The worst running playlist of all time.
By: Stephanie Boland
Tags: Fitness, Running, Gender

Lost Kit #6.

In defence of my Meat Loaf habit.

It’s an especially bad year to admit it, but I’ve never been hugely invested in Christmas. If you are, please let me say up front that it’s not you — it’s me. Don’t get me wrong: I like the lights and the carols; I even do a pretty good giblet gravy, for a vegetarian. But as with so many things a lot of people have strong feelings about, I struggle with the admin of Christmas — which is to say, the admin of making as many people as possible as happy as possible. Deciding who will go where, when, with who, and bearing which gifts is a task loaded with a burden of outsize significance I’m no good at bearing. Maybe I’m just not good at being the mom.

We’ll be at home for Christmas this year. As a happy couple with a comfortable home, missing a “family Christmas” isn’t the burden for us that it would — or will — be for many others, so we’re staying put in our London flat. (As an aside, I resent any suggestion Conor and I don’t count as family. What else is this?) Presents for the Bolands were boxed up and sent in November, I have cash out to tip the postman and the delivery driver of our Christmas shop, and all that’s left is to sit back and wait for this crap year to come to an end.

Maybe it’s because I’m iffy on Christmas anyway, or maybe it’s because we’re keeping things low-key this year, but either way, I write this listening not to carols or Carey — nor the Bach which used to start pounding out of my old flatmate Gary’s room about this team of year — but Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light.” All I can say is the end of 2020 is a good time to hear someone howl “I can’t take another minute more of you,” where the “you” is of course “your own sodding company.”

I really like Meat Loaf, and I particularly like it for running, which I’m currently hyping myself up to do. My favourite playlist to run to is a 2hr 36 compilation of similarly Dadish hits called “Man rock jog.”

The quality of this playlist so poor that Conor got annoyed when I tried to add a T-Rex song to it recently, huffing that Marc Bolan &c are “too good for ‘Man Rock Jog’.” (For reference, here is a sample: “New York Groove” by Ace Frehley, “Come on Eileen” by Dexys, Neil Diamond’s “Delirious Love”, the Safety Dance, and “Gloria” by Umberto Tozzi.)

When I posted a screengrab of it on Instagram not too long ago, a friend replied simply saying “lmao I forgot about your terrible music taste.”

Fun quiz: a member of which group featured here dry humped my leg backstage

at the Carling academy when I was 16? Answers by reply!

While she’s not wrong, it also seems a little unfair. Just as they say there are no atheists in foxholes, so I don’t believe anyone really has taste when it comes to the world of the workout playlist. In fact, unless you’re a spinning instructor or some sort of pastel-lycra-type influencer, I would contest it’s actively to your detriment to have workout music you’d be proud to share. A running playlist is different to music as art in the same way that a Twix is fundamentally a different food item to a slab of 90% dark. To act like they are interchangeable as “chocolate bars” is to do them both a disservice.

The music I listen to while running isn’t about quality — at least, not musical quality. Maybe that’s why “Man Rock Jog” is full of Americana, and songs that topped the charts long before I was born. The songs I move my body to are a fiction: not only an escape from the niggling pains and tedious responsibilities of adulthood, but the soundtrack of an impossible remembered freedom, beyond school, work and family. While I dodge families carrying Christmas trees home from Greenwich park, my head is full of the Jersey Shore and Italian karaoke bars, of baseball seasons I never saw and heatwave summers I never lived. I’m not running the same suburban loop I always know I can fit in before a work meeting, but bouncing beside my younger self as she storms the stage in an old Brixton theatre. Just for now, it is not her job to make anybody happy.