Give us room to dance

When the weather started getting nice this spring, I took to taking hour-long walks at lunchtime. And I stopped getting up at 5:15 to hit the treadmill at the gym. So I pretty much haven't been doing much running at all this summer. Tonight, I took C. to swimming lessons, and decided I'd hop upstairs to run while she swam (there's a bank of treadmills overlooking the pool, so I can check out lessons and get my own exercise at the same time). I didn't know how it would go -- whether I'd conk out after 15 minutes, or what.

J threw some stuff on an mp3 player as I was getting ready to run out the door. "How fast do you want to go?" Uh -- pretty slow, actually. What's just above walking? "OK I'll throw a 148 bpm mix and a coupla 150 bpm mixes on."

I started with the 148 mix. A 4-minute taiko drum segment to start it off. It really hit the spot. Just the thing to run to while feeling big and slow -- the drums start rolling and all of a sudden you feel like you could knock trees over. Reminded me of a song C. and I used to sing along to by Ruth MacKenzie off her Kalevala album. Remembering that song prompted a nice trip over to the Northside website -- I really have to replace the Bukkene Bruse cd that was in my car's cd player when it got swiped....

We'll have to throw some nordic neo-folk stuff onto some of our running mixes and see how they work. Half of the stuff is in weird time signatures -- 5 or 7 beats per measure, or odd bars of a different time signature thrown into something that's straight 4/4. We'd probably be tripping all over the place...