Rock & Run

Ok, I run with an iPod. Maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s a puss move to perform the act of running with musical accompaniment Maybe it’s dangerous to jam those earbuds deep into your earholes, crank up the volume, and blot out the din of passing cars, sneaky bicycle bums, and assholes who honk and yell “Run Forest, Run!” as they blow by. Maybe it’s a factor in the softening of American “tough running” or the amount of sub 2:30 Boston finishers compared to 1979. Maybe, but I do it.

I ran in the late 80’s with a Sony walkman cassette player (nearly as large as a Japanese bento box) and clunky headphones with foamy ear muffs and 20’ cords that were looped and bread- tied. I ran with the first micro-teeny am/fm radios that seemed to only receive sports talk radio programs (talk about a bummer to run to). I ran with crappy portable cd players, developing a food servers’ type running gait to keep the thing steady and tracking. And I've run with tinny mp3's that held too few songs and sucked the life out of triple A batteries before you could finish a decent long run.

So I’ve done my penance and I deserve the right to run with a compact, efficient product that straps on my bicep, keeps a charge, and holds a gabillion songs that can be shuffled such that you won’t hear the same song for hundreds of running miles.

Tuesday night as I ran the old 13 mile beach loop without the proper light to see the reading on the Garmin, I thought that you could really do some neat workouts just based off of the average song time of a particular artist/band, set to the correlating distances..

Example:

Distance Artist
¼ mile repeats Circle Jerks, Minutemen, Ramones
½ mile repeats Any AM radio 1960’s pop song (average time 2:45)
mile repeats Jesus and Mary Chain, Joy Division
Fartlek Any Nirvana song
tempo repeats Rush, Yes, ELP

And on that note...30 years ago, I could run a 5k faster than you could finish the album version of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (baby, 17:05). This March when I run my next race, I’ll be lucky to finish faster than it took Kraftwerk to beep the last boop on that classic hit “Autobahn” (22:43).