"I discovered that running with an iPod for entertainment turned an attitude of, "oh no, I've gotta go out and run," into, "hey, running further gives me more time to catch up with favorite podcasts"."
-Tim Cooke (McCavity)
The right equipment adds to an addict’s enjoyment as he satiates his craving. A drunk prefers a particular style glass for his scotch on the rocks. Pot-smokers have elaborate bongs to cool their smoke. In the 80’s, cocaine users wore their little spoons on a chain around their necks.
Running addicts are the same way. To feed my running habit, I’ve accumulated all sorts of gadgets intended to help me run better, keep closer track of how much I’m running, and magically cure what ails me. I’d like to think that every item I picked was sensible and a good value, but sometimes a gizmo ends up staring down at me from a shelf, a baleful warning against wishful thinking.
I’m not saying running gear always has to be practical. If it’s a cool toy that’s fun to play with, I’m happy. Running is supposed to be fun.
Sunglasses mix the cool and the practical. A good pair of sunglasses is important for comfort and protection on sunny days, and stylin’ in the right pair makes me look and feel fast, or at least makes it a little more convincing when I tell myself how fast I am. I usually buy cheap sunglasses. They work just as well as the fancy ones and they don’t make me cry when I lose a pair. I did pay a lot for one pair of sunglasses. They’re the ones with the prescription I need to read course maps and fill out race applications now that I’m getting older.
I do a lot of running on city streets where there’s a lot of traffic. For safety’s sake, it’s important to be visible to others at all times, especially in the winter when ice and snow block the sidewalks and narrow the roads. My running clothes and shoes have reflective patches on them, but that’s not enough. When it’s a gloomy, cloudy day, I wear a bright orange reflective vest. At night, I add clip-on lightweight flashing lights. I may not look stylish, with orange mesh layered over my mismatched running clothes, accented with portable disco lights, but I will get the attention of any drivers as they pass by me. Even so, it seems like no matter what I wear, drivers still seek me out. Maybe I’ve crossed a line to where I’m so annoyingly bright that my gear turns drivers into motorized moths mindlessly chasing my blazing image.
On most runs, I need something to drink. I might go 3 or 4 miles without a drink in the summer, and maybe stretch that out as far as 6 miles in cooler weather. But for anything longer, I’m going to want some fluids to keep myself hydrated. I’ve tried fancy drinks laced with special electrolyte mixes and protein, but at the core, I’m lazy so I usually stick to something that I can get anywhere easily and doesn’t need mixing before I can use it. Water is good enough on shorter runs. I use Gatorade on longer runs where the additional carbohydrates and electrolytes are useful.
I have a belt that I use on short runs that holds a basic 20 ounce plastic bottle. For longer runs, I have some backpack-style Camelbaks, rated to hold 50, 70, and 100 ounces. None of them actually hold quite as much fluid as they say they do. And I can never use all of the capacity they do have. When I try to squeeze those last few ounces in, they come right back out as soon as I try to screw the cap onto the bladder.
Even my largest Camelbak doesn’t hold enough to last me through an entire long run in the middle of the summer. If I run out of fluids on a run, I can refill with tap water from a bathroom sink a water fountain, or, if I’m desperate, someone’s outdoor hose faucet. Tap water doesn’t taste great, and sometimes it gives me an upset stomach. I try to refill while I still have a little Gatorade left, to help hide the taste of the tap water.
I prefer to stop at a store and buy a sports drink if I can. My stomach is happier, and I also get the benefit of a short rest while I shop. In the places I run most often, there’s always a store within a mile or so when I need one.
On a hot day, I put in some ice before I go out to keep my fluids cold as long as possible. A cool drink is more refreshing when I’m on a run, and cool fluids are absorbed into my system quicker to help me stay hydrated. Ice cubes are better than nothing, but I found a special tray that makes long, thick tubes of ice. Those ice tubes fit easily through the mouths of my containers, and they last a lot longer than small ice cubes.
In the winter, the problem is keeping my sports drink from freezing. I’ll use Gatorade more often because the minerals in it help keep ice from forming. When it’s really cold, I wear my Camelbak under my outer shell, so my body heat keeps the fluid a little warmer. Everything tastes a little like sweaty runner, but it’s enough to keep ice from forming in the bladder or clogging the drinking tube.
Camelbaks are a pain to keep clean. If I don’t wash them regularly, mildew grows in the nooks and crannies. I keep my Camelbaks in the refrigerator between runs to slow down the growth of the gunk, but eventually they need a thorough cleaning. My pile of gear includes custom brushes for cleaning the bladders and the drinking tube, bleach pills to kill the mildew, and a rack that fits inside the bladders and hold them open so they can dry.
