They say that you never forget your first time, and I can tell you I certainly have vivid memories of mine.
It was November and I was out on one of my favorite 6 mile courses. It was cold and crisp, and the sky had that just-about-to-snow color to it. I was wearing my bright blue Nike running tights…the ones that make me think of Donna Summer and 1977.
As I neared mile 6 I was suddenly overcome with an indescribable feeling of euphoria and well-being, the likes of which I had never experienced before. I felt supercharged and I got a bust of energy - I felt as though I could run another 6. I decided to add an extra twist to my run and moved off my usual course, heading down a street I had never run before. I completed about 8 miles that day – the farthest I had ever run before. It was so awesome and amazing…I had experienced my first real “runners high.”
Common knowledge has been that runners high is related to the release of endorphins into the body during intense physical exercise. Others have questioned the existence of runners high at all, saying it’s just a myth. But for those of us women runners who spend our days pursuing it, we know it’s real. Recently, we believers were vindicated by a German study performed at the University of Bonn.
The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that the methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable to the study of the runners high phenomenon. As reported by Gina Kolata for The New York Times:
Boecker’s idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.
Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.
The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.
The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, “when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.
“Some people have these really extreme experiences with very long or intensive training,” said Dr. Boecker, a casual runner and cyclist, who said he feels completely relaxed and his head is clearer after a run.
That was also what happened to the study subjects, he said: “You could really see the difference after two hours of running. You could see it in their faces.”
In a follow-up study, Dr. Boecker is investigating if running affects pain perception. “There are studies that showed enhanced pain tolerance in runners,” he said. “You have to give higher pain stimuli before they say, ‘O.K., this hurts.’ ”
And, he said, there are stories of runners who had stress fractures, even heart attacks, and kept on running.
Dr. Boecker and his colleagues have recruited 20 marathon runners and a similar number of non-athletes and are studying the perception of pain after a run, and whether there are related changes in brain scans. He is also having the subjects walk to see whether the effects, if any, are because of the intensity of the exercise.
The non-athletes can help investigators assess whether untrained people experience the same effects. Maybe one reason some people love intense exercise and others do not is that some respond with a runner’s high or changed pain perception.
Hey, it makes sense. Endorphins are the opiates naturally produced by the body – no wonder it feels so good to run! And that explains how sometimes you can “run through the pain.”
Really fascinating stuff. I would also really love to see a study as to whether or not listening to certain kinds of music while exercising can actually heighten the experience. Oh, and if running produces naturally produced opiates in the body, does that explain why some of us feel we are “addicted” to running?
We’ll keep our eyeballs peeled for the results of Boecker’s ongoing research in this area.
image: New York Times
