Running with an iPod

I don’t normally run with my iPod as I like feeling connected with the landscape and being able to let my mind wander freely. However at the moment I am thinking about next week and worrying about lasting the distance. Perhaps listening to music in the last 6 miles would be a helpful distraction.

Today I experimented to see if that would work - and it was pretty much a failure. I didn’t sense my body properly and in a strange way felt a little off balance. I couldn’t hear the footfall and felt isolated from my surroundings. In addition the cable flapping around and the earbuds slipping were a constant irritation. In other words I just did not enjoy the run very much even though it was a perfectly still day and the temperature was just right.

Ah well another idea bites the dust.

However I really enjoyed the music in the open air, amongst the trees and woodland paths and it was particularly enjoyable when doing my stretches. That might have been a useful discovery because I maintained the stretch for longer and more easily than usual.

PS

When running I put it on shuffle play (not a feature I use that much). During the run 17 tracks were played but a couple of artists had more than one song i.e they were over represented. I remember reading articles about people who used shuffle a lot and were convinced that their iPods had favourites (or there was an Apple conspiracy to favour certain artists). Apple responded at first by saying that the order was totally random, which I’m sure was true because truly random events are likely to have clusters. However they did not hold fast to the purist line and soon altered the program to make it seem more random.

I like this as a small example of how we all like to look for patterns and how difficult it is to identify what is random.