This morning, I went for my first run in five days, which is, in my world, an abnormal number of days without running. My last run had been on Thursday last week. My iPod stopped working on that same Thursday. Coincidence? Don’t be silly, of course not.

I had an amazing 10km run by myself after work that day, complete with pukeko sightings and everything. It was sunny and not too warm and I got to try out a new running playlist. By the time I got home, I hit the ‘stop’ button on my iPod and it gave up on life. The screen went completely white so I can’t do anything with it. I tried restoring it as the website suggested but it didn’t work.

Apple has refused to fix it for me, despite admitting that it is a known issue and completely unrelated to the crack on the screen (that the iPod has had since January). Eleven months, a few running events, hundreds of kilometres of training and two half-marathons later, I’m iPod-less.

I’m not sure why it had such an impact on my running schedule but, if I’m running by myself, I really can’t run without music. I almost feel bad about this handicap – it sort of reminds me of the joke about the blonde who died when they took her headphones away (yep, I really did just google that joke so I can link you to it).

Lucky for me, I have a new phone capable of handling all manner of apps and whatever else the cool kids are using these days. Yesterday, I loaded it with a few of my favourite songs to run to and downloaded the MapMyRun app. The phone is considerably bigger than my now broken iPod Nano but has one particularly great advantage over the iPod: it works.

It’s a good short-term solution and it may even be a good long-term one. Now I need to find out how long the battery will last for while simultaneously playing music, tracking my time/distance and stopping to take the occasional photo. If it’s anything less than two hours, I’m going to have to find an alternative because there is no way I’ll be able to run a half-marathon without music.

In the future, I may just have to suck it up and invest in a Garmin Forerunner (what I really mean by this is: hot damn, I want a Forerunner and now I’m just coming up with an excuse to justify it to myself) and a small mp3 player of some sort (maybe an iPod Shuffle, if I’m ever able to bring myself to give money to Apple again).

Tell me, what gadgets do you take out with you while running? Anything you really can’t run without?