It suddenly dawned on me earlier this week that I couldn’t remember the last time I went on a run without my iPod glued to my ear.
It has become my little silver comfort blanket and I began to wonder just how I would cope should we be separated for any extended period.
As a result of this particular musing, I bravely decided to conduct a pseudo-scientific experiment in order to ascertain just how much of an emotional crutch my iPod has become. Twenty five minutes and just over two-and-a-half miles later and I felt both more tired and more naked than I could ever have expected.
Without realising it, listening to music has become an integral part of my running experience and the absence of a beat to accompany my exercise made the run feel both harder and longer. It is amazing just what a distraction it can be and also what an influence music can be on your mood while you run.
Now I feel that we now know each other well enough that I should reveal to you a particularly embarrassing secret: I have never actually owned an iPod of my own. Shocking, I know. My iTunes library has been accumulating dust for some time; a smattering of old Oasis albums that I added in 2006 all I have to show for my online music collection.
I have had two iPods over the past few years, they just haven’t been mine. The last music receptacle I actually owned was a Discman, bought as a Christmas present in 2001. I acquired the first iPod in 2007, when a friend of a friend got himself a new model – fortunately he was also an Oasis fan, but his penchant for Ska and heavy metal meant I found myself skipping songs with reasonable regularity.
My current model was donated to me by my lovely girlfriend Anna, after she upgraded last year. Though we share a fairly eclectic music taste, she generally prefers R ‘n’ B and with a selection of Britney Spears and Jason Mraz songs also on tap, my index finger has continued to enjoy some fairly frequent skipping action.
However, I have been pleasantly surprised by the impact some of her music has had on my ability to run faster and further. I say surprised becomes some songs have a rather odd ability to motivate me. Last week I managed to run eight miles twice and the standout track on both occasions was, rather coincidentally, Eminem’s song from the film Eight Mile – ‘Lose Yourself’.
It begins: "If you had one shot and one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?" Now, it’s hardly rhetoric of Martin Luther King proportions but they are some fairy inspirational words from Marshall Mathers.
Kanye West’s ‘Stonger’ - "That that don’t kill me can make me stronger" – and "Don’t Stop Believing" by Journey (okay, it’s the Glee version) also serve to spur me on with their lyrics about self-improvement, while the liked of Usher’s "Yeah" and Mumford and Sons’ ‘Little Lion Man’ have a beat that I can feel picking up the pace of my feet with every stride.
I powered through a big mental barrier two days ago by running 12.2 miles - feeling afterwards, in the words of Richard Keys, that I had ‘smashed it’ – and amazingly I don’t think I could have done it without the help of the likes of Flo Rida, Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris – artists whose musical merits I may have previously questioned. Thank you all kindly.
