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To run your second marathon, you might have to forget your first

Research shows runners forget the pain of running a marathon, which allows them to do another

Quebec City

What was it like running your first marathon? If you’re like most people, it was probably very hard, and those last few miles were likely quite painful. Usually, when you go through a painful experience, you try to avoid ever going through it again, so why is the marathon different? New research shows that over time, runners misremember the pain of running a marathon so they can sign up to do another (and another and another).

Pain and memory

Our memories are not always reliable, and biases, distortions and errors often affect our ability to remember things accurately. This is annoying when you can’t remember where you put your car keys, but can be helpful in other circumstances, particularly those involving pain.

The researchers of this study, published in the Journal of Pain Research, explain that memory is reconstructive, which makes it less accurate, and there are several studies showing that both acute and chronic pain is often misremembered. This is particularly true when pain is induced by positively-valued experiences. An excellent example of this is giving birth: women who give birth to a child tend to misremember how painful the process was, which allows them to go on and have more children.

Another example is marathon running. Every year, countless runners cross the finish line of their first marathon muttering “never again…” only to find themselves signing up for another one a few months later. How can this be?

Photo: Brighton Marathon

The pain of the marathon

To answer this question, the researchers studied marathoners at the finish line of their race, then again six months later, asking them to rate their pain on a scale of zero (no pain) to 10 at both times. They also had participants fill out the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule to rate their emotional experience after running the marathon.

The researchers found that the runners rated their pain as much less intense six months after the race than they did when they crossed the finish line, proving that they misremembered the experience. They also reported a much higher positive affect (i.e. they experienced many more positive emotions) than negative at the end of the race.

Their results support the theory that the positive context of a painful experience (like a marathon) is a key factor contributing to the underestimation of pain in a person’s memory. The researchers explain one possible explanation for this is that similarly to giving birth, running a marathon might cause a significant increase in your concentrations of beta-endorphin and oxytocin, which can modify the way your brain remembers the negative aspects of the experience. Other possible explanations are that oxytocin inhibits actions in your brain involved in memory consolidation, or that certain doses of endorphins cause retrograde amnesia.

Veterans vs. first-timers

The researchers also found that first-time marathoners remembered the pain as far more intense than those who had already completed multiple marathons. One possible reason for this is that veteran runners may find the experience of running a marathon more predictable and controllable than first-timers. This positively affects their mood during the event, which could further distort their pain memory.

What does this mean for runners?

There are two main takeaways from this research:

  1. You tend to forget exactly how painful running a marathon was, which is what allows you to go and sign up for another one (and another one and another one).
  2. As you run more marathons, you get used to the pain and realize that you can tolerate it, which makes the experience even better and makes you more likely to do it again.

So if you want to run another marathon, you’re probably going to need to forget (for the most part) how painful running your first one was. Luckily, your brain will do most of that work for you. As you keep doing marathons, you’ll also get more used to the pain and enjoy them more and more, which will make the pain even less significant in your mind.

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