Running: The best cure for a hangover?

I woke up recently with a familiar pounding in the head and dry mouth, relics of a night of some drinking. Now, as veteran of drinking, I like to think that I consume at a moderate pace, but occasionally I will slip and pay for it the next morning.

A cure that I've had for a very long time has been a simple one: go for a run. Yes, Gatorade, bananas, greasy food and the hair of the dog that bit me have been tried in my experienced life. (But, alas, more alcohol and greasy foods have been proven to simply not work. And a patent, I kid you not, a patent has been applied for using asparagus.) But, they've worked to varying degrees, while running has simply always done the job consistently for me.

What is a hangover? Veisalgia (which has an interesting etymology of its own) is the formal medical term to describe the phenomenon that many drinkers experience the next morning, though there is a disagreement of which symptoms should be included in the definition. (Weise, J., Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol 132, Issue 11, p. 897, June 2000). I think most people would agree though that nausea, sensitivity to sound and light, dehydration and just general not-feeling-so-good are good descriptors for the phenomenon.

What do I do? After rousing myself out of bed, I will get into my running gear, adding the sunglasses or cap if the brightness factor forces me to, and simply go. I try to take a little bit of water or gatorade before the run, but too much and I have found that my stomach will not like it and the contents will be on the ground before me. Depending on the severity of it all, I start at a jog of about a minute or two above my marathon pace. I concentrate on my breathing and get a tempo going before I increase my pace to somewhere I finally feel comfortable.

Some days I actually impress myself. I actually will sometimes get a good 5-K time given the circumstances and come at above the median for myself. (I usually end up running 2 to 3 miles for this "recovery run.") And admittedly some other days I quit after the first mile, having achieved my goal of feeling at least human again.

Why does this work? In my google-perusals, I have found scant articles about exercise and hangovers. This one British article talks about it briefly, though it seemed to not work so well for the writer. In my non-scientific analysis, I suspect it has to do with an increased heart-rate, which results in more blood flow, and therefore more oxygen flow to the head. Also, metabolism is increased, which allows the processing in the liver of all those toxins that you ashamedly polluted your body with the night before. And finally, endorphins are released when we exercise and run (the runner's high).

While I concur that the best way to prevent a hangover is to abstain, I think that approach is a bit too much like the moral-right's approach to teen pregnancies; we all who do drink will drink again, and possibly to excess. Let's just remember the run as a good cure.