Are you addicted to running?

I might be pushing the limits of irony by posting about running addiction so soon after an ultramarathon, but this paper has been sitting on my desktop for a while. So, here it is:

Chapman CL, & De Castro JM (1990). Running addiction: measurement and associated psychological characteristics. The Journal of sports medicine and physical fitness, 30 (3), 283-90 PMID: 2266760

People sometimes jokingly say that they are addicted to running. Like anything that makes you feel positive, an addiction to running sounds plausible. I went looking for some research on the subject and this paper from the last century came up. (By the way the paper wasn't available from the journal's site. Guess where I found it.)

Drs. Chapman and Castro from Atlanta GA set out to define a set of questions to be used to determine if someone is addicted to running or not.

A previous study had created a metric called  "Commitment to Running" (CR) score. However, the authors make a distinction is between "addiction" and "commitment". Addicted people feel like they have to run whatever injuries or other problems it might cause. Committed people, on the other hand, have a drive to continue running, but they are in control. In other words, running everyday doesn't necessarily mean you are addicted. (Did you hear that family and friends?)

To measure "addiction", a small number of people (n = 52) were asked to score given statements on a 5 point scale (as in "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree"). The statements that correlate well with the self reported level of addiction includes: "I run on a regular basis", "I would run with intense pain", "I would not reschedule activities with my friends in order to run" (The last one probably is scored in the opposite direction. i.e. if you "strongly disagree" it increases your final score (RAS: Running addiction score)).

The small size of the study and the self reported level of addiction leaves a lot of room for variation. Yes, the 11 accepted questions seem like they would measure the level of running addiction, but so do some of the 7 questions that didn't make it into the final test, because the correlation was low. For example the statement "I think of running when I am doing other activities, such as working" did not correlate with running addiction in this group.

Diving deeper into the details, the authors claim that for men, RAS correlates well with self rated addiction as well as the commitment score, while for women it only correlates with addiction. To simplify, for men commitment and addiction are similar, for women not so much. This would mean so much, only if they had a few hundred men and women instead of 37 and 15 respectively.

In the last bit of the paper the authors analyze personality traits of runners, but I am not going to go into detail. You can read the full paper if you wish.

This paper points to the gold mine, but doesn't really take us up there. Now that we have an endless source of subjects, it might be time to do this on a bigger scale. All you need is a few volunteers, a few clipboards and an NYRR race. And who knows, maybe one day we will see it on the cover of Runner's World: "Are you addicted to running? Find out in 10 questions!"