Philly runners: Ditch beast-mode playlists and try classical music instead

Rounding the turn to the end of my run along the Schuylkill, fatigue was rearing its head when Mozart stepped in.

The Piano Concerto No. 25 in my AirPods had reached that point in the third movement where the music seems to be unraveling with the inevitability of a ball bouncing down a flight of stairs, and the running suddenly got a lot easier.

Music exists for reasons far beyond its use as a tool for navigating real life, of course, but it does have tremendous utilitarian power. It changes the chemistry in your brain and can make the impossible possible. Good running music infuses you with energy, and there are plenty of high-energy running playlists out there. But fast and loud doesn’t capture the full range of what running music can be. For the classical runner, the “Ride of the Valkyries” is just one mood among many.

Nonrunners also know the synergies of joining music and place, and that it can happen unexpectedly anywhere you have your AirPods or the equivalent.

There’s an active colloquy between Gerald Finzi’s Eclogue and Big Trees, the enormous mosaic on both sides of the SEPTA train platform in Jefferson (formerly Market East) Station. The nearly quarter of a million tiles that make up the colorful piece by David Beck and Verlin Miller assemble in your mind’s eye as a breezy, late-summer day beside a river. More significantly, Big Trees radiates a particular feeling, an absolute sense of ease that makes it a perfect, if accidental, companion piece to Finzi’s peaceful, sun-dappled work for piano and string orchestra.

It’s the surprise element that makes chance music-place matches so emotional. I found myself walking through 30th Street Station a couple of months ago as travelers crosshatched and cleared in front of me to the majestic “Rose Adagio” from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty. A more beautifully choreographed minute could not have been planned by Balanchine himself.

Some pieces of music and places have etched a permanent association with each other in a corner of my brain, like the afternoon several years ago when the swells and quiet echoes of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis melded with the tall pines and sharp cliffs of Monhegan, the small island off the coast of Maine.

The landscape along the Schuylkill River Trail where I run might not seem suited for similarly poetic moments. Trains rumble on one side of the river while expressway traffic whooshes by on the other. At the southern end of my route the landscape turns industrial at a Grays Ferry cogeneration power plant. But Rachmaninoff’s “Barcarolle” from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos heard while running along the Schuylkill makes the sun-sparkled waters look like Venice. (Well, a boy can dream).

Runners more serious than me — meaning nearly everyone — have playlists that work for them, and often they’re heart-poundingly epic, ultimate, and beast mode.

But for me, a sense of awe goes a long way. Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music is anything but workout music. Sweet and serene (mostly), it’s almost a rocking lullaby in places. And yet it creates such an incredibly strong sense of a world apart that you focus on it and not your knees and back.

On some mornings, humor pushes me along. The two piano concertos of Godfather composer Nino Rota are stocked with references to Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and others — sometimes so unsubtly you have to laugh.

Aiming for an emotional arrival point is good motivation. Wading through the misty atmosphere of Chausson’s Poème for violin and orchestra has a great payoff about two-thirds of the way in, when an ascending harp figure sweeps orchestral momentum into high gear.

Distraction works wonders: following the superhighway of lines in anything from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, or analyzing in real time the structure of Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue.

And, yes, some music scoops you up and moves you along with pure adrenaline: Martha Argerich in the racing first movement of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, Vladimir Jurowski’s recording of Holst’s The Planets, or the wonderful helium-filled orchestral arrangements of Gershwin tunes on the soundtrack for Manhattan.

One of the greatest states you can reach listening to music while running involves the half-aware delusion that you’re achieving the physical task with as much ease and virtuosity as the musician you’re listening to — that somehow you two have become one.

And some days, there’s this: running in the sunshine with the Philly skyline in sight and Natalie Dessay singing Mozart concert arias in your ear, you are pretty much invincible.