Cannabis and Ultrarunning: The Mind-Body Culture Nobody Talks About

People do not run 100 miles to get in shape. That is the first thing to understand about ultrarunning, and it is the thing that explains everything else.

You do not spend thirty hours moving through a mountain range at night because you are chasing a personal record. You do it because somewhere past the marathon mark, running stops being exercise and becomes something closer to a practice. A conversation between the mind and the body. Cannabis and ultrarunning have shared a quiet, unhidden relationship for a long time, and to understand why, you have to look past performance and into the culture itself. It is a culture built on presence, on community, and on what a person does with suffering. Those values are old. They are older than the sport that carries them today.

A Culture That Runs Generations Deep

Long before there was a start line in Leadville or a lottery for Western States, there were the Rarámuri, the Indigenous people of Mexico's Copper Canyons whose name is often translated as "the running people." They have lived in that rugged terrain for more than a thousand years, and running has been woven into their social, spiritual, and ecological life for generations.

Their long-distance tradition is not a solo pursuit of a finish time. In the rarajipari, runners cover enormous distances while kicking a wooden ball, pueblo against pueblo, in a team event that is as much communal ceremony as athletic contest. Running there is embedded in a larger context of community, faith, and connection to the land. It is worth stating plainly, as scholars who study the Rarámuri caution, that they are not mythical "superathletes" untouched by the modern world. They are a living people with a running tradition that deserves respect rather than romantic stereotype.

That tradition touched American ultrarunning earlier than most people know. As far back as 1927, organizers in Texas planned an 82-mile run from San Antonio to Austin featuring Rarámuri runners. Decades later, Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run brought their 1994 appearance at the Leadville 100 to a mass audience and helped ignite the modern trail and barefoot-running movements. Figures like Micah True, known on the trail as Caballo Blanco, became bridges between that ancient culture and a new generation of runners hungry for something the treadmill could not give them.

The throughline across all of it is not speed. It is meaning. Running as ritual, as belonging, as a way of being in the body rather than merely using it.

Why the Trail Is Suddenly Crowded

That older idea of running has found an enormous modern audience. Ultrarunning is not a fringe curiosity anymore. It is one of the fastest-growing corners of endurance sport.

The numbers are striking. Since 2000, the number of ultra events in the United States has grown from 233 to more than 2,000, an increase north of 770 percent. In 2025, Ultrarunning Magazine tracked thousands of ultramarathon events and roughly 150,000 finishers. While participation in 5Ks and marathons has largely plateaued, ultrarunning has kept surging, with its growth rate outpacing the marathon since 2009 and the 5K since 2015. The trend is global: UTMB pointed to Strava data showing trail-run uploads roughly doubling in the first half of 2025 compared with three years earlier, and its own index races surpassing 800,000 starts in six months.

So what are all these people looking for? Not a medal. In an always-on, notification-saturated world, ultrarunning offers something increasingly rare: a long block of time with a single focus, a body that has to be listened to, and an experience that cannot be rushed, optimized, or half-attended. The recent boom is not really a fitness story. It is a story about people reaching for depth, presence, and a reason to feel something real.

Ultrarunning Is a Moving Meditation

Ask veteran ultrarunners what actually happens out there and they rarely talk about pace. They talk about the mind.

Ultrarunning is, at its core, a form of moving meditation. The distances are too long to muscle through on adrenaline, so runners learn to anchor themselves in the present moment, tuning into the breath, the rhythm of the stride, the honest feedback of the body. When the legs are gone and the mind wants to quit, the practiced ultrarunner does not fight harder. They go quieter. They return to their "why," the core reason they started, and let it carry them.

This is where the sport becomes genuinely philosophical. The central skill of ultrarunning is learning what to do with pain, learning to hold discomfort without being ruled by it. Existentialist thinkers framed suffering as an unavoidable part of being human, something we meet through the choices we make. Buddhist philosophy names it dukkha and points toward transcending it through awareness. Ultrarunners stumble into the same territory with their feet. Deep in a hard race there is a kind of hidden door, a transformation that changes not just how you finish but how you carry yourself afterward.

Mind and body stop being two things. That integration is the whole point. And it turns out the human body has a specific system designed to make it possible.

The Endocannabinoid System Is Your Built-In Mind-Body Bridge

Here is the biology that ties the culture to the chemistry. The famous "runner's high" was never really about endorphins. Those molecules are too large to easily cross the blood-brain barrier. The real driver is the endocannabinoid system (ECS), your body's own network of cannabinoid receptors and signaling molecules that runs through the brain, the nervous system, and the immune system alike.

Sustained aerobic effort reliably raises blood levels of anandamide, an endocannabinoid whose name comes from the Sanskrit word for bliss. Anandamide binds the very same receptors that plant cannabinoids do, and researchers connect it to the calm, focused, quietly euphoric state that distance runners describe. The ECS is, quite literally, the system that lets effort feel like joy. It is the physiological bridge between the mind and the body that ultrarunning culture has been describing in spiritual language for generations.

The ECS also governs the exact challenges of the long effort. Anandamide and 2-AG, the body's two primary endocannabinoids, dampen pro-inflammatory signaling and modulate how we perceive pain. CB2 receptors, concentrated in immune tissue, help regulate the inflammation a many-hour effort generates. Cannabinoids influence nausea pathways and help settle the sympathetic "fight or flight" nervous system into a calmer state. Presence, comfort, and calm are not just poetic ideals out there. They are receptor-level events.

Cannabis Was Always Part of the Trail

Given all of that, it should surprise no one that the trail community was honest about cannabis while mainstream sport pretended it did not exist.

