Precursor to a Never-Ending Series: Unnecessarily Long Explanations for Why a Song Is in My Running Playlist

September 9th, 2022

Non-Fiction

Ugh, more running related articles? Yes. Heck yes friendo.

In my normal training runs, I listen to podcasts and music. I generally will spend about 50% of my planned running duration listening to a podcast (No Such Thing as a Fish or Ologies, that's it) and then I'll switch over to music. All my music goes into one playlist, and that playlist gets played on shuffle. No exceptions.

Because of my approach of "let that shit ride on shuffle and live with it," I have a very strict yet remarkably vague criteria for what songs go into my running playlist. I've got songs from my early teenage years that I've been listening to for 20+ years. I've got songs I added last week. I've got emo, rap, hyperpop, acapella, trap, post rock, and whatever genre Miracle Musical counts as. I've got songs that have gotten me through the deepest wells of despair time and time again, and I've got meaningless pop garbage that tells me everything in life is cool and awesome and tonight is all that matters.

If the song works, it works. I can't describe it much further than that.

Currently my playlist is 469 songs long.

Buuuuuutttttt...just because it's hard to describe a general quality that makes a song work, doesn't mean it's hard to explain a specific reason that a song works. That's easy. I know my personal history with each and every song on my list, and what it is about that song that makes it playlist-worthy.

So over the next forever amount of time, I'm going to provide a look into the ever-ongoing creation of a running playlist one song at a time. No song is too big, too popular, or too stupid for me to run to, and that goes doubly so for me providing an overly detailed and thorough explanation of why exactly I like running to it.

There's no schedule or plan here, when these posts come up they will come up. This is not one of those posts, it's a post in anticipation of those posts. It's a pre-post. This is ridiculous and totally unneeded. That's why it's the perfect thing for me to write about.

That's me, kinda. Running with music, maybe.

Also this was a total cop-out way to keep my Friday post streak going, but hey, I'm not perfect. I'm just Mike.

Comments open below, but who cares lol.

Edit: Well, as of 9/16/2022, the series has begun. I will list out the playlist here as the individual articles come into existence.

9/16/2022: Bloc Party - Always New Depths