A study was done last year by someone in Germany. A scientist or maybe a runner who tired of justifying his feelings, decided to make it official. Runners high is real.
What the scientist did, was inject a bunch of runners with a contrast of a special sort. It bonded with the chemical that was thought to be resposnible for runners high. Then the runners were sent off to run. And after the run, were put through a PET scan. The scan showed the areas in the brain that were resposnible for the chemical release of the chemical. Lo and behold, the brain glowed a bright colour.
Eureka, he or she shouted. We found it! Proof that there is such a thing as runners high.
I read on one of the sites that talked about the study. They compared runners high to something I can’t talk about it a general audience blog.
What prompted this search you ask? I finally have experienced runners high. It isn’t the feeling promised in one of those websites. But it is a feeling that I know happens. I can tell you when the high sets in.
I was running this morning. Getting ready for Around the Bay in a couple weeks. I was running a 10 km route.
I went from worrying about how the run was going to go, to “Hey this is great! I know I said to myself that I would stop at 10 km, but I could just keep going. And while we are at it, I bet if I went and did this and this, I could solve the global economic crisis single-handedly.”
You’ll notice I’m being pretty vague about what I need to do to solve the economic crisis. Unfortunately as soon as the chemicals swirling around my brain subsided, I lost the great ideas.
Maybe when I run again on Tuesday, I should bring a notebook.