Music

I go back and forth on my opinion of listening to music when I run by myself. On the "shouldn't" side is safety, living "mindfully", and simulating race conditions. On the "should" side is distraction (which is in direct opposition to living mindfully) and improved mood. 

I've struggled this year to get the first mile of my "home course" under 10 minutes. I live at the bottom of a hill. Garmin does not do this hill justice. It looks a lot steeper when you're standing at the bottom. At some point, I realized that my first mile split was mostly dependent upon how motivated I was to get up this first hill (and when I haven't had coffee, I am very un-motivated). My obsession with a sub-double-digit first mile on this run has grown each time my watch flashes a 10:xx split. It really annoys me for some reason. I've even started my run (but not my watch) further up the driveway (which is a slight downhill to the street) to "gain momentum". This is completely absurd, and I know it, but still...

A few weeks ago, I had to untangle my watch from my headphones, which were attached to my MP3 player. It was completely light out, and there were sidewalks basically the whole route that I was planning on running, so I didn't really need to worry about getting hit by a car. And, although I know that anything can happen where/whenever, my only safety precautions shouldn't be not listening to music (aka if I don't feel safe, maybe I shouldn't be running).

So, I decided to lift my ban on listening to music on training runs. Olympians do it (although I'm not about to start inhaling random gases... how the hell did they settle on Xenon?). Plus, it was only a short run... junk miles... so I wasn't really cheating (awesome justification).

The first song was one that I liked but hadn't heard in a while. Same with the second and the third. About a tenth of a mile before the first mile mark, I looked down at my watch (the route levels off here, so I always use this bit to "speed up" to get my mile split in the 9:xx). My pace read 8:40. Holycrapforrealz? I almost started jumping, and might have, except I distrust my Garmin watch. I figured that when I got back to the house and downloaded the data, it would have showed me "teleporting" or something. Anyways, the rest of the run went well. I was actually in a pretty good mood when I got back... even more so when I hit stop and looked down at my time, which was like a minute-and-a-half faster than usual.

This phenomenon has been repeated more than once now. Ban is officially off. Even for non-junk miles. Although, I don't usually run those by myself. Anyways, I've also been playing around with the idea of finding songs with the right beat so I can hit ~180-190 cadence. I mean, this is basically what we do in spin class. I came across this site, which I immediately liked because I saw songs that I liked on it. Time to make a playlist!