I Can Stop Any Time I Want...

When the mainstream media writes about running, there are a few topics that seem to come up again and again.

One reliable "controversy" is whether the human species has bumped up against its ultimate performance ceiling. I noticed there was an article musing about exactly that question in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas Section ("Peaked Performance"). I didn't bother writing about it because a) I've written about it before, and b) there was nothing really new in the article. Of course what happens is that some researcher releases a study showing that human kind has reached some sort of bio-evolutionary limit. The research includes a statistical analysis of the progress of track and field records. It's all very convincing, and yet deep down we all know that somewhere among the world's seven billion people, in some remote village or town, there is a young girl or young boy who will not have read the research and is preparing to redefine what we consider possible.

Another topic that's always good for several column inches in a running magazine is the idea that if we would only eat/train/dress like our ancient ancestors we would cure all the ills brought about by our modern and decadent lifestyles. I don't usually pay any attention to this sort of thing (look how long I ignored barefoot running...) but I respect Runner's World columnist Amby Burfoot's writings, so I was surprised to see his recent post on the "Paleo Diet" (Updating the Paleo Diet). The Paleo Diet suggests that we should eat the way our paleolithic forbears did. That's cool -- the modern diet is certainly problematic -- but the Paleo-enthusiasts lose me with their assertion that we took a nutritional wrong turn when we learned to harvest wheat.

Anyway, I mentioned those two articles to make the point that the topics seem to be recycled from year-to-year precisely because there's no way of settling the questions they raise. They are the journalistic equivalent of arguing that Bob Feller was a better pitcher than Pedro Martinez.

Anyway, I felt like I hit the trifecta when I noticed an article in Slate Magazine that muses on the similarities between exercise and drug use ("Gym Rats and Dope Fiends"). I figured it would be another alarmist piece about how running is an addiction, and how runners are risking their health, their relationships, and their livelihoods because they can't give up their daily fix of mileage. I'd read that kind of thing before, and I was prepared to be dismissive.

But instead, I found that the author, Daniel Engber, had written a very thoughtful and (I thought) well-informed piece about the complex interaction between exercise and substance addiction.

Engber begins by establishing that exercise has been shown to make rats and people less susceptible to the effects of addictive substances like morphine, heroine, nicotine, etc. He then asserts that science has not established why this is the case. One possibility is that exercise induces some of the same effects of those substances in the brain. I learned, for example, that the word "endorphin" -- used to decribe the naturally occurring chemicals responsible for the pleasant sensations we associate with exercise -- is a shorthand for "endogenous morphine." Who knew?

Engber describes how the last several decades have seen an evolution of the idea of behavior as being shaped by the pleasure centers in the brain. He associates this line of thinking with the relatively recent identification of exercise "addiction," defined as an unhealthy compulsion to exercise to the detriment of other needs.

But Engber is careful not to exploit the opportunity to make simplistic comparisons between (or jokes about) running and real drug habits. As he writes...

"...exercise is not like heroin, at least not in the sense of fundamental psychopathology. And it's best to avoid the semantic controversy over whether any behavior --weightlifting, shopping, eating, f***ing, playing World of Warcraft -- should properly be termed an "addiction," or a "dependence," or even appear at all, in the official manual of psychiatric diagnoses."

On a personal level, I've basically been asking myself for nearly thirty years the question of whether my long habit of running is a problem that rises to the level of an addiction, obsession, or compulsion. Over and over again, I've reached the conclusion that it is not. As evidence, I say that every time I've stopped running for any length of time, it was actually pretty hard to start up again. What self-respecting addiction makes it really difficult to relapse? Furthermore, when I've stopped, I've felt pretty good -- not depressed, not unproductive. My time off has been useful.

So why do any of us do it so compulsively if we're not actually compelled? Well that's a complicated question but I think it comes down to weighing a life with or without running and deciding -- over-and-over again -- that running adds something not easily found in other things we do. It doesn't make sense to call this an addiction, any more than it would make sense to call writing this blog an addiction.

I mean, I'd sure have a lot more free time if I didn't run and didn't write -- but in the end, we do the things we do for self-satisfaction, to fulfill a need, as Coach Blackburn would say.

So whatever the similarities, the need to be satisfied with ourselves stands apart from the need to serve the biochemical cravings of a substance addition. Endorphins are a nice perk of running, but they aren't the reason I do it.