Why I Still Wear Headphones When I Run (Marathons)
Rodrigo Davies, Product Manager at Strava, recounts his relationship with running and music.
Plenty of people who love running really dislike the sight of other runners wearing headphones. Most large race events discourage headphones. Some see it as unsafe, like on a trail run, or in traffic. Some think it’s antisocial, and breaks the camaraderie of an event. Others think it’s a psychological advantage and performance boost that ‘real’ runners shouldn’t need.
I don’t completely disagree with any of the above, but for me, music has always been a core part of the running experience. Without headphones I probably wouldn’t have gotten into running over the past 3 years. Some of my friends and family are still surprised that I run at all, let alone marathons. Maybe it would make more sense to them if they knew that music helped me get here. So I’m going to try and tell that story.
From Jeff Mills to JFK
Growing up I avoided running because my brother was a fairly accomplished athlete, running in the Welsh cross country team and attending Loughborough University, where he trained with world-class athletes like Paula Radcliffe. Defined in opposition, I was the nerdy younger brother, who was into music and computers.
Through college and my twenties, living in London and Mumbai, I exercised very little besides occasional reluctant stints at the gym. I remained pretty deep into music, though, working for a couple of years as a music journalist and moonlighting as a DJ off and on since college. If I’d had a step counter in those days, I’d bet that the hours I spent on dancefloors would have equated to some serious miles. But the idea of getting up early and running for fun would never have entered my head.
So when I stumbled into running after moving to San Francisco, motivated mostly by helping my wife train for a half marathon, I didn’t think twice before putting on my headphones. I walked everywhere with them anyway, and I was worried I’d get bored without them. But I noticed right away that a run could be an unusually long uninterrupted period of time listening to music, most comparable to going to a nightclub — the type of underground house or techno place my friends and I would go to dance in the mid-2000s, where we’d barely talk for several hours. Like seeing Jeff Mills under a railway arch. Uninterrupted and completely immersive.
It was that immersion, coupled with the ability to track my runs on my phone (thanks Strava), that got me hooked on running pretty fast.
I remember very clearly the first time I experienced a runner’s high accelerating down John F Kennedy Drive in San Francisco listening to a Caribou crescendo. I broke out of the 10 minute jogging pace I’d been maintaining into a 7’30 mile, and made a special connection in my brain between music and running that I feel every time I put the two together.
Every run is a DJ set
Music designed for running isn’t new, of course. I remember hearing LCD Soundsystem’s 45:33, part of a series designed for 45 minute runs. I wasn’t running at the time, but I was interested by the fact that the ‘run’ followed the arc of a typical DJ set: warm up, find your tempo, push it a little, and cool down.
So when I planned my first ever race (the KP SF Half Marathon), I felt sure I needed a track just to get me through it. Since 45:33 wasn’t long enough, I made a playlist of LCD songs to cover the distance. Making the playlist became part of the training, too, as over the course of my training runs, I reordered and optimized the tracklist to get the progression I was looking for. It was like making mixtapes as a teenager all over again.
The race went fine, and the music certainly helped. I still often use Yeah as a finishing song for races — there’s something weirdly motivating about the line “everyone keeps on talking about it, nobody’s getting it done” when you’re running as fast as you can.
From there, I made a fresh playlist for every new kind of running experience. For my first SF Marathon (2017) I made a playlist over a few months of training, and which had beats and drive up front (for the hilly parts up to 20 miles), leaving the vocals and emotion for the last 6 miles when, well, you’re probably a bit emotional. I still follow that pattern for longer playlists. My first competitive 5k, in which I ran a PR at the time, had an angry, grungy playlist, as I was testing out how that angsty drive might affect my running. I found it was fine for very short races, but I found it drew my attention to the suffering too much to be sustainable on longer runs.
The playlist method isn’t perfect, because transitions and progression aren’t in your control. I probably should make a few more of my own mixes. I still love listening to real DJ mixes when running — like Pangaea or Yaeji throwing down on Beats in Space — but for races it’s nice to know what’s coming next and have some control if you need it.
But can you go faster?
In July this year, I got to really put my enjoyment of music and running to the test. I was planning to run the San Francisco Marathon for the second time, and I’d recently joined Strava, a company with its fair share of excellent runners. Right away I became aware of the excitement around the Boston Marathon — and the Boston Qualifying time (BQ).
Unfortunately the qualifying time for my age group (3’10) was 18 minutes faster than my 2017 time and, based on last year’s demand, I’d need to run 3’07 or better to BQ. Even with better training this year, It felt like a gamble. Making the right soundtrack seemed like one of the best tools I had available to help overcome the psychological battle.
My 2017 splits showed that I’d slowed down more than I needed to on both the uphills and the downhills, so I focused on using music to smooth that out. I downloaded the route and made a spreadsheet of split times, elevation gain/loss and cumulative time at each mile based on a steady pace. I imported the playlist I’d been working on and started to align the tracks to the pattern of the race I wanted to run.
There were no lyrics in the first 60–70 minutes, and very few until the later stages, as I find that lyrics elicit greater emotional ups and downs, and I needed smooth transitions to keep on pace. For every uphill section, I picked tracks that had hard driving basslines and beats, and for flatter sections I had relief tracks, some of which had a lot of space in them (like LTJ Bukem), to give me a chance to breathe and focus on rhythm. For the build up to the all important 20–21 mile mark, I had some soaring tracks that you can lose yourself in for a minute, before a hard reset into the very vocal and disco house-oriented last half hour (including that first ever runner’s high track, obviously). And what to cross the line to, or hear right after? Something beautiful and full of soul.
In the end, it worked out pretty well, and hopefully my next marathon playlist will be for Boston 2019 (which, thankfully, has much less elevation).
All the above means I agree with the opponents of headphone runners who think it’s a performance boost. It works for me. I find it especially helpful because I love curating and listening to music, and (maybe because of the former) I’m one of those people whose emotions are greatly impacted by music, which we know influences performance. So if being a DJ is part of performance and training, I’ll happily compete.
