The Last Miles: What Runners Play When It Hurts, and the Songs They Actually Speed Up To

It's fall marathon season! Which means a whole lot of people are about to find out what their legs feel like at mile 22. And everyone seems to have a theory about what should be in your ears when that happens. Save your favorite song for the end? Something angry? Something slow and steady to just hang on? I've always wondered what people actually do, and since TrackTunes sits right in the middle of Strava and Spotify, I figured I'd go look.

TrackTunes lines up each song with the pace it was played at, so across thousands of runs I could finally dig into this. I set out to answer two things: what do runners play at the end of a long run, and which songs do they actually speed up to?

The music doesn't change when it hurts

First I split every marathon into quarters and looked at the tempo of the songs in each one. My guess going in was that the music would get faster toward the end; people reaching for something with a little more oomph as the wheels start coming off.

Nope! The median tempo is 123 BPM in the first quarter, 123 BPM in the middle, and 123 BPM in the final quarter. Energy is flat too. Honestly I kind of love how boring that is. Whatever runners queue up at the start line is pretty much what carries them to the finish.

I think that tells us two things. One, most marathoners aren't fiddling with their phones at mile 20 (good!). And two, the playlist you build the night before the race IS your last-10K playlist, whether you planned it that way or not. So it's worth putting a little thought into what's sitting near the bottom.

What's playing in the last miles

Marathons on their own turned out to be way too varied to rank songs; almost no two marathoners had the same song on at the same point in the race. So for this list I widened it out to every run of 10 miles or more. These are the songs that come up most in the final quarter of those runs, ranked by how many different runners played them there.

1. 1
   No Broke Boys by Disco Lines
   23 runners
2. 2
   The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift
   23 runners
3. 3
   Mr. Brightside by The Killers
   20 runners
4. 4
   The Days (NOTION Remix) by Chrystal
   20 runners
5. 5
   Opalite by Taylor Swift
   19 runners
6. 6
   Pump It by Black Eyed Peas
   18 runners
7. 7
   Break Stuff by Limp Bizkit
   17 runners
8. 8
   Thunderstruck by AC/DC
   16 runners
9. 9
   Good Luck, Babe! by Chappell Roan
   16 runners
10. 10
    Lose Yourself by Eminem
    15 runners

Such a fun mix. A bunch of this year's pop sitting right next to the classics, and Break Stuff, Thunderstruck and Lose Yourself at the end of a long run just feels right.

One thing to keep in mind: the biggest songs show up at the end of runs partly because they show up everywhere. So this list is really what people reach for. Whether any of it actually makes them faster is a different question, and that's what the next list is for.

The songs runners actually speed up to

For this one I used the same approach as Power Songs: compare the pace during a song to the pace for the rest of that same run. If it's a hilly day, the whole run is slow, so the song gets judged against a slow baseline. Terrain, weather and fitness mostly wash out.

Then I did that for every runner. Each runner only counts once per song (so one person with a song on repeat can't carry it), and a song needed at least 15 different runners to make the cut. Here's the top 10, with the median speed-up and the share of runners who were faster during that song:

1. 1
   My Favourite Game by The Cardigans
   +4.5%
   80% faster
2. 2
   Feels Like We Only Go Backwards by Tame Impala
   +4.3%
   80% faster
3. 3
   someone new by Arden Jones
   +4.1%
   73% faster
4. 4
   Funny Thing by Thundercat
   +3.9%
   63% faster
5. 5
   Town Called Malice by The Jam
   +3.9%
   53% faster
6. 6
   Gnarly by KATSEYE
   +3.8%
   67% faster
7. 7
   Legend by The Score
   +3.7%
   75% faster
8. 8
   Just The Way You Are by Milky
   +3.7%
   62% faster
9. 9
   Right Thurr by Chingy
   +3.7%
   78% faster
10. 10
    ALL THE TIME by John Summit
    +3.6%
    58% faster

For context, a 4.5% speed-up is about 25 seconds per mile if you're running 10-minute miles. From one song! That's wild.

And here's the part that surprised me the most: not a single song is on both playlists. Zero! The songs runners play at the end of long runs and the songs they speed up to are totally different lists. Also, Milky's Just The Way You Are showed up in my earlier analysis of the songs that correlate with the fastest pace too, which used a completely different method. So that one might be legit.

Small note on the method: songs that tend to come on right at the end of a run can get a little help from people's finishing kick. Requiring 15+ different runners smooths out a lot of that, but probably not all of it.

So what should you put at the end of your playlist?

If the music doesn't change as the race goes on, then the end of your playlist deserves a little more love than the start. My suggestion? Fill that last half hour with the songs you speed up to. The list above is a good place to start, and your own Power Songs are even better since they come from your own runs.

Both playlists live on the TrackTunes running playlists page, and you can see what everyone's playing right now on the Community Charts.

Good luck out there this season, and happy running! 🎵🏃