Running Rage Is Now A Thing

Amygdala is rising, even in pastimes:

Most of the time, Chris Coon is a mild-mannered, low-key pastor at Urban Village Church in Chicago.

But when the collar comes off and the running shorts—and especially a race bib—go on, the 49-year-old turns into a different person. An angry one.

The things that stoke his ire? Poor race organization. Course volunteers who don’t direct runners at turns. And cars, especially those that don’t yield the right of way or even acknowledge his presence in an intersection.

Not only does anger bubble up more frequently when he’s running, he says, he’s also more likely to act on it. “I’ve flipped the bird at many a driver over the years,” he says. “And if they flip me off then I’ll usually yell at them, ‘F you,’ or something like that.”

His reaction might shock any of his congregants within earshot—but it doesn’t surprise other runners or sports psychologists.

During training runs or competitions, or even during related activities like race registration or packet pick-up, many athletes and observers report a fast-rising fury out of proportion to any perceived slight. (For instance, a race shirt in the wrong size is one of the most common reasons participants yell at Kimberely Stedman, founder and race director of the F3 Half Marathon in Chicago.)

And—sometimes to their own surprise—they find themselves lashing out more than they would in any other situation. In effect, it’s a pedestrian version of the raised tempers that occur behind the wheel. Hence the term run rage.

I know what we have become accustomed to is unnatural, but I don’t really know what “natural” is. There were times when if you said something and someone took offense at it, you would get hit across the face with white gloves, and the next morning the two of you would face off with guns and at least one of you would die. In contrast, the much more common, “Lets take it out to the parking lot,” seems positively quaint, though even that is considered faux pas today. Now feminists have grown so accustomed to the lack of conflict they think nothing of mouthing off to random thugs, though even that will change as the K kicks in.

Are humans naturally confrontational, or is conflict aversion the norm in psychologies? Is this an active response to the pain of shortage, or just a withdrawal from the phenomenon of exponentially increasing pleasure produced by the explosion of new technologies?

Regardless, it’s another area where psychologists, and the people in the environment are starting to look around, scratch their heads, and think to themselves that something is different. Brains are detecting something is changing and amygdalae are coming back online. And as they do, they trigger other amygdalae like individual neutrons triggering two or three neutrons to be released from another atom in a nuclear bomb. Soon we will be awash in triggered amygdalae, the K-shift will have reached critical mass, and the real fun can begin.

Expect to see that Conservative Policy Mood graph just keep on climbing, even without the Apocalypse. And once the Apocalypse hits, just watch what happens to the ideological balance then. There will be articles on crocheting rage, and scrapbooking violence, to say nothing of what will happen when that mood meets r-selected migrants, intrusive government, and political corruption.

Best of all, President Donald Trump Jr., followed by President Eric Trump will be an inevitability, probably seeing their campaigns and Presidencies supported by an unending stream of insightful tweets from dear old Dad.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because amygdalae need exercise too