Its 5 A.M on a Tuesday morning and I’m slipping my shoes on. Not sandals, nor slippers. Nope, I’m slipping on my cross trainers; for those of you who don’t know what cross trainers are, they are a specialized type of shoe for runners. The reason why I’m up this early is because I have a race. I’m up to tell myself little mantras and to down two cups of coffee before I begin my short warm up run before yoga, but at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, when the gun goes off, the world stops and that race will have begun. When runners hear the sound of a gun, it clicks within their mind that nothing else matters in that moment but making it to the finish line before their opponents. However, the question of many who witness distance runners out in even the most undesirable conditions is “why do they do it?”
Neuroscientist and psychologists are too baffled by the extreme stamina of certain runners such as Olympic runner Dana Kastor, who after training for several months for her race would overcome injury after injury without giving up on her goal of taking home the gold medal. Runners will often find themselves in such a state of euphoria that they could only say that it was brought on by their spirit and will to go the distance. Some will do it because they love the feeling of the open air and wind in their face, but many will tell you that it is because they have developed a complex in their mind that they must run to better themselves in some way or to decrease their anxieties of day to day life.
When someone says that they wish that they could run away from their own troubles, I myself can certainly say that I will go out on a ten mile run in the wee hours of the morning just to forget about why my friend spoke harshly towards me or why my mother was angry with me the night before. It is that mental drive of fear or anger that could bring even the best of runners over the edge. Even the famed American Olympian 5,000K runner Steven Prefontaine, who during one of his collegic NCAA races had run with one of his worst injuries.
Many sports scientist and sports psychologist have agreed upon one theory, that being the ‘Endorphin Hypothesis’. The hypothesis, which claimed that there was an increase production of the body’s own opioids in the brain (ScienceDaily.com), has been put to the test in several different laboratory settings, but has yet to have been proven as to whether or not the euphoric feeling that overcomes oneself following a long run is the body’s own ‘high’. However, neuroscientists from the Technische Uniiversitat Munchen (TUM) and the University of Bonn believe that they have proven the ‘Endorphin Hypothesis’.
The experiment that they had conducted involved screening ten athletes before and after a two hour long distance run using PET scanning. By using a radioactive substance called diprenorphine ([18F]FDPN), which binds to the opiate receptors in the brain and hence competes with the endorphins, they were able to observe the levels of endorphin production within their brains. “The more endorphins that are produced in the athlete’s brain, the more the opioid receptors are blocked,” says Professor Henning Boecker (ScienceDaily.com), who conducted the research at TUM.
“Respectively the opioid receptor binding of the [18F]FDPN decreases, since there is a direct competition between endorphins in the brain and the injected substance.”
The experiment showed that by comparing the images before and after two hours of long distance running the study could demonstrate a significantly decreased binding of the [18F]FDPN. Over all the experiment seemed to be a success, but in looking at it, there were a view uneven variables such as how many men there were to women involved, the amount of radioactive material placed in each athlete (which one may assume was equal) and the athleticism of each participant. As much truth that the experiment may hold like the fact that endorphins that are released is the body’s own way of coping with pain when one commits to their endurance training, those variables must still be there to prove the hypothesis. So until those variables are included, neuroscientists must still accept the fact that it is still just a theory.
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