Five reasons to run without Music

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Many runners say that music motivates them to run. They have special playlist of their selected motivating songs. You might have various other reasons to run with music. Here are five reasons, why you should NOT run with music especially when participating in some running events / race.

1. Give the respect to 'excuse me': Recently, I was running at Bangalore Ultra which had very narrow trails at some parts of track. In my second lap, I had a girl running ahead of me and guy walking just ahead of her. When she was very close to guy ahead, she said 'excuse me'. Then almost coming to stop, she repeated second time – 'excuse me'. And third time before she had to move to grasses to cross the guy. Next 'excuse me' was from me and I got no reaction from the guy in his own world. And then I realized that he his ears are plugged and probably getting bombarded with music. I aped the girl and crossed him same way. I doubt if he is even aware that people were asking him for way. When you are going slow, please hear and give respect to those said and unsaid 'excuse me'. Folks will always pass you with a smile with thanks – said or unsaid.
2. Make new friends – You will never find events other than running, where competitors are more helpful to each other. We don't compete, we celebrate our training with running events. And running is more fun if you have more friends at event. So, why not make more friends on track. Now, nobody is going to even try talking to you if you have ear plugged with music. Well, then unplug and make new friends.
3. Hear to motivating stories – Each runner has different story of themselves or somebody else how they did previous run, how they overcome last hurdle they faced, how they lost 30 pounds from their body or about a motivating book they read recently. Well, why listen to music for motivation when you have better things to get motivated.
4. Enjoy the route, track, trail – Lots of run events are conducted in very scenic tracks. And if you are busy with music, you are missing the beautiful tracks. Now, do you want to miss that? Forget the music track, enjoy your running track.
5. Listen to your body – You want to believe it or not but music does stop you from hearing to your body. Without music you will be in better control of your rythm, breathing and foot steps. You will better know when you must speed up or slow down and not just speed up based on music tempo.

Many running events actually ban use of music players but not all. I believe, we in 'our' own interest should not be listening to music while running. Well, you chose to run an event because you want to enjoy the run. Then, why dilute the enjoyment with music which you could hear at your home too.  Say, no to your iPod or any other music player. Enjoy the Run.

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Runkeeper to Dailymile

I started running in January this year. As, I have been always fond of numbers, I wanted to keep track of all my runs. That's when I chose runkeeper for same. They had a no nonsense GPS based iphone application which I could use to track my run. It could automatically upload my runs to their website runkeeper.com. Runkeeper website also gives some very nice charts and reports which made running more interesting to me.

Then in July, convinced by a friend, I started dual entry of my runs by entering my activities in dailymile.com along with runkeeper.com. They didn't have a GPS based iphone app. They didn't have charting as good as runkeeper but where they scored over dailymile.com was socialIf you find any problem, please let me know. I will glad to help.  Please feel free to mail me at tachniki@gmail.com networking. And that matters a lot in running. We run more when we are in group. We run faster when are in group. Yes, motivating each other is best part of any running community. And dailymile.com enables that through their social networking.

Lately, it was getting difficult for me to use runkeeper application on iphone as iphone battery didn't last more than two hours with GPS enabled. Also, Iphone GPS may be good for basic use but it was not accurate enough. I could often see corners getting cut. Iphone GPS is quite unreliable at times. And lately have been seeing runkeeper crashing regularly. Thats when i decided to invest in Garmin forerunner 305. Although runkeeper and dailymile both had interface to upload activities from Garmin forerunner, I didn't want to continue to making dual entry. I still liked dailymile.com but had no real motivation left for using runkeeper.com.

So, finally decided to use dailymile.com, I exported all my data from runkeeper.com to csv file and then imported to dailymile.com. Thanks to dailymile.com for providing APIs to do this easily. Please read here to find more on how to do this.