Should Have Been a Rock Star zen moment 3

Zen Music moment

I had just finished my senior year of college football. For four years my focus had been to get bigger and bigger and now, slowed down by leg and ankle injury and weary of the extra weight, I set out to start a jogging program that would drop weight and put less stress on my weakened ankles.

Since Sterling College set on the edge of town, bordered by wheat fields, there was no lack of flat roads on which to run, but I needed some motivation to make that trek.
Sitting in my dorm room, as usual with the record player going, I stumbled on to the ultimate running beat. It was hidden on Led Zeppelin II in the song “Whole Lotta Love.”
The “Da-Da Da-Da Dump Dump Dump Dump” rhythm of the tune was a perfect pace for the guy wanting to use the music as a focus for averting his discomfort during the jog down a dusty road.

It proved to be the right stimulus. Singing to myself over and over and over, the beat to the song, the words etched in my brain, almost dragging to a stop as the psychedelic interlude arrived in the song, it became a running version of the song in my head longer than Zeppelin probably ever jammed on it live.

But there, with the “Da-Da Da-Da Dump Dump Dump Dump” playing over and over, I managed to jog and keep jogging for the next many years. I spent years and miles ( often logging over 1,500 miles a year) with that tune still buzzing in my head. And at times still, if I happen to be jogging without an IPOD, my mind will still slip back to that habitual beat to get me over the miles of pavement.