I'm not a strong runner. I would really like to be, but if I run for more than 2 minutes I feel (and look) like someone is stabbing me in the side while I'm chased by a bear. At one point, I told myself if I just had music to motivate me, I could get out there and do something great. Needless to say, I still suck at running, but I've gotten pretty good at making running mixes. First, some recommended tools. I used Mix Meister's BPM Analyzer to sort through my iTunes library and set all the beats per minute. Once they're set, you can display and sort by that in your list of music. Another handy tool, if you just want to do it yourself is this fun web site that lets you tap out the BPM yourself and you can enter the value yourself in the Get Info section of each song. There are plenty of other options available on this BPM detection page.

Googling around, I found a lot of sites where folks said they ran at around 180 BPM, sometimes for over an hour. I don't know what these people are made of or if they all have tiny legs but that pace would kill. me. dead. Of course, your mileage may (literally) vary.

In this experimental play list, I tried to keep it to 30 minutes, have one warm up song and one crawl back home cool down song, with the other songs increasing in BPM overall. If you can make it through Fishbone (and it's breakneck 183 BPM) at the end, you're a better athlete than I. My legs hurt just thinking about it.

My First Jogging Experiment

As a note, I made the above mix using OpenTape, the free, open-source tool based off of MuxTape. In addition to this being a jogging experiment, it was a bit of a OpenTape experiment. I call it a success!