Tood Moody writes:

>I think that in the case of at least some of the serious runners
>I know, health concerns do continue to figure prominently.  They
>have convinced themselves that running is the key to health and
>the cure for all ills.  Some of these guys compete; some do not.
>But I find that I often encounter the belief that running is *the
>key*, a mindset not different from what one encounters among
>adherents of idealistic diets.

What's really interesting here psychologically, I find, is that just
because people *say* they are into running (or anything else for that
matter) predominantly for health doesn't mean they behave accordingly. What
people say may at times not mean much. In things where ongoing behavior is
involved, one has to look at what people actually do and give that the most
weight.

There are people who say they are into running heavily for health reasons
but then proceed to go ahead and train their butts off until they are
overtrained; or they don't take enough easy runs or easy days between the
tough workouts, so their immune systems get beat down and they are coming
down with colds too often; or half their discretionary non-work hours in
life revolve around running; this type of individual is really just kidding
themselves. One could of course say these are more unconscious behaviors,
but then, people's real underlying motivations often aren't explicitly
conscious anyway. Going by people's conscious assertions about why they are
doing something often doesn't really get at the root or truth of things.

This is pretty much an exact parallel to the people who say they are into a
certain extreme diet for health but then can't see that their health is
getting worse because all the bad symptoms are euphemized as
"detoxification" or whatever. In both cases (runners, dieters) it usually
seems to happen because they have become emotionally addicted or beholden
to a philosophy and stopped paying rational attention to the results that
would confirm the reason they purportedly got into it for originally.

Out of curiosity, I wonder where this idea that running (or aerobics,
really) is *the key* for health traces back to historically? I would guess
maybe Kenneth Cooper of "Aerobics" fame back in the late 1960s or early
1970s or whenever he first gained prominence. (Of course, even he has been
emphasizing other aspects of health now for a long time as well.) Also
maybe Dr. George Sheehan, someone you mentioned earlier, "the running
doctor," who also gained prominence in the 1970s. I can still remember back
in the late 1970s when I was doing the most running I ever did, there were
even those claiming that if you met a certain standard of mileage or
running fitness it would absolutely prevent or "immunize" you against heart
attacks. That one, of course, lasted only till Jim Fixx the running author
died of one, unfortunately, from atherosclerosis due to other aspects of
his lifestyle and pre-existing disposition (family history of coronary
disease).

--Ward Nicholson <[log in to unmask]>

P.S. Are there any other serious runners (or formerly, in my case) besides
me who have never experienced the vaunted "runner's high"? Or if I have
experienced it, maybe it's just that feeling of being "in shape," and
instead normal sedentary people are just experiencing a baseline state of
"couch-potato low" :-) all the time by comparison. Of course, I started
running when I was 14 and had never been out of shape in my life and never
knew any different. I can still remember Frank Shorter (won the 1972
Olympic marathon) or someone in his era joking that anyone who experienced
runner's high wasn't really training very hard. 'Course, even during
periods when I purposely trained much slower, I never got runner's high
either--what I enjoyed was more the primal rhythmic feeling of loping
across the countryside in a hypnotic zone, but to me it wasn't anything one
could call euphoria with a straight face.