DIY DJ

Call me DJ Bob, Mixmeister Deluxe.

This interval training series from Podrunner took a sharp jump up between weeks 7 and 8. The intervals had been incrementing by 1 min of additional fast running before recovery, but this time it went up from 9 min fast and 1 slow to 14 fast (and one slow). Plus, they kicked the bpm up a notch as well. Too much, I think. My overall times have slowed instead of getting faster.

I've been wishing I had something in between. Like, run fast for 11:30 and then recover for 1:30, a total of 13 minutes per segment. It's longer than the 9/1 set but shorter than the 14/1 set, and gives a few more seconds for recovery. But out on the website they make it clear... no custom sets. I get that; all their mixes are free anyway.

But I emailed the guy (DJ Beatsmith) who runs the site and asked for advice. He mentioned Garage Band on the Mac or some software known as Audacity, which just happened to come bundled with the USB turntable I got for Christmas, so...

I made my own custom set. :) At BPMs that match my "happy pace", as they call it: 155 on the fast parts instead of the 157 this last week, and 130 on the recovery parts instead of 137. I can power walk to 130, but not to 137. Just downloaded two different 60 minute sets that the website had made (they have at least two for every BPM from 130 to 180!), imported them into Audacity, cut and pasted chunks into a blank audio track, and viola! Groovy mix, man.

With a little additional tweaking, I put in a 3-second transitional set of "bells" between fast and slow segments, mixed it down to a .wav file, uploaded that to iTunes, pushed it to my iPod shuffle, and - Saturday I get to test it out. It's just under 80 minutes of music, and I'm hoping that in two weeks I'll be at the finish line of the 12K before the music stops. Of course, I'd love to finish in under 75, but that's a smidge optimistic.