The first mountain I ever ran down was Masada. I was eighteen years old and in Israel. Located on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea, Masada was built around 35 BCE by Herod the Great and earned its place in historical lore after the first Jewish-Roman war. This was about 66 CE. When the Romans finally took the mountain, they discovered that the 936 Jewish inhabitants had set all the buildings on fire and committed mass suicide rather than becoming Roman slaves.
Masada is flat-topped and dirt brown and looks like someone took a giant molar and shoved it root first into the desert. It is 1300 feet high. The trail that runs from top-to-bottom is a vertiginous curve of switch-backs bordered by nasty cliffs. There were about eight of us milling around the top, looking for something to do. I don’t quite remember who proposed the race or who shouted “GO!” but I remember never having run so fast before.
The path was steep enough that within twenty feet of starting our steps had become leaps. About fifty feet later, leaps had become bounds. I was clearing eight to ten feet per and stopping was out of the question. I remember that what had started out as something fun to do, had become a bit more dire. I also remember that by the end of the first switchback, roughly two hundred yards down the trail, the world around me had melted away.
Thought and feeling and past history and future concerns were completely gone. Years later, I would come to understand why this happens. That understanding came from a guy named David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis, Missouri. Klinger, as he explains in his excellent "Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force," wanted to know why policemen in gun battles often fail to hear shots going off in their ears and frequently report seeing bullets entering the people they’re shooting at.
After all, bullets travel faster than the eye can normally see, while gun shots are loud as hell. Turns out that during a so-called “adrenaline response” the brain funnels energy to the parts that need it most and away from those not critical. The loss of hearing comes because the ears have been essentially turned off, while the brain’s perception of time—which is modulated by the neurochemical dopamine (dopamine is also released during an adrenaline rush for its performance-enhancing capabilities)—has slowed down.
Dopamine is also one of the brain’s main happy drugs, which helps explain the euphoria that accompanied that first mountain run.
In my early 20s, I lived in San Francisco and kept up this mountain running tradition. A good friend and I would hike Mount Tamalpais, in nearby Mill Valley, about once a week. We would sit atop for a few minutes and then sprint straight down. Tam is considerably higher than Masada (a 2571-foot peak) and the way down significantly more varied. The last portion of the run took us through a pine forest.
It’s been twenty years since those days, but I remember that pine forest almost exactly. I can see the narrow spacing of the trees and the light dappling down through their crowns and the reason I can remember all of it some two decades later also comes down to dopamine.
One of the other functions of this neuro-chemical, as was discovered by Michael Goldberg and Robert Wurtz at the NIH, is to modulate attention. Technically, dopamine helps stabilize our spatial map (our internal, multisensory representation of extrapersonal space) and cement experiences into memory.
This happens for a lot of reasons, but a very simple explanation is that emotions exist to tag experiences for either discarding or long-term storage. The stronger the experience (thus the more neurochemicals like dopamine released) the better chance that experiences gets saved for review. Put yourself into heaps of danger (by, say, running down a mountain), and the brain is going to record every step just in case a situation this precarious ever occurs again.
The last time I ran down a mountain was eight years ago, in Madagascar. I was there studying lemurs with the primatologist Patricia Wright and had decided to go for a hike with Wright’s daughter Amanda. We were in the high hills surrounding the World Heritage Site known as Ranomafana National Park when a lightning storm broke out. For reasons that remain unclear, the lightning was purple. That didn’t diminish the threat. Researchers working in Madagascar had the habit of getting struck by lightning atop these same hills and we didn’t want to risk it. By the time the second flash occurred, Amanda had taken off at a sprint and I had rushed to follow.
Now Amanda was raised in the jungles of Peru and the forests of Madagascar, but had spent the past decade going to college in New York and later working at a bank. She wasn’t supposed to be in shape for this kind of dash. I, on the other hand, had spent the past two years hiking and climbing and skiing and snowboarding and doing an assortment of other such activities. I should have smoked her, but I could barely catch her.
This woman had spent her childhood running down mountains. When we took off down that muddy, hardscrabble trail, I felt like I was chasing a Billy goat. As a sportswriter, I had spent years chasing professional athletes around mountains, but none of them had ever moved as fast as Amanda. To say it was otherworldly is an understatement. I watched her leap from a cliff’s edge, flip her body sideways and plant her feet on the side of a tree some fifteen feet off the ground, then flip around and bounce off another as she worked her way down to the ground. It was an early display of the sport now known as
parkour. This too was dopamine at work. And it was astounding.
About six months after that trip I got very sick with Lyme disease and spent the better portion of two years in bed. Recovery was hard. I thought my mountain running days long behind me, but it’s been six years since then and I now live in northern New Mexico—a place dotted by tall peaks. I’ve been eyeing them lately, thinking it might be time to lace up my sneakers and see what’s what.
Besides performance-enhancement, memory modulation and general happiness, dopamine is one of the most addictive substances on earth. Cocaine, often considered the most craven of drugs, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine. A fact that helps explain why, at age 41, I would decide to start running down mountains again.
For the dopamine of course. You just can’t beat that rush.
