Day 4,156—I am glad I found you (running with music)—

 

        Before I would run, I would walk for hours in the creek behind my house. Sometimes I would bring my Walkman and listen to books or music. I loved walking for hours and escaping into a different world while doing it. As I got older and started running to lose weight for wrestling, I almost always listened to music while I was running at night. Most of the time, I would run at the gym on the treadmill and put my portable CD player and then my MiniDisc player in the cup holder of the treadmill. CD players were never great to run with because they would skip, and CDs would skip in general, even if I wasn’t running while listening to them. Minidisc players came out before MP3 players did. They were the best because you could put something like 8 hours of content on them, and they didn’t skip. I wish my MiniDisc player still worked. I saved it for all these years, but when I found it when cleaning out stuff, something spilled on it, and it didn’t work anymore.

        If it were possible to still use something like that, I might; I liked the physical buttons and the content being tangible like a tape. My phone will suddenly tell me it cannot play something, or it will prompt me to sign in. There are so many error messages that could appear and stop me from listening to music, but this wasn’t the case with MiniDisc players.

I know many people take pride in being one with nature and not needing music while running. I say to them, “Good for you.”

        There are only so many hours in the day, and I love listening to music, and I hear it so differently when I am running by myself. I will even start to sing along to the songs and stride to the beat, leaping over obstacles in my path. All while smiling and feeling like, “This song, this artist—gets it! They get me!” This is how I am feeling now, but I couldn’t put it into words, so thank you, song.

It also feels like I am suddenly in a movie. I get a soundtrack to what I am seeing daily, and suddenly everything has meaning and doesn’t feel so ordinary.

Today, I was listening to an album. When I think about the music I was listening to when I was younger, it was stuff like Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, or Bright Eyes. I first started collecting CDs, then MP3s, then records. Now the only physical media I routinely buy are records, but I don’t listen to them enough. They haven’t invented the portable record player yet.