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Running From Addiction	SPORTS
How the once mythical "runner's high" is helping former users kick the habits, one mile at a time. By Frank Owen

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For me it happens around the eight or nine mile mark; a sensation that starts when the hairs on the back of my neck start to bristle with static electricity and that nagging pain in my legs begins to subside. Just at the point when I’m rounding the tip of Manhattan’s Battery Park City, with the Statue of Liberty blinking in the half-light, when I feel like my heart is about to burst and I’m on the verge of collapse, my feet grow wings and I begin to fly. What had been agonizing drudgery is now effortless motion. I feel simultaneously calm and energized, like I’m floating on a fast-moving cushion of air. My senses are heightened. I smell the damp grass in the park and the diesel fumes trailing the Staten Island ferry. I am unstoppable. The sensation doesn’t last long—maybe 10 minutes—and it doesn’t happen on every run, but when it does the effect is thrilling and all-encompassing like a hit of crystal meth or crack. No wonder, then, that athletes who have previously been hooked on drugs can get addicted to the buzz.

“Sometimes when I run in places like the Grand Canyon,” says ultra-runner extraordinaire Charlie Engle, a former addict who kicked his habit on the way to becoming one of the world’s elite extreme athletes, “I swear to God, it’s like I’ve been shooting coke for two days.”

They call this sensation the runner’s high—a feeling of euphoric well-being that runners report after prolonged bouts of physical exertion. For years some skeptical scientists have claimed that it didn’t really exist. “A total fantasy in the pop culture,” one University of Michigan researcher told The New York Times in 2002. But this past February scientists used new brain imaging technology to establish that the runner’s high is a very real event occurring in the neurocircuitry of the human brain, caused by endorphins, the body’s naturally occurring opiates. At the same time, a number of addicts for whom traditional treatment programs have failed are turning to running to quit drugs. An Ohio-based organization called Racing for Recovery is one of a number of groups that regularly organize triathlons and 5K runs all over the country, where everyone from smokers to crackheads to OxyContin junkies run their demons ragged in what might be termed replacement therapy: a classic example of a positive addiction substituting for a negative one.

Engle could be the movement’s poster boy, the man who spent 111 consecutive days running 4,300 miles across the North African desert, an epic and grueling journey chronicled in the documentary Running the Sahara. Engle is a legend in ultra-running circles, having traversed not just the Sahara but also the Gobi Desert, the Atacama Desert, the Amazon rain forest, Vietnam, and the jungles of Borneo. The 45-year-old regularly runs 40 to 50 miles a day, what a midlevel runner might cover in a hard week. But for 10 long years he was a hardcore coke addict, until in July 1992, after spending six days smoking crack in a seedy motel room in Wichita, Kansas, he gave up drugs for good.

Engle doesn’t regret past substance abuse. “Drug addiction was my training ground,” says the runner, who still dreams about cocaine. “That’s how I learned to be good at endurance. Without those 10 years of torture, there’s not a chance in hell I’d be doing the things I’m

doing today. I figured out I didn’t need to trash my addictive traits in order to be good at something other than taking drugs."

As researchers have come to learn, the drug high and the runner’s high have a lot in common, namely brain chemicals, the mood-altering neurotransmitters that substances like cocaine, marijuana, and heroin mimic or activate. The difference is that running is a whole lot cheaper and won’t leave you with a bloody nose or get you locked up in the big house.

The popular theory about the cause of the runner’s high emerged in the 1970s as the jogging craze was sweeping the country. Scientists discovered endorphins, a brain chemical whose structure is similar to morphine’s. Endorphins became the main theory to explain the high, especially after tests showed a dramatic increase in levels of endorphins in the blood of subjects who vigorously exercised. Who needed illegal substances when you could get a similar rush by running? The problem for many scientists was the belief that endorphins were too large to penetrate the brain. And if the endorphins failed to reach the brain, the skeptics claimed, then they couldn’t get you stoned.

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[1/9/2009]