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I'm trying to run a half-marathon in every state before I turn 50.
I'm 41. I have a toddler. I'm 14 states in. So the math is tight but not impossible — assuming I stay healthy, stay sharp, and don't lose the thread on either my training or the rest of my life, which includes a full-time job and a kid who thinks 5:15 AM is a reasonable wake-up time.
I'm not elite. I want to be clear about that. I'm a committed recreational runner who takes her training seriously, runs four days a week, and has strong opinions about hydration vests and port-a-potty placement. I'm the person your average fitness brand is targeting: health-conscious, data-driven, willing to spend on gear that helps me perform and recover better.
And I track everything. Pace, heart rate, cadence, VO2 max estimates, HRV, sleep scores, recovery readiness. My watch tells me when I'm ready to push and when I should pull back. I have more data on my body than my doctor does.
But until recently, I had zero data on the organ that actually decides whether I push or pull back. My brain.
What nobody told me about Tuesdays
A few months ago, I started tracking my cognitive metrics — focus, mental recovery, processing speed — alongside my usual training data. Not in a lab. Just during my normal life, wearing headphones that happen to have EEG sensors built into them.
What I found surprised me.
My sharpest cognitive day of the week? Monday. Consistently. That's two days after my long run on Saturday and one day after my easy recovery run on Sunday. My brain isn't just recovered by Monday — it's thriving. My focus scores are the highest. My mental recovery metrics are the best they'll be all week. I'm faster cognitively, more locked in, and better at the work that requires actual thinking.
My worst day? Tuesday. Right after speed work.
That one stopped me. Tuesday is the day after I do intervals — the hard, anaerobic, everything-hurts kind of running. And every metric I track in my body looks fine by Tuesday. My legs aren't particularly sore. My HRV has bounced back. My watch says I'm ready to go.
But my brain says otherwise. My cognitive speed drops. My mental recovery scores tank. I'm slower to process, harder to focus, and more prone to the kind of foggy decision-making that I used to just chalk up to "a bad day" or "not enough coffee."
It wasn't a bad day. It was a measurable cognitive response to high-intensity training that my body had already recovered from, but my brain hadn't.
And the research actually explains why. A 2024 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports (Liu et al., 2024) found that high-intensity interval training significantly affects information processing, executive function, and memory. A review of acute HIIT effects noted that prolonged high-intensity work can result in overall fatigue and decreased cerebral oxygenation — essentially, your brain is working so hard during intervals (monitoring pace, counting reps, overriding the urge to stop) that it needs real recovery time afterward. Not just body recovery. Brain recovery.
And those are two different timelines. My watch didn't know that. My brain data did.
The thing every runner knows but can't explain
Once I started seeing that pattern, I started thinking about all the other brain things runners experience that we have no data for.
Like the first two miles.
Every runner has a version of this. You lace up, you head out, and for the first mile — maybe two — your brain is actively working against you. This is stupid. My legs feel heavy. I could just go back inside. Why do I do this to myself.
And then... something shifts. The resistance quiets. Your breathing settles. Your body finds a rhythm that your brain stops fighting. On a really good day, it tips into something more — that elusive runner's high that everyone chases and nobody can reliably reproduce.
Here's what's wild: we used to think the runner's high was about endorphins. Decades of popular wisdom built around the idea that your body floods with these feel-good chemicals when you hit your stride. But recent neuroscience has essentially rewritten the story. A systematic review in The Neuroscientist (Siebers et al., 2023) found that the runner's high appears to be driven primarily by endocannabinoids — your body's own version of cannabinoids — not endorphins. Studies have shown that blocking opioid receptors didn't prevent exercise-induced euphoria and anxiety reduction. The endocannabinoid system seems to be the key driver.
And researchers still don't fully understand what triggers that shift, why some runs produce it and others don't, or what the minimum threshold of exercise is to get an endocannabinoid boost. A 2024 study in Sports even found that the endocannabinoid response differs by sex — the increase was higher in women than in men after a 60-minute run (Weiermair et al., 2024).
