Music helps, too, something I’ve been slow to adopt compared with most other runners. The bulky old players were cumbersome, and I always thought the music would ruin my concentration. Besides, I’d never had music during physical effort before, so I didn’t know any better. Sometime in 2005, though, I finally put on a pair of headphones with a sleek little mp3 player and discovered that, if I like a song, I can listen to it over and over again, sometimes playing it forty or fifty times, falling into a rhythm, waiting with anticipation for a few words or motivating phrases that I especially relate to, applauding when they come. It doesn’t mess with my concentration, and has turned out to distract me in a good way. During the transcon, there were about a dozen tunes I gravitated to, among them “Say Hey” by Michael Franti and Spearhead, “The Underdog” by Spoon, “Sing the Changes” by The Paul McCartney Project/The Fireman, “Real Real Gone” by Van Morrison, “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, and especially “Just Us Kids” by James McMurtry. Hearing the same song over and over operated like white noise, having a calming effect and blotting out everything else, the music fusing with the motion and taking the edge off the physicality of running.
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