Elite trail runner Avery Collins has spoken openly about using THC edibles in training and has held cannabis-company sponsorships. Jenn Shelton, one of the sport's most beloved voices, described cannabis as something that helps runners "manage pain, not puke, and stay calm." Endurance publications have run guides on training with cannabis for years. This was never about getting high on a mountain. It was about the same values the culture already held: staying present, softening the edge of suffering, keeping the stomach settled through the dark hours, and remembering that movement is supposed to feel good.

The honest scientific picture is nuanced, and OFFFIELD believes in giving you the real version. A 2019 survey in PLOS One found that most physically active cannabis users combined it with exercise to increase enjoyment, with pain management the most cited exercise-related reason, and interventional running studies found cannabis increased positive affect while lowering perceived pain versus a no-cannabis control. At the same time, a 2025 dose-ranging randomized controlled trial in Sports Medicine - Open found neither 50mg nor 300mg of CBD meaningfully changed perceived exertion during submaximal running, and systematic reviews agree there is no evidence cannabis is performance-enhancing. It will not make you faster. What the evidence supports is the subjective, mind-body side: enjoyment, calm, comfort, and recovery. For a practice that is mostly mental, that is not a footnote. That is the essence.

Precision Over Guesswork

Here is where the old-school trail approach falls short of its own values. A runner reaching for an unlabeled edible at mile 40 has no real idea what dose they took, when it will land, or what it will do to a stomach already on the edge. Guesswork undercuts the whole point of a practice built on awareness and control.

This is exactly why OFFFIELD exists. Our High Performance Energy Gummies deliver a precise, lab-verified 3mg THC, 10mg CBG, 40mg CBD, and 10mg of natural caffeine from yerba mate. It is a deliberate, low-dose formula built to support focus and a subtle lift, not to get you stoned. You know exactly what you took, so you can stay in relationship with your own body instead of gambling with it. For the recovery side of a hard training block, our Sleep Gummies pair low-dose THC and CBD with CBN, magnesium glycinate, and L-theanine to support the deep sleep where real adaptation happens.

A responsible note on the rules. CBD was removed from the World Anti-Doping Agency prohibited list in 2019 and is permitted for athletes. THC remains prohibited in-competition under WADA, so any competitive athlete subject to testing should account for that. Precision dosing is not only about comfort. It is about knowing exactly what is in your body, which is the most present-minded thing an athlete can do.

Run High, Not Stoned

The ultrarunning community understood something the rest of the world is only now catching up to. The point of cannabinoids, like the point of the long run itself, is not escape. It is presence. It is meeting discomfort with steadiness, staying in your body when everything wants to pull you out of it, and remembering that the reason you laced up was joy.

That is Movement Made Happy. The endocannabinoid system is the bridge between effort and joy that both ancient running cultures and modern trail runners have always sensed. Supporting it thoughtfully, precisely, and without shame is what OFFFIELD is built to do.

Explore the science behind the endocannabinoid system on our Science page, see the precision formula in our High Performance Energy Gummies, and keep reading on the OFFFIELD Journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is ultrarunning growing so fast?
US ultra events have grown more than 770 percent since 2000, and ultrarunning's growth rate has outpaced the marathon since 2009. The draw is less about fitness than meaning: a long, single-focus, present-minded experience that a distracted culture increasingly craves.

Why is ultrarunning considered a mind-body practice?
The distances are too long to power through on adrenaline, so runners rely on present-moment awareness, breath, and stride, much like a moving meditation. The core skill is learning what to do with pain, which is as much a mental and philosophical practice as a physical one.

Does cannabis make you a faster ultrarunner?
No. Systematic reviews find no evidence cannabis is performance-enhancing. The research support is for the subjective mind-body experience: enjoyment, calm, perceived comfort, and recovery, not speed.

Is CBD legal for competitive runners?
CBD was removed from the WADA prohibited list in 2019 and is permitted. THC remains prohibited in-competition, so tested athletes should account for that. This is exactly why lab-verified, precisely dosed products matter.

Related Reading

• Run Clubs and the Endocannabinoid System: The Real Science of the Runner's High
• Anandamide: The Bliss Molecule Behind the Runner's High
• Cannabis and Endurance Cycling: What the Science Says
• Cannabis and Exercise: Enjoyment vs Perceived Effort

Sources / References

1. York R, Gunn L, et al. Cannabis use in active athletes: Behaviors related to subjective effects. PLOS One, 2019. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218998
2. Sahinovic A, Irwin C, et al. The Acute Effects of Cannabidiol on Physiological and Subjective Responses to Endurance Exercise: A Dose-Ranging Randomised Controlled Crossover Trial. Sports Medicine - Open, 2025. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40798-025-00895-w
3. Charytoniuk T, Zywno H, et al. The Endocannabinoid System and Physical Exercise. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2023. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36768332/
4. McCartney D, Benson MJ, et al. Chronic cannabis consumption and physical exercise performance in healthy adults: a systematic review. Journal of Cannabis Research, 2020. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7819470/
5. RunSignup. 2025 Ultramarathon Statistics: Demographics, Growth, and Registration Trends. 2026. https://info.runsignup.com/2026/04/16/2025-ultramarathon-statistics/
6. Blaikie D. The Tarahumara Ultrarunners. Ultrarunning History. https://ultrarunninghistory.com/tarahumara/

Legal disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. OFFFIELD products are hemp-derived and formulated for adults 21 and over. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Cannabinoids can affect individuals differently; consult a qualified healthcare provider before use, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or subject to athletic drug testing. Do not drive or operate machinery after use.