So that first-two-miles mental battle I fight every single run? That eventual shift into flow? That's a brain event. It's measurable, it's biochemical, and we barely understand it. Everyone wants to hack their way to a faster runner's high — but we can't hack what we can't see. What if, instead of just gutting through those first miles hoping the switch flips, we could learn our own pattern? Understand what conditions make it happen faster, or what days it's just not going to come?
Mile 12 in Rehoboth
Let me tell you about the race where all of this stopped being theoretical.
I was running the Rehoboth Beach Half Marathon. Mile 12. I had a PR in front of me — I could feel it, the math was there, I just needed to hold pace for one more mile.
And I hit a wall. Not a muscle wall. Not a cramp. My brain just... quit. Every part of me that had been doing the quiet mental math of pacing and positive self-talk for the last hour went completely offline. I couldn't talk myself through it. I couldn't find the gear.
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I called my husband. Who was hundreds of miles away. At home. Taking care of our crying child. And I made him coach me through the last mile over the phone like a crisis negotiator talking someone off a ledge.
Josh, if you're reading this — thank you. Again. I know that was a weird phone call.
I got the PR, by the way. But not because I found some secret reservoir of physical fitness. My legs were fine. My cardiovascular system was fine. I had trained for this distance and my body was prepared. I finished because another human being externally supplied the cognitive function that my brain had run out of.
That's what it was. A cognitive failure, not a fitness one.
And the research backs this up. A foundational study in the Journal of Applied Physiology (Marcora et al., 2009) found that mentally fatigued athletes reached exhaustion significantly faster during high-intensity exercise, even though their physiological markers — heart rate, blood lactate, VO2 — were identical to rested conditions. Their bodies were fine. Their brains told them to stop sooner. Other research has found that mentally fatigued endurance athletes perceive exertion as significantly higher than when they're cognitively fresh — same workout, same pace, but it feels harder.
I had no warning that wall was coming. No data, no indicator, nothing on my watch that said hey, your brain is about to check out at mile 12. Imagine if I had.
The pain cave, but make it data
Courtney Dauwalter — arguably the greatest ultrarunner alive — talks about what she calls the "pain cave." When she's 75 miles into a 200-mile race and every cell in her body is begging her to stop, she visualizes entering a cave with a hardhat and a chisel. She chips away at the rock face, turning pain into progress, making the cave bigger with every step. She's described it as a place she's excited to find the entrance to.
I think about this constantly. Courtney has spent years building an elite-level mental framework to push through the limits of her brain during competition. And her core insight — that the body wants to tap out before it's actually reached its limits, that the brain is the real bottleneck — is exactly what the science shows.
But here's my question: what if you didn't have to be Courtney Dauwalter to understand what's happening in your brain during a run?
What if everyday athletes — the ones doing half marathons and 10Ks and Saturday morning long runs with a jogging stroller — could actually see their cognitive fatigue in real time? Not through years of elite-level visualization practice, but through data from headphones they're already wearing?
Imagine knowing before mile 12 that your cognitive reserves are running low. Imagine understanding which training days leave your brain exhausted versus energized — before you schedule the meeting that requires your sharpest thinking. Imagine being able to tell the difference between "I need to push through this" and "my brain is genuinely done and pushing through will cost me more than it gives."
That's not a fantasy. That's a data layer that exists. It's just not in the products runners use yet.
The gap I can't stop thinking about
I can't be the only runner who'd want this.
Every wearable I own measures my body's recovery. None of them measure my brain's. I love my watch and my chest strap and my recovery app — but there's a massive blind spot in how we think about performance and recovery, and it's the same one I keep coming back to: we treat the brain like it's separate from the body, when it's actually the thing running the whole operation.
A 2025 study in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport (Daneshgar-Pironneau et al., 2025) found that endurance athletes are actually more resistant to mental fatigue than non-athletes. Which means this community already intuitively understands that the brain is part of their performance equation. We just don't have a way to measure it.