I usually carry other miscellaneous items on a run in addition to my sports drink. I always (unless I forget) have a key to get back in the house. I usually have a pocket to stash the key in, but if I don’t, I tie it on my shoelace. On a longer run, I might need to find storage space for:
I carry a selection of this stuff in my jacket pockets or in a small zippered belt pouch.
Sometimes I need even more stuff than usual, or I’m running to work and I want to carry items that are too big to fit in a pouch or pocket. That’s when I use the 100-ounce Camelbak. I usually don’t need that much to drink, but the bag is a backpack that’s large enough to carry a change of clothes and any other items that I’ll need, like my wallet and my eyeglasses.
I have a waist belt I use for long trail runs that fits somewhere in between my usual water belt and my large Camelbak. It holds two 20-ounce water bottles and has a pouch that’s bigger without being too big, enough for a few additional things I might need for trail running, like a flashlight and batteries, extra blister protection, or snacks.
Every runner has a sports watch. Every year, at least until I break down and start running in my prescription glasses, the size and readability of the display on my watch becomes more important. I can still read the display on mine without my glasses, but I can’t read the labels on the buttons, so I only use a few functions while I’m running. My watch has a stopwatch I use during races and a repeating countdown timer I use to time my stretching routine and to time intervals when I’m training. I can set my watch to repeat intervals that are all the same length, or to repeat sets of unequal intervals when I want to do 5 minutes of running followed by 1 minute of walking. The watch also has a second time zone and an alarm clock that I use once in a while when I’m traveling.
My watch is also the display for a heart rate monitor (HRM). There's a chest strap that transmits a signal to the watch. My heart rate provides an objective measure of my level of effort while I’m training. I can set my watch to beep when my heart rate gets out of the optimal target zone for the type of training I’m doing. There are a number of different methods for estimating those target zones, which implies that using a HRM for training may not be quite as scientific as it seems. Still, a HRM helps keep my effort consistent, especially on hot days when it takes more effort to run at a particular pace than it does on a cooler day.
I used to use a HRM more often, mostly to ensure that I ran my easy runs at an easy level of effort. Once my runs got long enough, it became almost impossible to keep my heart rate below the desired level without walking, especially when I was going uphill. I didn’t have the patience for that, so I put the HRM aside.
Sometimes I wear a GPS watch to measure my runs. I’m on my third different model of GPS. My first one had a cumbersome separate receiver pod that transmitted data to a watch, but now the entire GPS system is housed in the watch. It’s a little clunky on my wrist, but I’ve got my eye on the next generation, which has shrunk to the size of some regular sports watches.
Before I had a GPS, if I wanted to know how far I was running, I had to measure it on a map or drive the route to measure it with the odometer. I usually ran the same routes, adding together shorter loops to make a long run. The GPS gives me the freedom to go out for a ten or twenty mile run without having to plan the route in advance. I can head off in any direction and run wherever I want and still get an accurate measurement of the distance to put in my log. Sometimes I use that freedom to sneak in a few extra miles, and that makes me feel virtuous.
My GPS watch doesn’t do everything I need my watch to do, so sometimes I end up with the regular watch on one wrist and the GPS watch on the other.
My most important piece of running equipment, other than my shoes, is my portable music player. Music is an energizer, a soundtrack for a heroic effort, or an end in itself. I like listening to good music almost as much as I like running. If I combine the two, I get a lot more time to listen to music than I would have otherwise.
When I have the opportunity, I enjoy running and talking with other people. When I’m racing, that takes all my attention. The rest of the time, I run with music.
Music distracts me when I’m tired or bored or in pain. That’s good, as long as I don’t get so anesthetized that I let my form get sloppy or ignore a pain long enough to let it become an injury.
A radio won’t skip while I’m running and I don’t have to load it with what I want to hear. But I’m picky. I can’t tolerate a lot of popular music, and inane commercials, DJs, or talk show hosts drive me crazy. I always bring along something that lets me play my own music.
The first player I ran with was an original Sony Walkman cassette player (remember cassettes?). Cassettes were cheap and easy to use, they didn’t skip, and I could create my own tapes from my collection of vinyl albums. However, the songs on a cassette always played in the same order, cassette tapes regularly got sucked into the works of the player and mangled, and carrying multiple tapes and spare batteries on long runs was inconvenient.
