turbo-charged run

for most of the summer, i’ve been running with my ipod. i had been having difficulty pushing myself past that mental wall that always pops up about 2.5 miles into a run saying, “i’m tired, i’m bored, i don’t like running, when will this be over?” so i thought i’d distract myself with music. i had a mix of random “songs i like” that i’d put on my shuffle to listen to while traveling, so i just listened to that. there’s probably a few hours of music if i listened to it straight through, but now that i’d used that same mix for a few months, it was getting a little old. i knew which songs really didn’t work for running (way too fast, way too slow) i knew the songs that were irritatingly close to working (if i could just run double time, this would be perfect!), and the few songs that were exactly perfect–my running cadence–and that put extra energy in my stride whenever they popped up in the mix. i thought i’d heard that there were running mixes that you could find online and started to explore my options to see if i could find other songs that were perfect.

after a little searching around on the internet, i found jogtunes which lists some songs according to their bpm (beats per minute). none of my favorite songs were on the list (not surprising) so i wasn’t sure how to find similar songs. until i saw their link to this cool tool which allows you manually calculate the bpm of any song. by using that tool, i discovered that my favorite songs (“mushaboom” by feist and “stop this train” by john mayer) were both right around 180 bpm. so i went back to the jogtunes website and found other songs that were around 180, and also went through my own favorite songs on itunes, tapping out beats on the bpm calculator to find good ones, and started compiling a new itunes running mix. this morning, i used it for the first time and…. wow. i’m exhausted, and yet, by the end of my 4 mile run (while listening to “for the longest time” by billy joel) i didn’t really want to stop–the music was so compelling! i also found it amusing that really hard core (at least for my ears) songs like “going under” by evanescence seemed like a rhythmic relief after more quiet (but apparently quicker paced) songs like “the boxer” by simon and garfunkel (that one, late in my run, totally kicked my butt).

any runners out there have favorite songs to run to? or other exercise + music combos? other music resource recommendations? if you find any other good songs around 170-180 bpm, send them to me!