There are times when I wished I had taken more biology classes.

This week was one of them.

Three stories with links to performance enhancing drugs hit the sports world this week. Women’s basketball player Diana Taurasi was cleared of charges of using a banned substance when the results were retracted by the Turkish lab doing the testing.

In cycling, Alberto Contador was reinstated after the Spanish cycling federation reversed its one-year ban. The three-time Tour de France winner been suspended  after he tested positive for a banned substance. He claimed he inadvertently ingested the substance by eating tainted meat.

Also in cycling, Lance Armstrong announced “Retirement 2.0.” The cycling icon retired, for the second time, in order to be with his family and concentrate on other projects associated with his Livestrong Foundation. While not currently making headlines for performance enhancing drugs, the rumors have been around for years and he currently is currently the subject of a criminal investigation by federal prosecutors.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m suffering from drug-testing fatigue.

The conversation about society demands always flows between two extremes. On the consumer side, we want our athletes to perform superhuman feats of skill and speed to amaze and entertain us and entice us to spend our money on their product. On the mythology side, we demand athletic heroes and heroines who inspire and motivate and do everything the hard way without any pharmaceutical assistance.

Many pundits argue you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have amazing athletic feats that continue to outdo last year’s amazing athletic feats without the assistance of performance enhancing drugs. If not to actually increase performance, the substances are used to promote faster recovery from injury, which may or may not be necessary if the physical demands of the athletic marketplace allowed them to rest and rehab correctly.

Then comes the actual testing procedures. With Taursi and Contador both cleared this week questions arise about standards, fairness and accountability. Sure, Diana Taursi may have been vindicated, but now the former UConn women’s basketball star will forever be linked to a positive result, even if it’s a false positive. There is still some rehabilitation of her image that will need to be done, and there’s no series of injections to help speed that process along.

Perhaps my performance-enhancing fatigue is the result of the nature of the questions themselves. How much of a drug is considered performance enhancing? How many hairs do we split? How aggressively do we test? What about those accused with false positives? Should I even care about drug use in sports? Does it really mean anything in the grand scheme of things?

There are so many angles in this debate it leaves me more confused than trying to convert kilometers to miles in the middle of a race.

Athletic stories inspire me. It’s why I’m in the sports story telling business to begin with. And I can’t explain quite why, but it does matter to me that athletes are “clean.” I’m just not entirely sure what my definition of “clean” is or how those standards should be applied.

But there is a space between consumer and mythology where a reasonable response lies. Somewhere we can have our entertainment and our heroes. That’s the place where I’d like my sporting life to live.