J.M. Thompson had done a lot of running by the time he decided to take on one of the most grueling physical challenges — a 205-mile race around the circumference of Lake Tahoe. The ultramarathon, which Thompson ran in September 2018, covers 40,200 feet of ascent and the same distance back down, run over four straight days and nights.

That’s an awful lot of time to think. Or, as the British-born San Francisco psychologist recounts in his new memoir, “Running Is a Kind of Dreaming,” to let the mind move beyond conscious thought, into a liminal “waking dreamworld,” where all that matters is moving forward.

“When you run,” writes Thompson, “you remember what it feels like to be free.”

The writer spent years running in a different way long before he took to the trails. As a young Oxford graduate, Thompson developed a pattern of hopping from one mad adventure to another, ejecting himself from jobs and relationships, skipping continents and careers. If he stayed in one place too long, he feared the darkness of early trauma and depression would catch up with him.

Eventually, it did just that, as he recounts in vivid prose. The book, published Oct. 5, details the author’s descent into cocaine addiction, a crushing sadness and eventually the conviction that death was preferable to a life spent circling the same futile thoughts.

After a 2005 suicide attempt, Thompson checked himself into Langley Porter, UCSF’s inpatient psychiatric ward. During a break on the hospital’s fenced-in rooftop, a thought bubbled up from deep in his unconscious mind, below the suicidal noise, that running itself could be positive— that physical exertion could maybe even “soothe the intangible wound in my soul.”

“Run before it’s too late … Right now. Run,” he recalls thinking, as he started sprinting between the blacktop’s basketball hoops until he was sweaty and spent. Miraculously, his “thoughts fell silent as my feet pounded the ground.”

Thompson, now a staff psychologist at Oakland’s Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic, sees running—in conjunction with therapy, sobriety and Zen meditation—as a lifeline, an integral part of his psychological healing.

Speaking to The Chronicle by phone from his home in San Francisco’s Mission District ahead of his online Litquake event Thursday, Oct. 14, Thompson described delving into his painful past to write this book. The hope, he says, is to “let others know there’s a way out of the underworld” of mental illness, through both self-examination and the exertion of outdoor exercise: running as “medicine for the mind.”

Q: How did you come up with the book’s structure, alternating between your 200-mile run around Lake Tahoe and memories of the darkest periods in your life?

A:很多伟大的回忆录写difficult experiences, and there are a few good books about running, but my aha moment was wanting to do something along the lines of a book that really influenced me as a teen, (Robert) Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Although it’s set in the world of motorcycles, Pirsig is very clear that it’s not really about that. It’s an odyssey of a man trying to understand the nature of reality and himself.

Similarly, my book’s setting is running, but it’s really a journey into the abyss of memory, depression, drugs and suicide, and hopefully it’s a somewhat cathartic journey for the reader in seeing that there is a path out of that.

Q: Do you feel like running saved your life?

A:Running definitely saved my life. I don’t want to create a false narrative that running is some panacea—I (also) found a good therapist—but there was something about running that was transformative.

Especially in the hell period of still being suicidal and in early recovery from cocaine addiction. I felt terrible all the time. I wasn’t fit. I was actually pretty overweight, but I would get up early and drive down to Ocean Beach in the dark and run. I could see the stars and feel the squelch of the sand under my feet, hear the surf, smell the kelp and the burnt firewood, and run and feel my body and just be with that. Sad memories would bubble up, but also memories prior to being depressed and I’d think, “This is incredible.”

Q: Do you recommend running to your patients to combat depression?

A:I’m absolutely convinced it helps. It wouldn’t have to necessarily be running … but there is evidence that aerobic exercise is amazing medicine in terms of how it performs in rigorous head-to-head experiments against antidepressant medication.

I have a friend who’s a psychiatrist on an inpatient ward, and he would even go so far to say that in such a medical context, to not recommend exercise would be malpractice.

Q: You describe being on especially long runs as feeling like a “waking dreamworld.” Do you see similarities to a psychedelic drug-induced state?

A:I do. I’m trained as not only a trauma therapist but as a neuroscientist, and I’m pretty convinced that with long-distance running, what’s actually happening probably has some crossover with psychedelic psychotherapy — you have this loosening up of the prefrontal cortex, so you enter something more akin to a waking dream state. Because of that, there’s the capacity for the restructuring of traumatic experience. The reality of traumatic memories for the millions of people who endure them is that the nightmare never ends. You have this tape loop playing in your head. As I call it in the book, the time is always then. Those same feelings are always there.

What then becomes required clinically is some way to reorganize experience, so you can integrate that into some sense of, “Well, that was then, and this is now, and now I’m safe.” “That was horrible, but it’s in the past.” I think long-distance running can be incredibly useful in inducing that kind of psychological state that helps.

Q: I’ve never read anything quite like your description of suicidal thoughts, or of checking yourself into the hospital. What was your approach there?

A:I felt like there was something important in being unflinching, in describing the reality of not just suicidality but a suicidal attempt with a high potential lethality. This was not a cry for help. I was quite intent on dying. Yet, my sense was that the whole experience of suicidality, and of inpatient treatment, remains a mystery behind closed doors. It’s sort of terrifying, and rightly so, because these are dark corners of the human experience. But I thought there would be real benefit in being extremely honest and open with readers about it.

Q: Would you ever do something as long as the 200-mile Tahoe run again, or did you get that out of your system?

A:I just did a 28-mile run this morning, and it was great. I’m coming around to the thought now that running is something I’ll always do, but I don’t know if I need to run all day and night and be moaning in the dark with my feet falling off. I think that was about seeking some way to heal. It’s like the famous line from Alan Watts about psychedelics: “Once you get the message, hang up the phone.”

“Running Is a Kind of Dreaming: A Memoir”
By J.M. Thompson
(HarperOne; 320 pages; $27.99)

Litquake presents J.M. Thompson in conversation with Bonnie Tsui:Prerecorded online event. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 14. Free. Registration required.www.litquake.org