I may have got away with this. A return to the rabbit diet, plus three hang-dog days of penance in the gym, silently chanting Hail Marys, seem to have dragged me back on message. This morning I felt normal again; normal enough to know that a run in the big outdoors was on the cards.
It rained all morning, just like it rained all weekend, yet today’s seemed less hostile. I was reminded this week that running is about mental fitness as well as the physical sort. When the old head is right, even the rain has a smiley face.
I finally got out at about 2:30, after a frustrating morning’s work — expending a lot of effort to achieve almost nothing. I looked at something (a database structure if you really must know), and decided it needed changing. So I spent 3 hours changing it, then realised why it had been as it was in the first place. So I sheepishly changed it all back again, arriving back at precisely the spot I’d started from 5 hours earlier. A bit like a marathon, I guess.
I’ve had a relatively ipod-free couple of weeks, so today I opted for a spot of noise. It was a good opportunity to try out a new idea. I’ve learned from listening to the odd Podrunner that my favoured pace is around 155 to 160 beats per minute (bpm). Poking around under the iTunes hood the other day, I noticed that most tracks have the bpm value logged as part of their metadata (as we data bods say). It’s easy enough to display the bpm and then sort all your tracks on that column to create a list ranging from the slowest (in my case, Johnny Cash singing the Beatles’ In My Life)) to the fastest (The Waterboys’ great And a Bang on the Ear). Funnily enough, the memories attached to both these songs mean I can’t listen to either without being plunged into deep melancholy.
In a thin stratum somewhere in between these profoundly emotional extremities come about 80 or so tracks that match the required pace. It’s a fascinating way of throwing together an otherwise arbitrary selection of music — much of which I’d not heard for a while. I just copied the first 30 or so to see how I went. They included:
Bob Dylan croaking out a strangled version of Yesterday
James Taylor – Fire And Rain
Pogues – Fiesta (The Almeria song)
Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem – Kelly The Boy From Killanne
Clannad – Almost Seems (Too Late to Turn)
R.E.M. – E-Bow The Letter
Bob Dylan – Thunder On The Mountain
Kings College Choir – I Saw Three Ships
James Taylor – Country Road
Cliff Richard – The Next Time
The Beatles – Good Day Sunshine
John Martyn – Easy Blues
Joni Mitchell- Both Sides Now
Jimi_Hendrix – Foxy Lady
Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind
Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem – The Whistling Gypsy
Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem – Whack Fol The Diddle
Franz Ferdinand – Michael
Jimi Hendrix – The Wind Cries Mary
Beth Orton – Feel To Believe
Bob Dylan – If you see her, Say Hello
Crosby Stills Nash and Young – Woodstock
Lloyd Cole – Music In A Foreign Language
The Housemartins – Think For A Minute
The Who – You Better, You Bet
Antony and the Johnsons – You Are My Sister
Joan Baez – 68
Joan Baez – Love is Just a Four Letter Word
The Beatles – For No One
King’s College Choir – Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
I managed only the first 8 during my 40 minute run, but it seemed to work, and they kept me tripping along at a steady cadence through the light rain. Dylan’s Thunder On The Mountain was the high spot as far as running effectiveness goes. What a thumping tune that is. Shane MacGowan growling the Almeria song was the smile interlude, and how neat to finish off with the angelic Choir of King’s College singing one of my favourite carols. It’s confession time: I listen to Kings singing Christmas carols regularly through the year, especially when I have work I need to concentrate on. Even to a horny handed old atheist like me, nothing makes the thought of a god more tempting than the sound of a boys choir doing their thing.
You may wonder how a choir singing a Christmas carol can provide any sort of runnable rhythm. I wondered too, but as the song popped up in the slipstream of the rockier items, it was quite possible to pick up on the beat and keep it going. It might have been tougher had it been the first one.
The bpm thing is an idea I’d recommend. A great improvement over the Podrunner music, which can be a bit brutal to an old hippy like me. That said, anyone who has trouble sticking to a steady pace should play around with Podrunner: it works for me.
