Well I solved the 3 mile runs problem. You'll never guess. I'm just not going to do them any more!

I was looking at the training program and I just wasn't getting enough miles. This may be my fault, when I went to sign up for the training group they asked for my resting heart-rate and I guessed 70. Turns out it's actually around 60, so all the times, speeds, heart-rates etc are wrong. Holding that nice little customized booklet, I didn't have the heart to tell Paul.

But the lack of miles has been bothering me, so I finally went back to my first running inspiration of a few years ago, which is "The Non-runners Guide to Running a Marathon" and decided to drop into that program while keeping the long runs with the group. Hence the eight-miler today.

And it was great! Last week while reading a Guardian blog on the London marathon, someone mentioned the Podrunner web site at http://www.djsteveboy.com/podrunner.html, which you should immediately check out if you're a runner. The DJ on the site creates music mixes of a fixed tempo specifically for athletes. I checked it out, liked the idea and decided to give it a whirl.

I have a little 1 gig SanDisk MP3 player which I use occasionally for audio-books. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a pair of ear-buds that will stay in place short of super-gluing them, so that was the first problem to solve. A trip to Sears turned up a pair of Sennheiser 'Runners' headphones, buds that have bits that go over the ears and round the neck, but they were Sennheiser and I happen to think very highly of their products having owned a killer pair of headphones for about ten years. And sure enough they go on, stay on and sound brilliant. I was always blown away by how Sennheiser got bass to sound good in headphones and these days they've actually managed to do a reasonable job with ear-buds as well. Oh, and they're meant to be weatherproof and Amazon.com have them for a reasonable $29 (you know where to send the check Mr. Sennheiser).

Okay, do I now need an iPod? It turns out that the little SanDisk is plenty good enough for running and that 1GB can hold a lot of music, so not for now. I own a set of earphones that cost about 3 times as much as the MP3 player - isn't technology marvellous? And so I set off, with every expectation of having to find some way to stash the earphones half way through the run when I get fed-up with the whole deal. But it was brilliant!

Now you may think that you're going to let your mind float off into bucolic daydreams to the sound of Vaughan Williams while you're running, but if you've had any experience of listening to music while you run, you know it aint going to happen. It turns out techno, house or whatever you want to call it is absolutely, spot-on, what you should be listening to when you run. You get that mantra/audio mandala thing going, your body syncs to the beat and it's a whole new ball-game.

I knew where my 4 mile turnaround marker was so I didn't bother to wear my runners watch, which is a shame because I'm certain the run was a whole lot quicker than I've been doing recently and it would have been interesting to see by how much. Perhaps it was just that I was due a really good run, Saturday wasn't terrible after all. But this felt like a real epithany, I was running way better than I've done for a while.

So it will be interesting to see how it goes. A few more runs like this and I will definitely be sending DJ Steveboy a donation for the fine work he's doing.