Dopamine’s the Drug
They call it dope for a reason, dude.
A recent NY Times’ Book Review tempted me with several books to read—two for self edification about the deep ocean and a third because the reviewer, Tom Bissell, didn’t have a clue about what he was going on about. Bissell’s review is titled Low Tide, What can surfing tell us about addiction
“ ‘Surfing is a kind of parable of addiction,” he [Ziolkowski] writes early on—an assertion that roused from this reviewer a startled question mark in the margin. Then came this: ‘That many surfers have struggled with drug addiction will probably come as no surprise.’ If, like me, you’re read more books about, say, the origins of the War of 1812 than you have about surfing, this fact likely will come as a considerable surprise, akin to suddenly discovering that America’s Cup winners are notorious for their love of shooting smack.”
from Low Tide, What can surfing tell us about addiction by Tom Bissell
My beef lies with Bissell’s admission he knows little about addiction other than it’s bad for you and nothing about surfing, nor motivations generally behind competitive sports.
Aside from smiling at the ‘shooting smack’ comment—a nice line guaranteed to catch the editor’s eye—though coke’s probably the drug Americans’ Cup billionaires like best. But what the hell is Bissell talking about, ‘considerable surprise?’ If not for the kicks, where else does the motivation to compete come from? I’m with Ziolkowski, and will bet Bissell never looked too hard for some good dope, er, dopamine. Or, at least, doesn’t know where to get himself a hit. I can only imagine he’s never left his NYC studio apartment to take in the world outside that troubled metropolis, though some might say living in that place is struggle enough.
The Drop, by Thad Ziolkowski—whose subtitle runs on How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery—is essentially a discussion about dopamine and the extreme ends some folks go to satisfy the craving. After drugs and alcohol, the next best known on the planet is competitive sports.
“The drop is where a surfer first gets up on the waves and drops down the face of the wave. It's also referred to as "taking the drop."
Riding the Tube—photo by The Last Minute - Flickr
And the photo editor didn’t seem any more with it; the caption accompanying Bissell’s review states, “The Brazilian surfer Hector Alves rides a wave.” True as far as it goes, but what he’s really doing is riding the tube. Hell, even I know that, and the closest I ever got to surfing was checking out my son Ryan’s surf board.
So I’m here to ‘splain it to ‘em. Ever heard about a runner’s high? Don’t reckon Bissell has.
To use an example, the 1500 meter race is a test of gumption over exhaustion if you’re throwing yourself whole hog into it. The need for more oxygen is the least of your problems. In the first 400, you’re rocking and rolling around that track, with an extra kick when you need to reach the inside rail past that dude in the red racing shorts who got the jump on you at the gun. Still have jets for feet in the second lap but come around the track starting into the third 400 you’re in the middle of the deepest, most airless abyss with lactic acid cramping your calves, fumes in the tank, and ten million miles from the finish. It’s crazy time. It’s when the ‘fade’ sets in, and all you’ve got left is a big blank spot where your mind used to be.
It’s possible to extrapolate the same condition to a 10K race when it happens at about 6 or7 kilometers. My personal theory is that anyone can kick it in with the finish line in sight, but it’s in that nowhere middle that most succumb. Your body tells you ‘don’t worry; it’s near to the same pace.’ If you’ve been cruising at a personal best since the start (we’re talking about on a good day), it’s dawning that you’re not breathing so well, your legs are turning leaden, and either you need to double down on the effort to keep from dropping off pace, or you’ll be too embarrassed to make a final attack at the finish. It’s all about the games you play with yourself and what to do about them.
I’ll go you another one: 95 degrees in the shade and 100% humidity at the start of a workout—how you cope with this, that’s the real test, when no one’s paying attention and it hurts the brain to even think about starting an hour of repeat quarters.