As someone who runs in headphones for hours at a time — and I know I'm far from alone — the idea that my headphones could tell me something meaningful about my brain while I'm already wearing them feels less like a futuristic concept and more like an obvious next step. The sensor technology is there. The form factor already exists. Someone just needs to connect the dots.
Why this matters beyond my Garmin
I've written before about women's cognitive health — about the research gaps, the longevity tax, the fact that women are at higher risk for cognitive decline and have been historically shut out of the studies that could help prevent it. I'm not going to rehash all of that here.
But I'll say this: I started paying attention to my brain health because I'm a woman in my 40s who watched cognitive decline take people I love. Running is part of my longevity strategy. It's not just about the medal at the finish line or the states I'm crossing off my list. It's about building the kind of cognitive resilience that means I'm still sharp, still present, still me at 60, 70, 80.
And the data is making me a better, smarter runner. Knowing that my brain needs two full days to recover from speed work means I schedule my hardest thinking for Mondays, not Tuesdays. Knowing that my cognitive processing speed correlates with how well I execute my training plan means I take brain recovery as seriously as I take foam rolling.
Okay, more seriously than foam rolling. I'm terrible at foam rolling.
This isn't a gimmick. It's adding one more layer of data to a picture that was incomplete — and for the first time, getting a full view of what training actually costs me and what recovery actually requires.
Fourteen states down. Thirty-six to go. And for the first time, I'm running with my whole picture.
References
- Liu, K., Zhao, W., Li, C., & Tian, Y. (2024). The effects of high-intensity interval training on cognitive performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 32082. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-83802-9
- Siebers, M., Biedermann, S. V., & Fuss, J. (2023). Do endocannabinoids cause the runner’s high? Evidence and open questions. The Neuroscientist, 29(3), 352–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/10738584211069981
- Weiermair, T., Svehlikova, E., Boulgaropoulos, B., Magnes, C., & Eberl, A. (2024). Investigating runner’s high: Changes in mood and endocannabinoid concentrations after a 60 min outdoor run considering sex, running frequency, and age. Sports, 12(9), Article 232. https://doi.org/10.3390/sports12090232
- Marcora, S. M., Staiano, W., & Manning, V. (2009). Mental fatigue impairs physical performance in humans. Journal of Applied Physiology, 106(3), 857–864. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.91324.2008
2 Distraction Stroop Tasks experiment: The Stroop Effect (also known as cognitive interference) is a psychological phenomenon describing the difficulty people have naming a color when it's used to spell the name of a different color. During each trial of this experiment, we flashed the words “Red” or “Yellow” on a screen. Participants were asked to respond to the color of the words and ignore their meaning by pressing four keys on the keyboard –– “D”, “F”, “J”, and “K,” -- which were mapped to “Red,” “Green,” “Blue,” and “Yellow” colors, respectively. Trials in the Stroop task were categorized into congruent, when the text content matched the text color (e.g. Red), and incongruent, when the text content did not match the text color (e.g., Red). The incongruent case was counter-intuitive and more difficult. We expected to see lower accuracy, higher response times, and a drop in Alpha band power in incongruent trials. To mimic the chaotic distraction environment of in-person office life, we added an additional layer of complexity by floating the words on different visual backgrounds (a calm river, a roller coaster, a calm beach, and a busy marketplace). Both the behavioral and neural data we collected showed consistently different results in incongruent tasks, such as longer reaction times and lower Alpha waves, particularly when the words appeared on top of the marketplace background, the most distracting scene.
Interruption by Notification: It’s widely known that push notifications decrease focus level. In our three Interruption by Notification experiments, participants performed the Stroop Tasks, above, with and without push notifications, which consisted of a sound played at random time followed by a prompt to complete an activity. Our behavioral analysis and focus metrics showed that, on average, participants presented slower reaction times and were less accurate during blocks of time with distractions compared to those without them.
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