I Ran (So Far Away)
A brief history of music to my ears
he Sony Sports Walkman was my first running partner. It looked like a cross between a toy and a piece of military-grade equipment. It was cool because it was yellow and it was better than the regular Walkman because it was bigger. I popped in the Flock of Seagulls tape, slipped the cassette player’s chunky clip onto the thick waistband of my soccer shorts and headed out for a jog. It was the early ’80s and running was called jogging.
TThe Walkman’s headphones had a thin metal band that caught in my hair and its little rounded foam ear pads barely grazed my head, emitting more sound into the open air than into my ears. Partway through my jog one day, I heard the familiar sound of the song slowing down – “I ran all niiiiight aaaaand daaaaaay!” – and then screeching to a halt. The tape had tangled. I had to stop and unspool it with my pinky finger before continuing.
My next music player on the run altered my gait. The portable compact disc player forced me to pay the price for its superior audio quality by making me run while holding it like a waiter’s tray and shuff le awkwardly so as not to make the CD skip. It made weird spinning noises like a handsaw. The slightest bounce and it would skip. I ran in constant fear of skipping.
When I st arted training for marathons, I switched to the lightest music player I’ve ever used: an FM radio the size of a pitted date. It had only two dials: one for channel-surfing and another for volume. The earbuds would only stay in if they were secured with a hat, so I wore a running hat even when it was warm. With that radio, I listened to many bad songs and too many mattress and Pizzaville commercials to mention. But the radio’s extremely light weight made up for its faults. Plus, its little metal clip fit perfectly onto my teeny-tiny, late-’90s running shorts.
In the early 2000s, I ran with my first mp3 player. Steve Jobs launched the iPod as “1,000 songs in your pocket,” but I had to settle for exactly nine songs in my pocket. My player could only fit one album on it and I chose Green Day’s American Idiot. Too lazy to switch it up, I ran like an idiot for months of marathon training with that one album playing over and over. I grew to like it. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” took on new meaning during fall marathon training long runs, and “Give Me Novocaine” summed up my feelings toward hard-tempo intervals.
By the time I got a real iPod and then a smartphone with access to thousands of songs, curated playlists and podcasts, I was no longer interested in listening to music as I ran. The technology advanced so quickly and offered so much. I had the world at my eardrums and all I wanted was silence. As I ran through the 2010s, I preferred listening to the sound of my footsteps, the beats of my heart, and the rhythm of my breath. But some days I heard it, from somewhere deep inside my brain, a familiar voice, singing, “Don’t wanna be an American idiot. Don’t want a nation under the new media.” Crazy Legs columnist Michal Kapral has been called the “Michael Jordan of joggling.”