It's not because I'm a crazy-intense runner or some kinda purist; the amount of gear I have on me each time I go out for a trot (reminder: GPS watch, heart rate monitor, Fuel Belt with gels and varying number of water bottles, water bottle in hand, harmonica) (okay, not the harmonica) should remind you that if anything, I'm a bit of a maximalist when it comes to running gear.
And it's not that I corollarily think that listening to music while you run is a bad idea. It's just that I don't want to be distracted from running, in a couple of ways. In the most practical sense I want to have some situational awareness so I don't accidentally walk into traffic or something. But also in the sense that needing to be distracted while one runs makes it seem a bit like needing to be distracted when you're at the dentist (hmm, I politely decline the offer of headphones when I'm at the dentist's as well), which suggests that running is somehow a painful thing from which we need diversion, rather than an activity we need to engage in entirely.
Don't get me wrong, I love music, and it's not that music isn't kinda playing in my head - you see, when I love, Love, LOVE a song I'll play it over and over until I've memorized each little scratchy, off tune bits (most of my beloved music came before Autotune), to the point that I can satisfactorily reproduce a song in my head; if I'm going to listen to music, I'm gonna listen the hell out of it. So often, when I'm running, I'll have a loop of music playing through my head.
What I've noticed is that the tune isn't necessarily an inspiring one, e.g. the Rocky theme over and over again. The thing that I've observed is that the music I replay in my head is something I can set my cadence (that is, the rhythm and tempo of my footfalls) to. For example, I've had many people tell me that Elliott Smith's music is so somber that it makes them want to stab themselves in the heart twice, but to me songs like Speed Trials and Alameda are perfectly timed for an ideal cadence; I wonder if their tempos are multiples of 90, which apparently is the ideal cadence for runners. It's the same idea behind using the tempo of "Stayin' Alive" to maintain an ideal rate of chest compressions during CPR, the thought that a song can set the rate at which we do something; even though he may not have been a runner, perhaps Elliott Smith was tapping in to our universal need to run when he wrote his music with the speed that he had in mind, and even though I don't listen to music when I'm running, perhaps one of the first things music did to us as humans was set the pace by which we ran.
By the way, one of the songs that also often plays in my head when I run is the Young Chuck Norris.
No Run Today Because I Spent the Entire Day at Work After a Vacation During Which I Took Pictures Like This:
And This:
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