Recovery Running
Former Addicts Find Solace on the Road
A recent government survey reveals that an alarming number of Canadians struggle with drug and alcohol problems. Writer Ben Kaplan explores how some have found running and turned their lives around.
There’s only one thing I like more than marathon training – having a scotch and then drinking a few beers. But when I’m training, I won’t eat chips. I’ll f loss my teeth each morning, and I’ll be in bed by 10:00 p.m. No takeout, no ice cream, and certainly no scotch or beer.
Like many, I have a complicated relationship with alcohol. I won’t go to a bar for months but then, when I do go, I’ll wake up the next day still wearing my shoes. I started running in 2009 when I wanted to turn my luck around. After moping through a rejected screenplay with a bottle of whiskey, it was time to become proactive. Binge drinking would have to go. Binge running has replaced it. From Ottawa to Jerusalem, Toronto to Portugal, Boston to Las Vegas, I run – and while my tendencies aren’t cured, they’re tempered. My next race is March, then May, then October. The reason not to slip: there’s always another goal.
Most run to improve their health, watch their waistline or for the challenge and thrill of it. I run for all of those benefits, but there’s also something else. It’s preventive – a sort of premeditated damage control. The Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, conducted in 2012, measured the rates of drug and alcohol use via telephone interviews across the country. Nearly 80 per cent of Canadians reported drinking alcohol in the past year. Of that group, 21 per cent of the male drinkers and 16 per cent of the female drinkers exceeded the low-risk alcohol consumption guidelines. In a year, nearly a quarter of Canadian men drank too much. According to that same survey, which is Health Canada’s go-to guideline for understanding our taste for intoxicants, one in seven Canadians aged 15 and over has experienced harm as a result of another person’s alcohol consumption.
As running explodes across North America and, indeed, the world, where races are held everywhere from Iceland to China, the Sahara Desert to the North Pole, running is becoming a step along the path of recovery for many. As a result, several addicts and problem drinkers are turning towards running, whether of their own volition or through the help of a dedicated program manager at a courtordered halfway house. It makes sense: with its enforced discipline, endorphin hit, feeling of community, positive self-talk and rules and guidelines, the structure of the running world is a natural fit for those in dire need of a change.
Tara Hall is an intake co-ordinator at the Orchard Recovery Centre in Bowen Island, B.C. The 38-year-old from Vancouver had long known that she had a problem. She drank too much, but denial helped her get by until a trip around the world brought her problems to light. Denial won’t work when you’re broke and alone in Australia. “I lost my relationship and job – everything – but it was a spiritual and emotional bottom that made me change,” says Hall, who had always been a runner. “I remember being 11 years old and, even at that age, enjoying the peacefulness of a run by myself,” Hall says. However, her sneakers had long accrued dust and her good times turned into times she couldn’t shake. It wasn’t until she found herself back home in Vancouver, 33 and f loundering, that she realized her simple pleasures from childhood might also provide the spark to start over again.
“For me, running provided a sense of serenit y and that feeling of vit alit y and freedom of my childhood,” says Hall, who connected to the Orchard Centre’s holist ic approach to recover y, where nature and exercise are as important as therapy. Running won’t cure addiction, Hall says. It’s complicated and, indeed, a disease. But as part of a larger reclamat ion project – a series of steps t hat led to her loving and valuing herself– running was key. “It ’s a humbling experience, running, but I love the letting go of my ego,” she says.
That feeling of serenity while running is the Holy Grail and an open secret amongst runners. The runner’s high, that sweet relief when the work feels effortless and our bodies and minds are connected, can be as addictive as any drug, and the high is certainly as f leeting. How many of us don’t feel right when we can’t get our run in? It has to do with the brain’s release of endorphins, naturally produced opiates that make us feel good. Running can provide a rush, the dopamine pathways are opened, and we feel powerful – high.
“At times, I feel as if I’m bulletproof,” says Shawn Davies, 34, who’s lean and muscular and covered head-to-toe in a labyrinth of tattoos. To see Davies, who was raised hard in Peterborough, Ont., an abused adopted child of a violent alcoholic, f lies in the face of the stereotypical recreational runner of the current boom.
Davies now runs as hard as he once lived, and he channels that intensity into his workouts. For him, the running was a way out. “I didn’t respect myself and didn’t love myself,” Davies admits. “But then something happened – I took charge of things, started having a voice and figured out who I am.” Ultimately, running was a choice Davies made, but he had some assistance. He got turned onto running in his rehab clinic in Peterborough.
“Everything started unravelling. I’d use and feel good, then come down and drink to keep going, but the cash advances and missed work caught up,” says Davies, who discovered Muay Thai in treatment, which led him first to mixed martial arts fighting. He first started running to cut weight before matches. When he decided to stop fighting, he found himself continuing to run. That led to an idea: he’d run a marathon.
For Davies, like a lot of us, the running replaces an unhealthy addiction, but becomes so much more. Last year, Davies moved to Toronto and took a job as a welder primarily so that he could start training more seriously with a group. Now, his life is structured around the schedule he keeps for his runs.
But there’s something else about long-distance running that appeals to Davies – the suffering. He likes testing his body, breaking himself down and then growing strength from that weakness. A thrillseeker, he admits that he likes walking that razor’s edge between pleasure and pain during a tough workout at the end of a 100-mile week.