Oft-recommended is altitude training, on account of the thin air in Boulder’s hills, which is great if Nike is paying the freight, but training hard in Washington’s summer swelter is a close second to that effort. Higher the H2O in the air the less oxygen, and you simply can’t get cool. The only reward is that come October into November, when the weather becomes your best friend, running is as easy as sitting in an easy chair. I set my best times without exception in the fall racing season.
So if I wasn’t being paid to do this self-flagellation, what the hell was it for? For those few days when it all came together on a track, or on the road? Nah, that was more icing than cake. When you push yourself to reach just a bit further than you think you can, it fills a need to rebalance the body’s chemicals—and it feeds your mind. As Ziolkowski argues, extreme physical effort requires an equal mental effort, helping to equalize one’s emotional state.
Some people don’t want to take the long war around, like distance running. Instead, they prefer the sudden injection of, say, surfing. Though if they haven’t done enough training, it can be embarrassingly sudden.
A running buddy of mine, Doug, was happiest when he was doing something out on the edge—manning a machine-gun on a helicopter in ‘Nam, becoming a DC cop then a narcotics officer in the DEA, making a mess of his love life, running the Army 10-Miler with a fractured foot, and so on. Doug, like another running compatriot, Barbara, was always willing to go out in the sleeting rain, or do hill repeats when it was too hot or too cold for most people to leave their house. But I always sensed that times between workouts and races, he was almost lost. Chasing the endorphins was his distraction.
Bissell recovers a bit further into the article. “Drugs, Ziolkowski insists, work their power most effectively when a person’s life has little else that is sustaining within it,” with the unstated comparison to competition sports.
“How convincing this book is as a therapeutic primer, I am utterly unqualified to judge. What I can say is that you don’t need to love or even be interested in surfing to feel passages like this one land powerfully between your shoulder blades: ‘The freedom of surfing is oceanic captivity. The first wave, the one that creates the surfer, is bondage. What characterizes the origin stories of surfers and their first waves is fatalism, the resignation and love of the captive for his captivity.’ “
from Low Tide, What can surfing tell us about addiction by Tom Bissell
I’m considering buying The Drop, in spite of Bissell’s review. I can’t speak about addiction to hard drugs. I will volunteer that smoking grass in grad school gifted me with lofty designs and images to write about that I might never have come upon—the right brain was told to take a break and let me think creatively. And on more than one fifteen mile training run, I sorted stuff out for myself, “feeling good in my brain” like Tom Petty bragged—about the effort and what I’d accomplished in both pursuits.
Running the woods trail around Lake Accotink in the fall brought a renewed connection to my childhood back when Saturdays were spent chasing Barry through the woods. The caution is being self-aware sufficient to realize there are limits. Dirty Harry’s quote regarding limitations can be inserted here. Hanging around enough sports junkies in my day, I’m not sure what more Ziolkowski can tell me about that subject. Though they were wicked fun to train with.
CODA
Years ago, when I was still training for distance running, I came across articles claiming the running craze, as it was dubbed, could become a form of addiction, a notion I resisted. At least in my own case it didn’t apply.
My main regret was that I hadn’t gone out for cross country in high school. No one in my family encouraged me to try competitive sports, and with asthma, it was daunting. With my father dying before he reached 50 from emphysema, breathing was never something I took for granted. Once I began running, I realized I should have run cross country. Something intangible about distance running suited me.
Perhaps, if I’d been a better athlete, this notion of addiction might have been more applicable? But it was obvious I wasn’t going to qualify for the Olympics in this or any other life. So the motivation to do 50-mile weeks came mainly from a curiosity, an ambition, to see how far I could go in the sport.
That, and how it felt to be in the best mental and physical shape of my life. No other accomplishment has had as much of an impact. I had always lived inside my thoughts, and wherever that led me, it did. Reaching a physical level I never knew I had within me was a gift from outside myself, as if Zeus and his sidekicks were saying “See?”
And I was able to reclaim something from my youth. I find it sad so many leave their youth like clothes in the back of the closet, clothes they no longer can wear.