Capturing the Runner’s High from Long Slow Distance

By Pete Estabrooks

Every year around this time of year I mount up again, lace up my dogs and start slowly, steadily and substantially upping my mileage. It starts with an hour or so and over a series of months becomes three, four, five-plus hours of long, slow (spacey) distance.

It’s LSD not unlike old-school acid, the substance that separated Timothy Leary and others from everyday reality. It’s not just a shared acronym, it’s a shared separation from the moment. Mine is just physically, rather than chemically, induced.

So here’s the deal, my name is Pete and I am a problem runner. Actually, I have no problem with my running until I admit to others how much I like to run.

Once that news is out there, I become a whack job, and there’s the problem. I am not a whack job, you just don’t get it.

I am a junkie, a stone-cold, I-can’t-believe-I-can-feel-this-good and I-can’t-wait-to-do-it-again junkie. I love getting high. I have for years and I have a ticket to the factory. I can produce a little something in an hour, a little more in two. It jumps a bunch in three, and at four hours things start cooking. If I can stretch my run through five or six hours, I get a glorious mix of pleasure and pain, a solid buzz that lasts until well after the run ends.

The buzz is feeling good about myself, feeling grand about my place in the universe, feeling amazed about staking my place in the animal kingdom and enveloped in sensations that begin as a physical tingling from the muscles in my feet to the base of my skull, and transcends feeling to become a brilliant internal synaptic overload, a charged calm, a powerful peace.

It’s not unusual to lose an hour or two in that groove to stop short and think, “Whoa, what time is it?” or funkier still, “Crap, where am I?”

I can get lost in an incredible world within a world that is available if I pay the price. I can’t explain the feeling to you in any more rational manner than a heroin addict could explain to me why they do what they do.

More people understand the concept of drugs making you high compared to running because the equation for a runner’s high does not always add up. Many long runs suck. They start hard, become difficult and then devolve into plain cumbersome.

But for the times when I escape my body and mind to release my soul, bad runs are a small price to pay. I’d do 10 bad runs for one good run.

Hey, I am not saying any of this to encourage you to run long. You do or you don’t, you will or you won’t. I am just saying if you do, you are not alone and you are definitely no whack job. You just dig a good high.

Pete Estabrooks is Fitness Editor at IMPACT Magazine.

Mar/Apr 2011 Issue