High on Running

Today, Monday, I felt I made quite a bit of progress. This morning I did the loop around Lake Elkhorn in Columbia, Maryland, not far from my home. I have found a web page which shows it to be a 2-mile circuit. The terrain is basically level but with a few downhills and uphills. The path on what I consider the "far side" of the lake has several shallow uphills in succession, when you go around counterclockwise.

I walked counterclockwise slightly more than halfway around the lake for a warmup, then jogged the full circuit in 30 minutes — for a 15-min./mi. pace, or, put otherwise, 4 miles per hour.

I closed with nearly a half-circuit of cool-down walking.

At the end of the jog portion, before the cool-down, my heart rate was 158 beats per minute, well into my supposed ninth decile based on a measured top HR of 170 bpm. But I was not breathing hard, nor was I sweating profusely on this relatively cool, non-humid August morning.

In fact, I did not lose enough fluid to keep me from having to duck into the shrubbery behind a pump house to make weewee at the end of my workout, in this public park whose main pavilion and restrooms are inexplicably kept locked behind a metal barrier, except when the kiddies' summer camp is in session!

At any rate, I felt like I had crossed a barrier of my own, now being able to run (OK, jog slowly) relatively effortlessly for two miles and not feel overly tired as a result.

I still can't quite figure out why my heart rate is so high — much higher than I would expect for my pace, rate of respiration, and rate of sweat production. I think I could do two miles at a clip somewhat faster than 4 mph, if my heart rate gave me more "headroom" and didn't top out at 170.

Nonetheless, I really am starting to feel like a run-for-funner.


And it seems like the regular exercise elevates my mood, at least while I'm exercising and for a couple of hours after. This certainly has to do with endorphins, morphine-like chemicals the body releases naturally which have been linked with the subjective feeling called "runner's high."

In addition to accounting for "the blissful feelings one experiences after sex," these chemicals "are naturally produced by a wide range of activities like meditation, deep breathing, ribald laughter, eating spicy food, or receiving acupuncture treatments or chiropractic adjustments." They reduce stress. They postpone the aging process (yessssss!). They also block pain, explaining one's increased comfort of running after perhaps the first 20 minutes have elapsed — the endurance athlete's so-called "second wind."

I especially like the part above about "ribald laughter," by the way. I recall reading some years ago of a book by Norman Cousins — Anatomy of an Illness as Seen by the Patient, I think it was — in which Cousins described how he recovered from a hopeless, nominally fatal illness by laughing, regularly and hard. Cousins would schedule a session watching old Marx Brothers movies and stuff like that on a daily basis, just to tickle his funnybone and get him laughing out loud, and after a period of time his illness vanished. He wrote (see this web page), "Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors."

For all you chocaholics: eating chocolate is another great way to release endorphins!