Dave Brewer: Addicted to Running?

Dave Brewer likes to run. He ran yesterday. If he’s alive and not in traction, he ran today. He ran every day last month, and every day last year, too, and on April 16, 2011, he will celebrate one quarter of a century without missing a single day of covering at least two miles. In the running world, people like him are called streakers, but Brewer, a 56-year-old financial manager from Herndon, Va., says “the technical term is ‘idiot.’ ” Brewer is also modest. I learned about the streak only because I was bragging to him—he’s an old friend—about jogging six days a week for a year, and he casually mentioned it.

His feat left me with one simple question: can you be addicted to running? Mental-health professionals we talked to said it depends on whether you feel like the run is a choice. There is no listing in the DSM-IV for exercise addiction, but psychologist Gloria Balague, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and consults with USA Track & Field, says you can be addicted to running, and you diagnose it much as you would alcoholism: if it starts to cause problems in your personal or professional life, you might have an issue. It’s not so much that the addicted feel great when they exercise, Balague says, but they “really feel bad about themselves if they don’t run even one day.”

One reason for those blues might be chemical. There is evidence that the same basic neurochemical pathway is involved in all addictions—drugs, sex, gambling, or even jogging. All lead to a dopamine spike in the brain, which stimulates reward circuits, leading to a sensation of pleasure. Some scientists also suspect that it may be possible for addicts to use exercise as a means of replacing more harmful addictions.

As for Brewer, he doesn’t think he’s addicted: “I don’t give a rat’s ass whether I run or not. I’m just proud of my streak.” But he also knows that these things tend to take on a life of their own. In 1991 Brewer was on a Lear jet approaching La Guardia, when the copilot came back and said the landing gear was stuck. “Some people might have been worrying for their life,” he said, “but all I could think was that I wasn’t going to be able to get my run in that day.” On another trip, his thrifty boss booked rooms in a bad neighborhood, and Brewer found himself being chased by a knife-wielding, barefoot man yelling, “Come back here! I’m going to kill you!” You can bet that’s one run he finished in record time.