Portable CD players sounded better than cassettes, but they skipped at the tiniest jostle, and this was back when it was inconvenient to burn my own mixes onto CDs. Instead, I replaced my cassette player with a MiniDisc player (remember those?). MiniDiscs were smaller than cassettes and CDs, the player ran longer on one set of batteries, and the discs sounded better than cassettes. I could play the songs on a disc in a random order. The player did skip from time to time, and dealing with multiple disks was still annoying.
Then I got my first MP3 player. It was a 128MB Rio 800. It was small, and I bought the optional snap-on 128MB "backpack" to double the storage so I could load it with 3 or 4 hours' worth of music, enough for all but my longest runs. I loved my Rio, but it had problems. Music files loaded slowly through its USB 1.0 interface, and the Rio froze up when it tried to play certain songs. To reset it, I had to unsnap the backpack to disconnect the battery, and that was hard to do even when my hands weren’t sweaty or covered with gloves.
I wanted more storage so I wouldn’t have to reload after every run so I could play different songs. I tried an Archos Jukebox with a 20GB hard drive, but it was big and ugly, and it jammed the first time I took it on a run. I exchanged it for a boxy little RCA player with a matchbook-sized 1.5GB hard disk. The RCA carried plenty of music and loaded faster via USB2, but the music management software for my computer and the controls on the player were cumbersome.
The cool people were buying iPods. Initially, I resisted getting one. For a time, iPods were a Mac-only product, and I was a Windows guy. Then Windows connection kits appeared, but iPods were big and expensive, and I didn’t trust the hard disk to stand up to the pounding it would take when I went running with it.
I got tired of trying to manage my MP3s with Real Jukebox, Musicmatch, and the other applications that worked with my RCA player (and don’t get me started on Windows Media Player). I found a plug-in for iTunes that let it work with the RCA, so I loaded iTunes, took a look, and liked what I saw.
Then I went into a store and picked up a second generation iPod nano and fell in love. It felt just right in my hand – next to Ruth, the nano might be the sexiest thing I’ve ever run with. It was easy to use and iTunes made it easy to load with whatever I wanted to hear. Once I replaced the 50-cent earbuds that came with the nano with decent headphones, it sounded great. The nano became my constant companion on the road.
Soon after I bought the nano, Apple announced the 2nd generation of their entry-level Shuffle player. When I saw it, I immediately lusted after one. It was tiny, cheap enough, and came with an integrated clip that removed the need to put it in an annoying case before I could run with it. The Shuffle was supposed to be ready in October 2006 but it didn’t show up in Apple stores until November, so the staff in the local Apple store had to get used to me calling to ask whether it had arrived yet.
When the Shuffle was finally available, I went to the store to check it out. It was just as cute as I thought it would be, but since I didn’t really need it, I held off on pulling the trigger. Then Apple came out with colored cases early the following year and my resistance crumbled.
The Shuffle can go anywhere. I can stick it in a pocket or I can clip it to my collar, the shoulder strap of my Camelbak, my hat, or my sweatband. Then I’ll tuck the headphone wires out of the way and head out for my run, unencumbered by straps, cases, or bulky players.
Those iPods met my needs. They didn’t hold all my music, but they were easy to reload, and I still didn’t trust the hard drives in the high-capacity iPods to hold up to accidents or the pounding of running.
There was one thing that was a problem. Sometimes I run intervals to work on my speed or to stretch out my long runs by switching between running and walking. My watch signals the end of an interval by beeping. The problem was that I couldn’t hear the beeps over my music.
I tried removing the watchband from an old watch and wearing the watch near my ear, tucked under my hat or my sweatband. I could hear the beep over my music that way, but it was uncomfortable, the watch often fell out, and I couldn’t see the watch when I wanted to glance at the time.
Ideally, I wanted my iPod to time the intervals and play a signal through the headphones when one ended. The nano (and the other iPods, except for the Shuffle) already had a stopwatch. But it was a crappy stopwatch that only had simple start, stop, and split timing functions. For some reason I had to pause the timer before I could stop it. And the stopwatch wouldn’t let me recall my splits when I’d finished running.
Then Apple came out with the iPod Touch, a version of their popular iPhone without the actual phone. The Touch is programmable, so it runs all sorts of applications in addition to playing music. When I looked in Apple’s App Store, I found someone had written an interval timer that could play its beeps over my music. The timer app was only 99 cents. Unfortunately, the Touch was quite a bit more. But now I have a third iPod.
