distance running, running, exercise, fitness, training

Although I’m on the Council of Ash, I never try to nag people into quitting, it rarely works. Instead, if someone doesn’t look horribly overweight, I just tell them to take up running – forget about trying to give up the habit, just join a cross-country or road-running club.

Before long you’ll finding yourself finishing a rousing 10K with that feeling in you known as the Runner’s High. And hey! - without even trying you’ll notice that you’ve stopped lighting up. And let me tell you, you’re done with cigarettes for ever, not just a twenty percent chance of it like with nicotine patches or similar treatments.

How come running works like that? It’s the endorphins. Well who are these little charmers? An endorphin is an endogenous opioid biochemical compound. Huh?  Goodness me, if you can’t understand that, it’s a polypeptide produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates. Anyhow it arrives in the brain with the runner’s high. (I assume you’re a vertebrate)

Here’s the magic. Endorphins also happen to be the by-product of smoking. So the runner doesn’t any longer need the artificial fix of nicotine in his brain, he gets it for free at the cross-country.

He gets other physical and mental benefits also, according to some health gurus.

We tested the theory ourselves in the early days of our good old Running Magazine. Geoffrey Canon took scores of volunteers and led them regularly on a 40 minute run, to put them to the test. (Where are you now, Geoffrey, still in Brazil?)

It worked of course. I’m only sorry we can’t do anything for those very overweight (let’s say fat) people  you see puffing away - puffing on a cigarette, not in running the cross-country. They’re just too heavily built and they think that smoking is good for them, because it stops them eating – but they go on eating.

I’d like to offer the people at Forest a chance to watch their health and stop smoking - maybe they’d then they call a ceasefire, no more trying to put the kibosh on our efforts.