IQ AEROBICS

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when many of us were running more marathons than was wise, several of us hatched a theory that for every marathon run, one’s IQ decreased by two points, each drop in IQ making it that much easier to dupe oneself into scheduling the next marathon. It was a clever little theory, we thought, surely formulated during the final miles of a long training run while our remaining IQ points were in a state of distress.

Unfortunately, we never took the theory far enough to explain what happened to a marathoner who ran out of IQ points.

More recently, aged (and perhaps matured) into a routine of more reasonable recovery spaces between marathons, we have further extended our IQ theory to conclude that given enough recovery time, the brain will begin to regenerate IQ points, thereby allowing the long-distance runner to come up with a lifelong but reasonable schedule of doing 26.2-milers.

We’ve obviously had way too many loads of fun—again, usually in the later stages of long runs—disassociating with the mental aspect of marathoning and ultrarunning when we should have been associating with the incredible pain and depleted stamina.

The mental aspect of running long distances has several aspects worth exploring—primarily the problem-solving element (in conjunction with the stress-release effect) and what I like to think of as the turbocharged-brain effect (TBE).

I caution that these are only theories at this point, culled from several decades of experience and lots of meandering conversations with other marathoners—experiences that are increasingly making way too much sense to a brain starting out from a deficit of 74 IQ points (i.e., 37 marathons).

It’s a given that most people today are overstressed, partly because they buy into the lame theory that they must keep up with everything that’s going on or else be left behind like a runner who’s stepped on one too many pieces of gum. Communications are sped up, information is thrown at us at increasing volume and speed, and everything—from the most important thing on Earth to the least significant—is given equal weight and assigned a timeliness that almost nothing has earned.

Everything today is ranked “Top Priority.” We let real mail sit while we frantically answer e-mails with less thought than we give a sneeze. We feel like failures if we do not stay abreast of every sports score, every tick on the Dow-Jones, every political scandal. As though it all matters.

Cell phones are everywhere. So many people talking and so few listening. Attention spans shorten, while our bodies drip, drip, drip adrenaline into our body systems, poisoning them, rotting our health like termites let loose in a balsa castle.

The closest we come to sanity is on our longer runs. Like a sailboat setting out on a 10-day cruise, evidence of civilization drops away one distraction at a time until there is only wind in the sails, a wake showing where you and the boat have been, and an open sea ahead.

It’s astonishing how quickly the truly useless baggage falls overboard when we go out the door on a run. Besotted and besmirched and bedecked with problems and questions and confusion all day, as we move under our own power through the early anaerobic stage of start-up and into a regularity of breath, the effluvium of the day slips from us, and we feel lightened, looser, more focused. The myriad distractions that kept us from seeing the bigger (and simpler) picture vanish, and we find ourselves able to answer questions that seemed overwhelming and as complex as the Gordian knot.

The stress drains from the muscles through the shoes to the asphalt, the drip of adrenaline stops for a time, the fog clears, and we relax our way into what used to be normalcy. All is well with the world; the world is much simpler than it seemed an hour ago; we are one with ourselves.

At least for an hour or so.

We must eventually return to the real world. But we return better than we left because of the TBE.

While we were running along, the breath even, the stride loose and regular, something else was happening besides outrunning the barnacles of modern life that had clung to us. Something physiological was also occurring: the aerobic exercise increased the pumping of the blood through the body, increasing its filtration through the lungs, infusing it with oxygen and life-enhancing nutrients that were then delivered to even the remotest ports of the body, but most important, to the poor, distressed, assaulted, bruised brain.

Although not technically a muscle as a quadriceps is a muscle, the brain works much like a muscle—the more it is used, the better it gets at doing what it’s built to do: think, remember, calculate, plan, imagine, cogitate, examine, evaluate, store knowledge, dredge up memories.

The daily run empties the brain of the dark stressors by getting rid of the marginal stuff that confuses us, allowing us to focus, and energizes the brain with oxygen and fuel. We come back even from a run that has gone badly better than we were before we left on it. The chemistry of the body knows it has been called upon to function in a manner for which it was designed. The brain is enlivened by the chemistry and the experience. We are renewed, even if only on basic and prehistoric levels we do not recognize consciously.

The burst of oxygen and nutrients fuses with damaged or near-dead IQ points and slowly revives them, slowly but surely bringing them back on line (or on board, if you want to stay away from the too-too modern and stick with the sailboat analogy).

From each run, we return a slightly better person, a better version of the person who started the run, a person more streamlined, focused, and alive.

Of course this is all merely a theory, thrown up by several long-unused IQ points. —Rich Benyo