COLUMN: Workout Playlists

There's a lot of things to pay attention to when you're exercising regularly for the first time in your life.

Are my weights set correctly? What's my goal? What the heck are "mets" and am I achieving enough of them? How's my pulse looking? Do I need to add more resistance?

And then there's me, whose priority clearly seems to be: What music am I listening to, and have I quite possibly created the greatest workout playlist ever known to man? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes.

Ever since I started going to the gym, I've been fascinated by what everyone listens to. Almost every single person in the place is sporting a pair of earbuds or wireless headphones. What's everyone's go-to exercise soundtrack? I really wanna know, and I kinda wanna judge you for your answers.

I know it's exceptionally poor taste to spy on people, especially when they're exercising. Lord knows I don't anyone to cast a single glance my way while I'm wheezing on a treadmill. But sometimes it's hard not to take a quick peek at your exercise neighbors. Thus far, it's been alarming.

Last week, I was mid-workout when some random girl climbed aboard the treadmill next to mine and proceeded to run at a pace almost twice my speed. Of course, she was barely breaking a sweat while I was an exhausted pile of goo. I wondered what she must be listenening to in order to maintain such an impressive pace. I assumed it was some kind of uplighting, high energy, beat-driven dance frenzy. Then I caught a glimpse of her phone.

As it turned out, she wasn't even listening to music. Her phone was playing an episode of The Kardashians. She wasn't vibing to some motivational club anthem. She was watching vapid millionaires be vapid. I'm pretty sure it's the least motivational thing I could possibly think of to watch. But the more I considered it, it honestly makes perfect sense -- after all, whenever I see one of those Kardashian people pop up on my TV, my initial instinct is to run away at top speed. Why not do it on a treadmill and call it exercise? 

But nothing in my brain can rationalize the dude in front of me the other day. Again, I swear I wasn't trying to be nozy. But the guy was on an exercise bike directly in front of my line of sight, and he had his phone propped up so it was basically the only thing I could focus on when staring straight ahead. And on that phone, he was watching the astonishingly bad 1981 animated movie, "Heavy Metal." Now THAT is an impressively niche choice, my sweaty friend.

"Heavy Metal" is essentially a series of animated vignettes similar to "Fantasia," except instead of classical music, you get Sammy Hagar and Blue Oyster Cult. It's also really quite bad. Maybe it was cutting edge for 1981, but when viewed through 2023 eyeballs, it looks about as cool as an episode of "He-Man." Still, I was able to recognize the movie from a tiny phone screen feet away because I've seen it a kajillion times. No one my age watched "Heavy Metal" because it was good. We watched "Heavy Metal" because it contained a few titillating seconds of scandalous animated nudity, and thus every adolescent boy around that time declared it to be the greatest film of all time. Why one might watch it forty years later in a public YMCA, however, is beyond my understanding. To each their own, I guess.

I'm still experimenting with my exercise music playlist. It's a mix of dance music from the 70s to present, with a focus on newer club tracks that make me feel like a fit and active 20-something and NOT a 50-something chubster grooving out to tunes made by people half my age, played irresponsibly loud to make me feel especially young, dumb, and inspired. It's a work in progress, but I think it's great.

I did, however, inadvertently discover the music NOT to play while one works out. The other day, I thought I could multi-task at the gym. Local promoters Void Church are throwing a super spooky Halloween bash at Wake Brewing in Rock Island on the 31st, and I've been tapped to share DJ duties that night. It'll mostly be an evening of goth, industrial, and darkwave alternative music from yesteryear, so I've been going through tracks looking for some gems to dust off that night. At the gym the other day, I decided to peruse some of Spotify's goth playlists in hopes of finding some good spooky tracks for the party.

I hit shuffle on the playlist and hopped on an elliptical machine. Within seconds, my ears were greeted by a surplus of haunting, ethereal, and entirely inappropriate workout music. I went to skip ahead, but quickly realized my phone was in a cubby-hole just out of reach. I didn't want to stop the elliptical and ruin the good heart rate I'd worked up, so I decided to just power through for a half hour and let the playlist shuffle away. What followed was the weirdest workout of all time. The All-Music Guide refers to the British group Cranes as "chilling," "unsettling," and "nervously threatening," which is exactly the kind of vibe you don't need to conjure up at the YMCA. Yet the Cranes, This Mortal Coil, and Bauhaus soundtracked my evening jog on the elliptical that night.

So if you were wandering around the YMCA last week and saw a sweaty fat lunatic giggling to himself, he was NOT plotting your demise, I promise. He was just REALLY amused to be jogging to a soundtrack of death, despair, and loneliness. Maybe my new calling is to become the Richard Simmons of the counter-culture set -- I can lead classes called "Sweatin' With The Goths" where dour day-walkers in all-black shuffle around morosely to the dulcet angst of the Sisters of Mercy. You've got to admit, it'd be better than watching The Kardashians.