Music and Motivation

I was running the Manhattan Half Marathon on Sunday and as usual, at some point my mind started turning to what I would put it in the race report. Then, a sad fact occurred to me: I had not put up a single post in the month of January! This is a first in "Running Rocks" history! Well, it's not too late, so here we are in the last week of January with a post. My work life and personal life is undergoing some transition at the moment, which has thrown me off on my Lady Southpaw stuff. It's upsetting to me because I wish Lady Southpaw Music was my work life, but unfortunately things are not so simple at this stage.

ANYWAY, I'll probably put together my race report this weekend. However, I wanted to get a quick post up this morning before January has completely slipped through my fingers.

The people at AudioFuel, a running music project in London, have alerted me to a very cool program they are sponsoring. AudioFuel has teamed up with the Virgin London Marathon to bring us the website musicandmotivation.com. On the website you can get athlete's running playlists, free AudioFuel tracks, an interesting pdf on running psychology (which includes the benefits of using music) and the Monthly Motivation newsletter. It's free, I signed up and downloaded it all and they haven't been spamming me, so it's all good.

The main thing I want to alert you to is their call for running music. Go to this link to nominate good running songs:
http://www.musicandmotivation.com/motivating_run/top/10.html

Every month until the London marathon they are going to publish an official training iMix with people's picks for their favorite running music. I just looked and the Lady Southpaw track "Engineering Masterpiece" is already in the running for January! I encourage you to go in there and add your vote. Of course you can also add whatever else you want after that. As far as I can tell you can write in whatever you want. Although, in order to be published in an iMix, it probably has to be on iTunes already (which, luckily, "Engineering Masterpiece" is published on iTunes!)

Thanks! Keep running and rocking in 2010 everybody!