Years ago my college track coach told us to never run with a walk-man because of its negative effects to your stride pattern (length and frequency). I went out for a run today and listened to the new Metallica album Death Magnetic. After about 25 min I started to notice that my strides were attempting to keep time with the beat, and likely had been for the whole time. Now this would have been just fine had I been listening to something by, say, Christopher Cross. But the beats per minute for Metallica are, as you might have guessed, considerably higher. I was running harder and faster than I had in quite a while. I paused the music for a moment and was a little surprised to hear how fast and loud I was breathing. The music was loud enough to mask me from hearing my own labored breath. Suddenly aware of this I instantly started to feel a bit more tired which was strange since it’s clear that feeling was just created by my mind, not my legs or lungs.
Two take aways from this. It’s interesting to see the relationship between the mind and body under stress. Two, coach was right, but short sighted. If I had trained with Metallica music a bit more I wonder if I would have been faster…
