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Hooked on a feeling By Ariel Rubinsky Tags: Israel News Last Friday, several hundred runners and cyclists traveled to Sodom for a new challenge: a 30 km night run at 2.30 A.M., through twisting canyons lit only by the moonlight and tiny flashlights, followed by an 80 km desert bike ride on Saturday morning. Most of the participants stuck to one of the two challenges, but around 50 athletes did both. A short while after they saw the sun rise while running, they climbed onto their bikes for the Volvo Challenge, a long ride in hot and dry desert conditions. Competitions of this kind have become part of the sporting scenery in the past few years. "Amateur" athletes (whose training would put some professionals to shame), aged 30 to 70, are constantly seeking new, more difficult and more complex sporting challenges. "It is part of human nature to look for thrills," says Keren Goldblatt, who owns the Pro Sport shoe store in Tel Aviv and who was behind the night run and a series of other field sporting challenges in the past year, including the Ultra marathon. In order to prepare for a competition like the night run, she says, "there is no need for especially tough training; 10 or 15 hours a week are sufficient." However Prof. Uri Rosenstein, a cardiologist who runs and cycles daily, disagrees. "Doing sports is good for you, but it can also turn into an addiction and endanger people's health," he says. Advertisement Eitan Chaprut also participated in the Sodom competitions. The 41-year-old father of three from Hod Hasharon, who works in high-tech, broke both his hands about half a year ago when his bike crashed. They were in casts for two months, but on Saturday he was already back on his bike for the Sodom challenges. "It's not a question of addiction," he says, smiling. "I simply can't manage without it." He adds, however, that now he is much more careful. "I know that I am not allowed to fall on my hands again. It still hurts." "I work about 40 hours a week and when there is an important competition coming up, I train about 30 or 35 hours a week," says Tzvika Fishman, 54, from Zichron Yaakov, one of the leading, if not the leading, ultra athletes in Israel. "The training is my whole life. I don't go to movies, I don't watch TV, and I don't go to restaurants. I also don't eat everything that they serve at restaurants. I train twice a day and and we all go to sleep at 9 P.M., because we are a family of athletes. My pastime is exercising." Fishman is married to a former medium-distance running champion; their two daughters, aged 9 and 11, are also triathlon and running champions for their age groups. He works as a security officer at the Hillel Yaffe Medical Center in Hadera, but his family life revolves entirely around sports. He has participated in 43 marathons in Israel and the rest of the world and has made impressive strides in the most difficult endurance competition in the world - the Ironman Triathlon. The Ironman consists of a 3.8-km swim in the sea, a 180-km bike ride and a 42-km marathon. A year ago, he participated in three such competitions during a two-month period and managed to improve his results from one competition to another - despite certain physiological studies that say participants in these competitions require a long recovery period. His next challenge is to participate in two Ironman Triathlons in a span of three weeks - in other words, without a suitable recovery period. "The world champion tried but did not succeed, but I hope to do so," he says. Why do you do this to yourself? "Friends of mine say it's a good thing I work at Hillel Yaffe, because there is an excellent psychiatric ward there," he says, laughing. "So long as the blood beats fast in our arteries, we are alive. I feel that if I stop for a second, I'll die. There is no vacation time for me - I am always busy preparing for the next competition." Fishman claims he is in touch with his body and that he takes his pulse every morning when he wakes up. If it is fast, this may be an indication of exhaustion or illness and he exercises more moderately. "The main thing is to keep the blood flowing and not to sit around atrophying," he says. To give up a training session is inconceivable. "If I exercise only once during the afternoon, I feel the need to get up and run or cycle. If I suddenly have an hour or two without any activity, I become restless. So I create some kind of work that will keep me moving, such as testing the security measures throughout the hospital, for example." Fishman admits that he is hyperactive even though he was never officially diagnosed as such, and that he is addicted to sports. He says that the pace of his training led to his divorce from his first wife, but adds that when he married the second time, it was with "the right woman, who lives like I do." He and his family members are at peace with his training. "We call it living with movement," he says. Going cold turkey Arnon Zafrir, a mental coach at the Ramat Hasharon tennis center, says research shows that a large number of endorphins are released into the body during exercise. "This gives you a good feeling, like the influence of morphine," he says. "People who stick with it constantly become addicted to the feeling. That explains why someone who is addicted to sports feels restless if he misses a training session. The body demands its fix, just like a drug addict going cold turkey." "Taking part in sports is a positive thing that helps with many other fields beyond actual training, but there is a certain limit that one has to be careful not to cross," says Avi Feiruz, a former triathlon athlete turned sports psychologist. Feiruz adds that the problem is that most of those who are addicted, do not realize the damage they are causing themselves and their surroundings. "Being competitive and being achievement-oriented are good qualities, because that is what gets people to move forward," he says, stressing that it becomes problematic when it borders on addiction. "One must remember that in many cases, energetic sports activities are an attempt to compensate for needs or other deprivations." How do you identify a sports addict? "You examine the dependency - am I able to give up a training session and forgive myself for it - which reflects the urgency of use," Feiruz says. "A person who trains three or four times a week is not the same as someone who does two sessions a day, five or six days a week." There are additional components, says Feiruz, such as the attitude toward his body in response to an injury, to exhaustion, or to an illness. Addicts tend to ignore, or to only pay partial attention to signs of physical weakness, in order to continue training as usual. Another component is the athlete's attitude toward his surroundings: Is his family affected by the intensive training, is there a drop in work productivity, does he train for long hours alone? Feiruz says he himself used to train intensively in the past and that he also participated in the Half Ironman triathlon. A few years ago, he says, he began asking himself "the correct questions" about the relationship between dependency and frequency, and then he managed to reach a healthy balance, he says. That doesn't mean that he stopped training. He starts his day by exercising in the morning and from time to time also participates in a triathlon; but, he says, "I train because it does me good; I changed my focus in life and I reached a balance." There are people who claim that this is a positive addiction. Is there such a thing? "That is a defense mechanism," Feiruz claims. "Addiction is something that you do out of physical or emotional drives that cannot be controlled. There is nothing positive about losing control of yourself." Man as a moving machine Rosenstein admits that, if he doesn't train, "it drives me crazy." He adds, however, that most people are addicted today to being idle. "The Homo sapien is a machine that was meant to move," he says. "Prehistoric man was built to run after the animals he hunted and to run quickly, otherwise he would not be able to get his food. These days people don't get off the couch but even so, the fridge is full. So if we are talking about 'addiction,' it is to idleness that is not something that comes naturally to us." Rosenstein adds he has no doubt that phenomena like hyperactivity and attention deficit disorders would be less frequent "if children could move around more rather than sitting on their butts all day." He adds: "We are not supposed to be as inactive as we are today." Bookmark to del.icio.us   Trailblazer Haula Abu-Bakar named first Arab female professor in Israel. Hills of hostility A stranger coming to Hebron Saturday would be confused.

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