07/08/2025
When I run, I do not listen to music. This might seem strange, because I listen to music when I do almost anything else: writing, cooking, cleaning, walking the dog. But I like the spaciousness of my brain when I run, the way my thoughts jostle with the repetitive motion. I might notice a blue jay and remember the feeder outside my childhood home; I might think through a sentence I’ve written and time the stressed syllables to my footfalls. I don’t mean to suggest that my thoughts are always interesting when I run. I’m often thinking of nothing—an emptiness that feels hard to achieve with headphones in. Running without music creates open space, an increasingly rare sensation in a world of screens and digital stimuli and perpetually worsening news. When I see people running with headphones, I’ll admit, I judge them a little: I think, Why not take a break from the music? Can’t you spend thirty minutes in silence with your thoughts?
The music critic Ben Ratliff runs and listens nearly every day, a practice he chronicles in his new book Run The Song: Writing about Running about Listening. When I picked up the book, I was ready to argue with him, to pen a screed demanding his headphones come out. But Ratliff’s goal, it turns out, is not to persuade the reader to listen to music while running. “I don’t think anyone needs to argue for running while listening to music, since so many people already do it,” he writes. “I only want to consider what running and listening have to do with each other.” The project is loose and intuitive: Ratliff preplans neither his runs nor his music.
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Ben Sandman, “Listening Closely: On Ben Ratliff’s ‘Run the Song’”
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Ben Ratliff | Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening | Graywolf Press | March 2025 | 248 Pages
