In my long years of running long distances, I have made great use of headphones and iPods. For races, I used to program special race-day playlists, which would always begin with Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” (a cliché, I know) and end with OK Go’s “Invincible,” which I loved not only for its anthemic encouragement — “When they finally come to destroy the earth/They’ll have to go through you first”— but also because of Damian Kulash’s sly aside, “When they finally come, what’ll you do to them/Gonna decimate them like you did to me?” Nothing inspires last-minute effort more than bitter irony.

But after a while, I started to leave the headphones behind. First I gave them up for races. It occurred to me that if I was going to train and practice and focus on achieving something, when the time came to actually do it I could at the very least pay attention. A race, most especially and counterintuitively a marathon, requires more focus on the moment than someone who’s never done it might imagine. We scan our bodies for discomfort, we check our pace, we count the miles and measure our remaining strength against the remaining distance.

Then as time went on, I started to give up my headphones for training runs as well. I am typing this, obviously, staring at a screen. The computer is also playing music, which I enjoy as I write. When I finish writing in a little bit, I will go have myself some lunch, and of course I’ll play some music or news, and maybe even look at another screen. After lunch, I’ll go rake some leaves or do other tasks, with headphones firmly in my ears; I’ll enjoy music over dinner, and then finish my day by watching another, larger screen, with some content that, I hope, can command my entire attention.

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If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.