So, last week, I discovered a few things. To start with, I’m doing my running in the morning, before work. That means, out of the house and onto the pavement around 6:15 AM. Well, thanks to Daylight Savings Time (what a worthless institution), that means it’s dark as night when I begin running. My original plan was to use a stopwatch to monitor my run/walk phases, but I discovered quickly that this means having to constantly squint at a stopwatch in the dark, trying to find the light button while you’re huffing and puffing and the like. Very unpleasant and very distracting. I needed a better way.

The obvious solution is to make a running track with audio cues for each phase. As an added bonus, I could mix up the music to have high energy music for the running part, and more mellow sounds for when I’m walking. Pretty cool, right? I have a cheap little Sansa MP3 player that would do the job for the music. So two problems to solve: One, I have funny shaped ear canals thanks to lots of surgeries in the past, and most earbuds fall right out. Two, I had to actually compile and mix the audio track.

Okay, so, the earbuds…I started with one set, and then cannibalized the foam covers from another set, and doubled up the foam. It seemed like it would fit snugly enough. So far, so good.

The next part was the music. I compiled a list of songs I wanted to use, collected them and then fired up audacity and started into importing and editing the music. It was a little tricky, mostly because I’m not very experienced with Audacity, and partly because I had to find the section of each song that I wanted to use and then crossfade between the running and walking tracks at the appropriate time point. Still, I was feeling good, because I’d started early enough in the evening to leave sufficient time to get it done.

Or so I’d thought.

Well, my beloved wifey came to me with a vocal project she was working on. It was really quite a neat project…she’d composed the music herself and now she wanted to record the vocals over the music. Could I help her with that? I asked when she needed it done, and, of course, the answer was NOW. Well, that was that.

When we’d finally finished recording passable takes of all six tracks it was 11:30. I’d planned to get to bed at midnight, and still was barely into my running mix. Hooboy…

To make a long story short, it was 1:30 by the time I had finished all of the audio mixing, overdubbed the vocal cues (run now, walk, get ready…run, walk…) and exported the whole thing as an MP3. And, of course, my body decided not to fall asleep right away when I crawled into bed. Hooray insomnia.

6:15 came way too early, but I was determined to run anyhow. Somehow I got out of bed, into my running clothes and shoes and out of the door. I made the mistake of checking the weather first and nearly called it off when I saw that it was 32 degrees outside. After convincing myself that I wasn’t gonna die out there, I put on another underlayer and decided to go for it. I stuffed the oversized earbuds into my ears and left the warmth of the house to plod up and down our street.

The actual run went fairly well. The earbuds didn’t stay in as well as I would have hoped, which is something that I must remedy. The music and cues really helped, though. Exercise is so much a mental game, and having the right soundtrack really takes the mind away from how hard the body is suffering. I want to thank Rob Zombie, Bill Conti, the White Stripes and Warren Zevon (among others) for getting me through this run.

Week one, day one completed. Quads, please cooperate with me this time. I can’t put this off any longer. Til next time.