Get the Spectator’s High

We’ve all heard about sympathetic pregnancy, the condition in which a man exhibits the symptoms of his pregnant partner. Well, how about sympathetic exercise? Just watching a video of a someone running can get your heart pounding and increase your breathing rate, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.

In this small-scale study, nine subjects watched a first-person running video. Researchers noted statistically significant increases from baseline in heart rate, respiratory rate and skin blood flow. “These results suggest that observation of exercise in the first person is a strong enough stimulus to evoke ‘physiologically appropriate’ autonomic responses that have a purely psychogenic origin,” the report concluded.

This makes a good case to have video coverage of track races and top marathons with some of the competitors wearing GoPro cameras, in the same style as NASCAR, the Tour de France and downhill mountain bike races.

Amazingly, elite runner Rod Dixon wore a camera on his head (mounted on a hockey helmet) for ABC TV during sections of the 1985 New York City Marathon. Dixon, who won the New York race two years earlier, wasn’t competing in the event that year, but said he took up the task to bring a “new dimension” for spectators of the sport.

“I want to tell why a runner looks strong or why he seems to be weakening,” Dixon told The Associated Press in a prescient 1985 interview. “You might sit in a studio and see these but you can really only get the feel for it with you are running along with them.”

While Dixon’s 1980s mini-cam setup weighted a cumbersome five pounds, the modern systems are almost light enough to avoid interference with performance.

Check out this footage of the downhill mountain biker Aaron Gwin riding the Sea Otter Classic:

And for a running perspective, take a look at this first-person video of an 800m race: