Running Music-less

Due to a string of reasons most of which are due to my scatterbrain, the last two runs I did were done without music. Strangely enough the last two runs were also faster than my previous runs and I didn't get a stitch. Perhaps I could better control the pace when it felt like a stitch was coming on instead of having to pound out the beat of whatever song that was blasting in my ear. On a side note, my mp3 player is full of songs with quick heavy drum beats. Me thinks I overestimated how speedy I was and now half the time I'm trying to keep pace to the songs!

The thing about running song-less is that I have a repeat rift of a song in my head THE WHOLE RUN. Which kind of becomes irritating after a while. Take for example my go-to Beyonce song every time I want to run, all that plays in my head is 'all the single ladies, all the single ladies'...and that's it. That's all I remember of the song, which says a lot for how great my brain is at absorbing lyrics of any kind. So about halfway through my run yesterday I figured I should think up another song and then this christian song popped in, but I only knew '10,000 reasons for my soul to sing'. It was highly frustrating running to a single line in a song rather than a whole song. Maybe that's why I ran faster than usual - I was just sick of my one lined song and wanted to get the run over and done with.

So the conclusion, I might do some short runs music-less in the future. My friend Chris does his runs (long AND short) without music and I thought he was nuts, but I can see a kind of logic to the madness. You do become a bit more in tune (pun intended!) with your body and you're able to react accordingly without having to do some weird run which doesn't sync with the beat of the song - I've tried this, trust me, it is soooo hard. I'm not so sure I could last a longer run without music, but that's a moot point at the moment since I've only been doing 3k runs anyhow!