“Running is a state of punishment. You have to refuse yourself the option to quit when you’re hurting,” says Davies. “I accept that and know that life is a struggle. It’s the way life’s supposed to be,” Davies says, and, indeed, the punishment he puts himself through has paid off. Davies has produced increasingly faster marathon finish times. In just two years, he has shaved his marathon time down to 2:40, which he ran at the 2013 Chicago Marathon. Davies
doesn’t run for paycheques, he does it to feel in control and alive. “Running is the unknown,” he says. “It’s something I can make happen – it’s up to me.”
According to Dr. Nigel Turner, a scientist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, addicts seek alcohol and drugs for two reasons: to avoid stress and deny negative emotions. You don’t have to have a problem to want a stiff drink after work. But people who get carried away with their vices, whether it’s gambling, over-eating, caffeine or cigarettes, also tend to be impulsive, pleasure seekers and vulnerable. According to Dr. Turner, their bad habits form over time and the pattern becomes entrenched.
“Drugs and alcohol become tools for avoiding negative emotions, but then an addict’s reward system becomes maladapted,” says Turner. “The problem is that negative reinforcement is what they seek to make their problems go away, but then they can’t stop the cycle of making the problem-solving solution the problem writ large.”
One of the benefits of running, in addition to providing goals and a sense of accomplishment, is that it leaves participants tired, as boredom is just as dangerous as stress. “If you exercise to the point where you’re exhausted, you don’t have time to think about how bad your life’s going,” Turner says, adding that exercise is an antidote to hopelessness. Build one thing, whether it’s how far you can run or how many pounds you’ve shed, and it spills over into everything else. Confidence can be as addictive as booze. “With running, you take yourself more seriously. Health becomes a goal in itself and you deal with negative emotions through accomplishment,” he says. “It’s an extremely good way of dealing with distress.”
Distress is a familiar emotion to all runners, whether we put ourselves through a 5k or an ultramarathon. When we start a race we know that, eventually, the hurt’s going to come. To a certain degree, that’s what the sport is about and what makes it strangely rewarding. And while racing does provide finish lines, it’s also never over. This is another way that running is addictive: when you score a personal best, the moment is fleeting. Now you have something to beat the next time you race.
The Harvest House in Ottawa treats men ages 18 to 30 – 80 per cent of which arrive via a court order. Patients are encouraged to run. Gary Wand, Harvest House’s program director, says that those who can stick with running decrease their odds of a relapse.
“You’re dealing with people that have trauma to the brain because they’re smoking crack or shooting dope and it inf licts damage to the mind,” says Wand, a veteran of both the marathon and the habit. He’s seen a dozen of his patients complete the marathon. Now officially part of Harvest House’s pathway to recovery, Wand says that he has five guys currently training for the half-marathon. “My best prospect,” he says, “is a bank robber awaiting his sentence.”
Wand is so enthusiastic about the redemptive role of long-distance running that he’s currently looking for donations to build a track. “You’re setting goals while every day moving closer towards reaching your goal – fertile ground for making pro-social change,” he says. “We’re trying to convert people to this lifestyle. So far, it’s worked.”
It may work so well because, confidence aside, it’s not only restoring muscles in the body, but running can also help rebuild the brain’s damaged cells. I may like training for a marathon because it keeps me away from my slippery slope, but I know that it also sends oxygen-rich blood f lowing to the brain. While it makes us feel good to be physically active, it also repairs damaged neurons. The brain is a muscle like all the others, and running fuels blood production to keep the mind, your real core muscle, in shape.
“There are 10 to 15 different kinds of peptides in the brain, they act as neurotransmitters and they produce opiates and feelings of well-being that are released when we run,” says Dr. Larry Grupp, a neurobiologist at the University of Toronto who has written extensively on the biological foundations of alcohol and drug abuse.
Grupp, also a runner, explains that the neurotransmitters have receptors that can become worn down over time after repeated chemical indulgence. Brain cells are destroyed. However, the f lip side of that and an interesting window into why addicts can find acute pleasure in running, is that that same abuse may also increase the neurotransmitter’s sensitivity. Running mimics the effects of the toxins. “It’s not the same kind of high that you get from heroin, which bathes the whole brain in an opiate, you can’t do that when you’re exercising, but it’s a facsimile – it produces a similar experience for the brain,” Grupp says.
One of Canada’s most promising long-distance runners is Rejean Chiasson, who hit 2:17 in his first race, the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 2011. Chiasson, 30, is a former soldier who used to have a taste for ecstasy, cocaine and alcohol and came to running after he’d exhausted pretty much everything else.
In 2004, after a bar fight left him with a broken jaw that would end his military career, Chiasson began to run seriously. “My behaviour was a sort of rebellion,” Chiasson says of the lowest moments in his life, which led him to running. “I thought I should be able to do whatever I wanted and that was it.”
Chiasson and I occasionally run together along Toronto’s waterfront and I was happy when a difficult breakup didn’t bring him back to bad choices. He credits running with building his character and helping him mature. “Seeing improvement makes me work harder and gives me a sense of accomplishment,” says Chiasson, who is battling back after a disappointing 2013 where he struggled on the race scene. Before he started running, Chiasson may have relapsed after such disappointment. But today he has a different outlook on life and his running. “I don’t know if it’s the runner’s high that I’m chasing, but you get a sense of happiness when you’re fit and there’s these very odd times when I’m running and everything comes together. That’s the best feeling ever; it’s not like getting high – it’s different.”
“Running is the unknown. It’s something I can make happen – it’s up to me.”