Runners think nothing of planning out a day-by-day training program geared towards a race a year away or tracking exactly how many miles they’ve run in a pair of shoes. I’m equally obsessed with choosing the right music to bring on my runs. I’ve ripped my favorites from my collection of about 2,000 albums to MP3, and I regularly download new songs from the Internet to add to my virtual pile of bits.
Some people string together playlists to act as the soundtrack to their own personal "Chariots of Fire". I tend to pick a group of songs and let them play in a random order. The surprise helps keep things fresh.
Everybody likes to run to up-tempo, anthemic songs that inspire you to pick up your feet, and the pace. I also like slower, steady songs that lend endurance by getting into a groove that just keeps rolling along, like "The Rail Song" by Adrian Belew or "Marquee Moon" by Television.
There are songs about subjects that remind me of running, like "Running up that Hill" by Kate Bush, "Everybody Hurts" by REM, "Feel the Pain" by Dinosaur Jr., and "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen. A few songs are actually about runners. There’s "The Stars of Track and Field" by Belle and Sebastian, "Like a Rock" by Bob Seger, and, um….
None of the songs I just listed were made after 1998. I’m getting old.
When I’m fully loaded up for a run, with drink carriers, iPods, sunglasses, multiple watches, lights, and everything else, I sometimes look as ridiculous as the White Knight from "Alice in Wonderland". But when I run without all that junk in a race, I feel like I can fly. Sometimes I’ll sign up for a race just to enjoy having someone else there to serve me a drink every mile.
I’ve got an entirely separate pile of running gear that never leaves the house. It’s the stuff I use to prepare for runs, recover from runs, or keep track of what I’ve been doing.
I keep my running log in an Excel spreadsheet on my computer, replacing the paper notebooks and journals I used to use. I note the distance for every run in my log, but only to the nearest mile. I also enter the basic type of run, whether it’s easy, normal, or hard, and I note which shoes I was wearing, so I can tell when they’re due for replacement.
Compared to many runners, I don’t actually track that many things. I skip many common items, like route, weather, time of day, how I felt, and so on, but I’m obsessive about what I do track. Excel adds up the weekly, monthly, yearly, and lifetime totals for me and creates graphs, so I have plenty of ways to look at my progress (or lack thereof).
I only log the time for a run if it’s a race. Otherwise, I’ll always be competing, trying to run faster every time. That’s impossible, and I don’t need any extra ways to lose, or to injure myself.
In 2002, I logged all the money I found while I was running. I always stop to pick up loose change, unless I’m in the middle of a race. When anybody asks, I tell them if I’m in too much of a hurry to stop and pick up money, I’m going too fast. Most of the money is in pennies, but every once in a while I’ll find some silver. The total for the year I kept track worked out to be exactly $4.
Google and the Internet have replaced magazines as the source of answers for any question I might have about running. Notice my use of the plural. For almost any question, I can find multiple, often contradictory answers somewhere on the Internet. That’s part of the fun.
I can search for races and plan running routes wherever I happen to be, shop for gear, and look up information. I also use the computer to keep in touch with my running friends via email, mailing lists, Facebook, and blogs.
Reading is probably my favorite way to entertain myself when I’m not running, so I’ve collected a number of books on running. Some are informative. For example, I found the first "Galloway’s Book on Running" to be useful when I was starting out. Tim Noakes’ "Lore of Running" has almost too much information, perfect for an obsessive runner like me. I have other books that are intended to be entertaining or inspirational, like "The Runner’s Literary Companion" and "Running Through the Wall". Since you’re reading this, you probably have your own collection.
I do some basic strengthening so my body holds up better for running (or biking, kayaking, or skiing). I mostly do sit-ups and other things that don’t require equipment, but I have some weights, an exercise ball, a rubber mat, and a few other odds and ends. I used to have a treadmill, but I never learned to like running without going anywhere, so it ended up as an expensive clothes-drying rack.
Sadly, too often my preparation fails me or I overdo it, and I end up with an injury. When I can’t run, I get a little desperate, so I’ve bought a variety of tools that were supposed to help me keep on the roads or heal quicker so I can get back out:
I’m very susceptible to snake oil cures, so I also have a collection of less useful items in the bottom of my closet. These things may or may not work, but at least they keep me busy when I can’t run.
My final essential piece of equipment is a belt. Not a belt for carrying water on a run, but a regular belt, the kind you use to hold your pants up. Most people use a scale to monitor their weight, but I don't think there's a need to watch my weight that closely. I already have plenty of things to obsess about. Instead, I use the belt. If I have to let the belt out a notch, it's time to start running more or eating less.