Furthermore, once a race has ended, I know what I am truly made of.One week later, this runner ran what must be considered, by his own standards, the perfect marathon: he dropped dead of an excruciatingly painful heart attack.
Last weekend another middle-aged runner died under tragic circumstances, trudging along a solitary Vermont back road. This runner was Jim Fixx, the 52-year-old author, lecturer and all-round guru on long-distance running. Fixxs books, The Complete Book of Running and Jim Fixxs Second Book of Running encouraged many inactive people to get active again, quit smoking, lose weight and organize their lives along more healthful patterns. But along with these sensible suggestions were intermixed advice and beliefs that may have hastened Fixxs death and, I am convinced, may hasten the death of other runners. I am speaking now of what psychiatrist Alayne Yates and her colleagues at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center refer to as the obligate runner -- those for whom running is a compulsive drive that preempts fulfillment in other life areas or who run to the point of inflicting physical damage on their bodies. As many as 25 percent of serious runners may be neurotically attached to their sport, claims Dr. Kenneth E. Callen, associate professor of psychiatry at the Oregon Health Sciences University, in a study published in Psychosomatics, the journal of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine. First, the obligate runner takes up serious running -- defined as more than 40 miles per week -- relatively late in life as compared to other athletes. Most obligatory runners become unequivocally committed to running in the third to fifth decade of their lives, wrote Yates and her colleagues in the Feb. The New England Journal of Medicine. The Complete Book Of Running Jim Fixx Professional Or PersonalSecond, obligate runners are found among those who generally feel unfufilled in their professional or personal lives and use running as a method for achieving meaning. Despite impressive professional accomplishments (managing editor at Horizon, excutive editor at McCalls), Jim Fixxs sense of direction as well as his greatest life satisfaction date from his discovery of running. The Complete Book Of Running Jim Fixx How To Become HealthierIn his books and lectures, he offered his readers a similar enlightenment by promising to show you how to become healthier and happier than you ever imagined you could be. ![]() ![]() In the survey published in the February 1983 issue of Psychosomatics, Callen described the typical runner likely to wind up hurting or killing himself: a middle-aged man tortured by the prospect of growing old, troubled by diminished physical attractiveness and bored by the absence of job or marital fulfillment. In their attempts to understand the personality traits common to obligate runners, the psychiatrists at the University of Arizona discovered important similarities with anorexics. The runners in our sample shared many of the qualities of the anorexic patient, wrote these doctors in their paper, Running -- an Analogue of Anorexia published in The New England Journal of Medicine. They were generally self-effacing, hard-working, high achievers from affluent families who were uncomfortable with anger and who characteristically inhibited the direct expression of affect (mood). Their singular commitment to running occurred at a time of heightened anxiety, depression and identity diffusion. This grim asceticism mentioned by these authors elsewhere in their paper can be confirmed by anyone who takes the trouble to observe the pained, but stoic, faces of obligatory runners when they perform their rituals on our city streets and country byways. Observing these runners, its hard to escape the conclusion that many of them are attempting to discover who they are and who they want to be via running. The heightened commitment to sport or diet provides the runner and the anorexic with a clear identity in that it differentiates them from other less dedicated people, writes Yates and her colleagues. Another characteristic of the runner at risk for disaster is a tendency to think of running in quasi-mystical, even irrational terms. It is here with my heart banging against my ribs that I discover how far beyond reason I can push myself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |