One of the things I've been doing - and really enjoying - is to listen to NPR shows on my long runs.
NPR publishes most of their shows online as "podcasts", which is just a fancy way of saying you can go to their website and pick up a recording of a show. It's like On Demand for radio, but on the Internet. It's just incredible stuff for over-intellectualizing rationalists like me. And it's the closest thing to unbiased news that I know of.
I regularly find myself sitting in my car for several minutes in the garage because I can't pull myself away from an NPR show - usually one on the most random thing imaginable. For some reason their stories are incredibly engaging, even when focused on a esoteric or sometimes mundane topic.
About a month ago I discovered that I could leverage this to help me in my training. I almost always run faster than I should run. And I don't usually listen to music when I train. Part of it is based on wanting to be a bit more in touch with how I'm running (specifically how loudly I'm running), part of it is just not having one more thing to futz with (I'm finding myself trend heavily towards simplicity in my training lately), and part of it is because music either irritates me or makes me run too fast/hard.
The exception has been my long runs. On my really long runs (2+ hours), I started listening to NPR in the mornings (my MP3 player has a tuner in it), but that didn't work that great either. If you're running for 2-2.5 hours, broadcast gets irritating due to the 30 minute news breaks that say the same thing. I don't really care about traffic when I run, and the weather report isn't terribly useful either. Cold? Heavy rain? Really...you don't say?
But the meat of the shows is what really grabs me. I get lost in the broadcasts in a way that never really happens with music. It's hard to be more than passively involved or "monitoring" music. Especially if you've heard it before. A good story, however, about something geeky like EU vs US environmental policy or emerging economies in SE Asia, somehow draws you in on NPR. But the show I really love is Word For Word, a weekly series which is just a recording of a given speaker at some summit. This is an incredible way to learn a LOT with very little time/effort. Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum, there is a lot of great content. Al Gore is up there. Ken Burns is there too. Sam Harris' talk is fantastic and very thought-provoking. On the other end of the spectrum, Rove is on my MP3 player for a future run, I'm even trying to talk myself into Lynn Cheney (we'll see). For just an hour, you really can pick up a lot of information and context.
I run so smooth and quiet to this stuff. I don't worry about my pace so much (which is good), and the time flies by, and it gives me something to mull over for a few days.
Yesterday on my run I listened to a talk by Bill Clinton from last July. So much has been said about Clinton and his presidency - much of which I have trouble squaring with the facts about the economy and America's standing in the world during that time (especially compared to now). But his take on the world is fascinating, and he frames everything so clearly as being important for a net positive. He even admits a mistake or two which is darn-near shocking these days. Who does that?
I've never really given Podcasting a look until recently, but now that I'm looking at doing a marathon in January (with a LOT of running between now and then), I'd like to get to a place where my player is ready-stocked with this stuff all the time. I'm also trying to figure out how else to leverage this, and some language-learning stuff came to mind. I wonder if people in the 'hood would start to think I'm crazy if I ran around muttering gibberish (I'm not good at languages, but I sure like to try) all the time.
Coincidentally, I just noticed a similar post from Treadwell.