nations very carefully, and we've got a regional development programme in place where eight or nine or 10 countries group together to form an anti-doping programme. We've got 15 of them throughout the world, so 122 countries where we do rely on resource-sharing.

"So obviously you're going to have a different level of programme in those regions and anti-doping bodies than you do in the UK. When you're a global body you just have to accept that that's the way of the world. The money is not shared equally, so you're going to get more spent in some countries than others.

"What we have to try to ensure is that an elite athlete, no matter where he or she might train or compete, is subject to testing. That's what we try to achieve, and I think we're getting much closer to that."

How close? Howman then said something which, while honest, will alarm those clean athletes who dislike the current system but endure it as the price to be paid for drug-free sport.

"The sophisticated doper can probably beat the scientific system. But they can't always beat the police. What we have to do is plug into existing operations like police and Customs, where those guys are in the business of gathering information and evidence about doping."

Does the anti-doping movement have the resources to fight the battles ahead?

"You always want more funding, and you always want to do more. We only have 55 people in our team, but I wouldn't like to be a complainer. We get $26m (£16m) a year in funding, and I think we use it very wisely.

"A quarter of our budget goes on research. We could do more of that - and make sure the testing was better - if (we) had more money."

In the last week of my experiment, news breaks that three of the four Indian athletes in their women's Commonwealth gold medal-winning 4x400m relay team have tested positive for steroids.

To me it feels both deeply depressing - that win, and the Indian reaction to it, had been the best moment of the entire Games - and a vindication of everything the whereabouts system is trying to do.

Does Howman feel pleased those athletes were caught, or sad that people continue to damage the sports we love with their drug-taking?

"I don't get paid to have feelings," he told me flatly. "I operate from a position that, if there are people out there cheating, then the clean athlete benefits from the catching of those cheats.

"If you look at the job we have to do, it's all about supporting the clean athlete. I'd like to think there are many more of those than there are cheats. So any time anyone has broken the rules, I like to see them brought to justice."

Investigating the anti-doping system has been fascinating, frightening and illuminating in equal measure. There's a lot more about it that I'm keen to explore in the coming months.

In the meantime, though, I have one last obligation to fulfil: write to UK Athletics to officially notify them that my brief career as an international shot-putter is over, and that I no longer wish to be considered for national selection.

Once that happens, I am taken off the whereabouts system for good, or at least until I decide to make a return to top-level competition.

Aspiring shot-putters across Britain: you can breathe again. The field is yours.