My New and Improved Marathon Playlist

I had a great playlist that I used for my last marathon, that is, until I grew tired of it, memorizing all the songs, knowing what song would come next in line, getting tired of the songs. So I thought I would just rearrange a few songs here and there, add some new songs, and "voila!" I would have a new playlist for my next marathon.

Unfortunately, as I found out when I started to put together my new playlist, it wasn't as easy as it sounded, but, finally, success. My playlist is ready, and as I promised in my previous post, here it is. It includes songs that I like, songs that have a beat that work well with running at a 9:00-10:00 minute mile pace, and it includes enough songs to cover about 5 hours of running time, hopefully more than enough time for me to finish the marathon.

I tested this playlist in bits and pieces during the past two weeks.  I had to change some of the songs around a few times, and I am now confident that what I have here is my new and improved playlist.

Well here it is:

Putting Together a Running Playlist for a Marathon

For the longest time I thought that it was silly to listen to music while running.  First, a lot of the running books I have read talked about how it was dangerous to run while listening to music, something about being distracted and not being able to hear what was going on around you.  Then, there was the whole idea of focusing on your form, on your breathing, and on your pace.  And of course,they reasoned, running with music made it difficult to actually enjoy the run. So I ran without music.

Yes, I actually did run without music. And while running without music, I was enjoying the scenery, saying "hi" to other runners, talking to people that were outside, and listening to the wonderful sounds of traffic nature, but the day I went on my first sixteen-mile run, I realized that I would need music to run or I would drive myself crazy.

That's when I started to research music players.  I spent countless hours trying to figure out what music player I needed, how much storage capacity I would need, and how long the batteries lasted.  In the end, I ended up picking the cheapest player I could get that was small, had a capacity of at least 8 gigabytes, and had a decent rating on the various websites.  After that, I thought I would bring the player home, put some music on it, and take it out for a run.

Little did I know that picking the music player was the easy part.  Next, I had to figure out how to put music on it.  It involved downloading software, formatting the player, figuring out how the software worked, and by trial and error I was able to get the player to start working.  Yes, now I was ready to put music on my player.

After a few more hours of loading my CD collection into my computer and transferring the music to my player, I was ready to listen to my music while running.  But wait, not all the songs I owned were good for running.  I quickly found out that a song wasn't good for running simply because I liked it.  No, it wasn't that easy.  The song needed to have the right beat.

So I started my search for good running music.  I checked various websites and asked other runners what songs they liked to listen to while running.  I learned that everyone had their own ideas about what made good running music.  I also learned a lot about beats per minute (bpm) and how important it was to find songs with the correct bpm for your running pace.

This was a good start. I was able to put together a playlist, and I began to run with music. For the record, while running with music, I was still able to enjoy the scenery, I could still say "hi" to other runners, I could still talk to other people that were running with me or were outside, and I could still hear what was going on around me. But after running to the same playlist for close to a year, memorizing not just the songs but the order they came in, and actually beginning to not like a few of the songs on the playlist, I needed to quickly come up with something different.

Therefore, I put together a new playlist for the half marathon I ran this past weekend.  It worked so well, that I decided to put together a brand new playlist for the marathon next month, but this whole experience has been harder than I imagined.  First of all, it will probably take me about five hours to complete the marathon, which means that I will need at least eighty songs on my playlist.  I need eighty songs that are good for running, that I will enjoy while running, that I like, and that I will not tire of quickly.

Currently, I'm still working on the playlist and have about sixty songs picked out.  Once I finalize the playlist, I will post it here in the blog.