Stomped the pavements of Woodford, Essex once again. Sometimes I enjoy the training because it is a way of winding down after a hard day’s work at the office and it is a chance for me to forget about all my petty little troubles and just be at one with nature and the world, etcetera, etcetera.
I often run without wearing my hearing aid (okay, it’s a cochlear implant. I won’t insult the intelligence of my readers). Sometimes it’s nice to run in complete silence. It’s nice and tranquil. Silence is golden. As the Tremeloes sang (or rather, the Four Seasons, as they did it first) .Without being disturbed by the sound of traffic, I am able to focus properly on my running. It’s just me and miles and miles of pavement.
On a longer run, though, especially when running for more than an hour, it helps to have something to listen to in order to keep me motivated. To that end, I’ll take my MP3 player out with me and listen to some music while on the run.
My choice of running music tends to be based on the clichés. We’ve got We Are The Champions by Queen, Physical by Olivia Newton-John, Eye Of The Tiger by Survivor, Keep On Running by the Spencer Davis Group, Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, and so on. You get the general idea – songs about exercise, achievement, winning, being victorious, running, and such like. Not particularly original, but effective nevertheless.
Unfortunately, when you’re going for long runs, these songs tend to repeat themselves so I decided to add a few other songs to the mix but ran out of ideas and rather lazily stuck on my MP3 player any song that had the word ‘run’ in the title. So Runaway by Del Shannon is on there. Band On The Run is on there. As are Runaround Sue, Running Bear and Candi Staton’s number two hit from 1976, Young Hearts Run Free.
Sadly that still wasn’t enough to sustain several hours’ worth of running so I extended the playlist to include any reference to walking. So The Police’s 1979 chart-topper Walking On The Moon is on there, along with Walk Of Life, These Boots Are Made For Walkin,’ Walk Like An Egyptian, Walk Like A Man and The Searchers’ When You Walk In The Room. OK, so it’s not the best playlist ever but it seems to do the trick.
I might vary the theme a little bit. If I’m going on a run that involves going up hills, I’ll have something like Ain’t No Mountain High Enough or Top of the World just to motivate me that little bit further. It is amazing how what you hear can really spur you on. I feel that a lot of people take their hearing for granted. That is partly why I'm supporting the Royal National Institute for the Deaf when I do those 26.2 miles. To raise awareness, not just awareness of deafness, but the causes of deafness. More people are experiencing problems with their hearing than ever before. It's not simply because of an aging population but overexposure to loud noises, particularly loud music, and especially from personal stereos and iPods and MP3 players. I feel specifically that younger people are a bit blasé when it comes to that sort of thing, and don't realise the damage that they are doing to their hearing before it's too late. Even though my hearing has never been good, my cochlear implant has allowed me to hear things that I never would have heard before and since then, I have really begun to appreciate music. It's surprising how much music can affect your mind and your mood, and it certainly can help. Most of the time, anyway.
My MP3 player has been on the fritz recently and the battery life doesn’t seem to last quite as long as it once did. Last week I couldn’t even turn it on (that’s “turn on” as in “to cause to begin the operation of,” and not “to incite sexual arousal”) so my mum kindly let me borrow her iPod on the condition that I brought it back with me in one piece. Usually everything I touch doesn’t last long without me breaking it. I don’t like having to fiddle around with the playlist once I’ve started running. I just like to switch it on and start running. As I quite like a lot of the music my mum listens to (I do have a weakness for the classics), I was happy to use her iPod for a couple of hours. Anything to keep me going on an arduous run. It was pretty good, as I remember. Quite a lot of upbeat stuff on there. ABBA are always good to run to. Even Phil Collins got me going, somehow encouraging me to run even faster than I already was. Then suddenly, Paper Roses by Marie Osmond comes on and that just put me right off my stride. Try as I might, I just couldn’t run to that song.
So, I like running in complete silence, but I also like running to music. But which is better?
I guess it doesn’t really matter. When I run the London Marathon, I shan’t be listening to music. However, I won’t go without my cochlear implant. I will let the voices of the spectators spur me on. That should be motivational enough for me. If hearing the words “come on Martin!” ad infinitum doesn’t work, then I don’t know what will.
So I won’t be listening to the sound of music, nor will it be the sound of silence, but the sound of the crowd.
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