Boredom and Ipods

There’s a question I get sometimes, even from other runners, that always surprises me, and I never know how to answer it properly. The question is this: don’t you get bored on long runs?

Bored? While running?

My answer is always short and unhelpful: no.

I can sort of see where these question askers are coming from. I mean, running is about as repetitive an activity as you can do, especially if the terrain is flat, uninteresting, and all too familiar. And running is often uncomfortable, even at comfortable paces, so I can see how someone could get tired of the mental strain that continuous pain can cause. But I never get bored on runs – even the solitary three hour ones.

Why is that?

I’ve been thinking about this question for awhile, and it was while I was thinking that a thought struck me (oy) – I spend almost all of my time every day alone with my thoughts. And I like it here in my head. I really do. But perhaps other people don’t like to be alone with their thoughts – and if you’re doing a solitary three-hour run, that’s a lot of time to think.

On the few occasions each week when I venture into the outside world (other than for a run), I often observe people going to extremes to avoid being left alone with their thoughts. For example, when I ride the bus, it’s inevitable that the majority of solitary riders are listening to ipods, reading, texting friends, talking on the phone, or even just taking their electronic devices out of their pockets, checking them, putting them back, taking them out again as if they’d forgotten something, putting them back, and on and on.

Is there something wrong with their thoughts? What’s so boring about just sitting and being?

I guess I’m the weird one: I seek out opportunities to just sit and abide and count my exhales. However, while this kind of behaviour – meditating and contemplating – may be weird, it sure is helpful when it comes to doing long runs.

In fact, to me, long runs are a veritable cornucopia of interesting internal and external stimuli. Each kilometre split brings dramatic tension. Every incline and decline forces me to change my stride. Monitoring my body and its changing conditions provides a never-ending flow of data to interpret. Smiling and waving to other runners evokes pleasant emotions. Dodging loose dogs evokes negative ones. And then there are the thoughts – ah, the thoughts – that rise and fall like a symphony.

Where is there an opportunity to get bored?

Other runners I’ve talked to have various coping strategies. The simplest is to run with a group or a running partner. It’s not a failsafe method, though – people can be just as boring as being alone, sometimes more so. But if there is no company to keep, many runners turn to technology, especially ipods.

Now, the use of ipods in running is a bit of a touchy subject, and there are zealots for and against, but I’m a moderate: I don’t train with music; however, I don’t think it’s somehow “impure” to do so. Whatever gets runners out the door each day is fine by me – whatever motivates them over the long haul is good in my books. Sure, there are safety concerns, but I think they are pretty minor all things considered. And the use of ipods has spawned an entire art: designing playlists strategically to meet the needs of a particular run. If you need the theme from Chariots of Fire to keep your legs moving through the final mile of a 20 miler – have at. Combining the emotion of music with the exertion of running can be a potent high. The more endorphins you can inspire, the better.

My own experience of running with music has been quite limited – and, to be honest, it hasn’t been particularly positive. The only time in the last 5 years that I’ve been driven to use music while running was last winter when I was stuck doing all my runs on a treadmill after breaking some ribs (I slipped and fell on ice while running). Doing 2+ hour runs on a treadmill is murder after weeks and weeks on the infernal machine. The only thing worse is pool running.

Now, I don’t own an ipod – actually, I’ve never downloaded a single song – so the best I could do was to bring a CD player into the workout room of my condo building and listen to full CDs. I admit that this is certainly not a good test of the effect of music on running, but I did learn a couple of things from the experience.

For one, running is all about rhythm – finding the right rhythm for a particular workout given the particular condition of your body in the moment. I hadn’t realized it before, but finding and maintaining and tweaking this rhythm requires constant monitoring, constant awareness of your body, your breathing, and your surroundings. Even on a treadmill, I’m always adjusting my running rhythms. As it turns out, music has its own rhythm, and it messes with and sometimes even dictates the rhythm of your legs. Before I figured this out, the clash of rhythms made running with music quite frustrating at times.

I also found that I redirected my normally internally based motivation outwards and started relying on the music to push me through the difficult parts of runs, whether it was the final kilometre of a hard tempo run or the last few seconds of an incline interval or the final minutes of a long run. And if the music wasn’t suitably inspiring, I found that I didn’t have nearly the same motivational strength to push me through the tough stuff. For me, running was much more difficult with music than without.

In the end, I found it much more agreeable to run two hours on a treadmill with no music and no tv. But that’s just me. Go figure.

In my opinion, the more agitated external stimuli we consume, the more intense and frequent our experience of boredom becomes. Running for three hours doesn't have to be boring at all -- it just requires a reassesment of how dramatic a stimulus needs to be to grab our attention. As corny as it sounds, sometimes the sound of shoes crunching on gravel can be music enough. In fact, sometimes it's the silence that's most interesting of all.