A New Track: Running and ambient music

When I started running, I expected it to be a struggle. In fact, I intended it to be. I wasn’t aiming to win marathons, but I wanted to feel its impact: the sweat streaming down skin, the increasingly laboured gasps for breath, the ache of muscles as the distances increased.

I do very little in my life without music on, so to me it seemed totally normal that music would be on while I was running. Naïvely, the thought of running without music appeared to be like a kind of torture – a combination of doing something physically painful and intellectually unstimulating in service of… offsetting ingesting copious amounts of olive oil and butter? When I put my headphones on, I figured it was only natural that the songs match the energy of my activity. High tempos and BPMs were important; they would make sure that even when I wanted to fall over there was momentum to keep me going. Memorable lines and shouted vocals acted as a partner that I could tune in and out. I turned to the melodic hardcore of Turnstile, the bright and gleaming pop of Dua Lipa and Charli xcx, the aggression of rage rap.

But as I grew to actually like running, to become (gulps) ‘someone who runs’, I started to rethink all this. In his book Run the Song, writer and music critic Ben Ratliff writes: “I run with music to help me merge with the external world, but I am sometimes using it to help me define myself against it… to run is to be out in the world, but also to be alone.” Nothing summed this up more than ambient music, a genre that can be both all-encompassing and have a cocooning effect. When I ran, contrary to the popular belief that exercise can have a calming influence, thoughts took the speed as an opportunity to race through my brain. By relying on music that turned my mind off, music that melded with the movement of my body, everything else filled the gap.

Since the pandemic lockdown, ambient music has proliferated in an insidious way, spawning countless anonymous ‘artists’ on streaming services spamming ‘curated’ playlists, and an emphasis on ambient as little more than Chill Beats to Live Your Life To. While there’s always been utility in ambient music as background soundscapes – from Brian Eno’s Music For… series to Hiroshi Yoshimura and Kankyō Ongaku – intentionality and personality are what separates the worthwhile from the exploitative.

Illustration by Andrea Bojkovska.

It was this intentionality that I sought to solve my problems; I wanted to fill my runs with interesting and conceptual sounds, not just Bird Song and Ocean Waves For Running To, freeing me from the shackles of setting a pace or reaching the next kilometre marker on Strava. This experiment transformed sessions, allowing me to burrow deeper into the music and climb away from what I was going to make for dinner, how I was going to do that thing at work, when I was going to text back that friend I’d left hanging.

Listening to Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (otherwise now known as: me at the end of a 10k trying to get up Gardner Street in Partick) helped me pry new meaning out of Liz Harris’s drowned and reverbed words; the silence and space in Ana Roxanne’s Because of a Flower allowed the hustle and bustle of the streets and parks and bridges and riverfronts I ran past to leak in and “help me merge with the external world”; the sustained and patient notes of Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code had borderline psychedelic outcomes when matched with the fatigue of an extended run. Forget runner’s high – come back to me when you’ve ran for an hour to the drone of a pipe organ.

Five ambient songs to run to

Belong – AM/PM
Ambient running music for beginners. If you need BPM to keep you going, this track will mirror the thud of your trainers hitting the tarmac.

Dettinger – Oasis 3
The presence of a beat tricks you into thinking this is familiar workout music at first, but its uncertain rhythms and hazy loops should begin to break through your comfort zone.

Cole Pulice – City in a City
Few things make running better than when the sun's out, there’s a light, cool breeze, and there’s music that could soundtrack the opening credits of an underrated 90s indie gem.

Claire M Singer – Forrig
Music that melodically ascends and feels as if it might go on forever. If only there was such a thing as a never-ending hill sprint.

Earth – Seven Angels
Extra hard mode: 15 minutes of mean drone metal. Good motivation though – it sounds like running away from the devil himself.