Maybe it's right. Maybe it's not. (Lots more ways for it to be wrong than right, so take that for what it's worth.)
The Higgs field simply is. It has certain energy states, it has certain properties. It's everywhere in the universe. If you kick it just right, you give a bit enough energy and a Higgs boson pops out. It's a real particle, it has actual energy. I personally keep wanting the fields to just be mathematical abstractions, things that we need to make the math work. Wanting doesn't make it so. It just gives me a headache.
Anyway, even if you don't produce Higgs boson, the energy in the field is such that there's a chance of a Higgs boson happening, of one just popping into existence for a brief moment. This would create a problem--it would take up more energy than the field has, violate energy conservation, and that's a no-no. So it can't exist and vanishes again. But if there's a chance of its happening, then it happens about that often. These are virtual particles: They exist for an instant and then vanish because they shouldn't really exist. So while they have real effects the particles themselves can't be measured or tested. (Check out the Casimir effect.) Note that this is another headache maker, but since virtual photons are predicted, if they existed they'd be able to be entangled in the right way so you could figure out their properties. In fact, in the last year somebody's managed to get a virtual photon to be "copied" and produce a real photon. Virtual photons exist, virtual other things exist. If a real Higgs particle exists, the virtual ones should exist.
So let's say you're an neutrino and are massless. You enter a Higgs field. I.e., you join the universe. You don't interact with the Higgs field. That means you don't interact with the virtual Higgs bosons. You don't care much about them, moving or standing still. Well, being massless you can't really be standing still--you have to have momentum. So off you go at the speed of light.
If you're an electron and enter the Higgs field you don't have much mass. But you interact with the Higgs field a little bit and so you have some mass. It's easy to move fast. But you can stand still.
You're a proton. You enter the Higgs field and you interact with it. Virtual Higgs bosons are everywhere and force you to convert most of your energy to mass. It doesn't matter if you're moving or standing still, you're interacting with the Higgs field and the Higgs bosons. They pop into existence and you're there to interact with them. If you move, they pop into existence as you go along and you're still there to interact with them.
I have to imagine that if you're moving fast enough you might wind up imparting some energy to the Higgs field. But its the nature of the Higgs particles' interaction with your particles that gives you mass. It's not like you have mass because you're imparting energy to the Higgs particles. You keep your energy. It's just become mass.
This is the opposite of drag in water. In water, you're imparting energy to the water molecules. This means you have less energy and less velocity. (My analogy is with water and wetness: If you're oil, you don't get wet; you don't interact with water; if you're Goretex, under some conditions you get wet, but generally you don't interact much with water and don't get very wet; if you're cotton, well, you get wet. You interact a lot.)
The result is that in a Higgs field you have an invariant mass. If you move faster, your energy contributes to your momentum--but your invariant mass is the same. You move through a sea of virtual Higgs particles, but the amount of time spent interacting with them, the sum of the interaction for any second, is a constant. You can interact with those that pop up in your position over the course of 24 hours or be in orbit around the Earth for 24 hours and interact with the Higgs that pop up in the near vacuum around the Earth.
Now, I suppose there might be some energy lost to the Higgs field as you rush at near-light speeds. I mean, they may be virtual particles, but could a proton actually interact with it by running into it? Well, they're small particles and even a proton is mostly nothing. My guess is that the energy loss, if theoretically possible, would be small. Negligible. Probably not measurable these days. Stay tuned.
(If I'm wrong, somebody, let me know.)
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