When it comes to exercise I’ve always been a team sports guy. Hoops, baseball, soccer – if there’s a ball to hit, throw, kick, dribble or shoot I could go all freakin’ day in just about any conditions you can imagine. But running for the sake of running? Hate it. Weights? I do it because I need to, but I don’t enjoy it, even if I do like the results.

This is just my psychology. So the music I work out to (these days I ride my bike more than anything) has to take me somewhere else, somewhere away from the boredom and pain that accompanies exercising alone. It needs to drive a tempo that pushes me physically and it needs to provide a psychic space I can retreat into, because when I’m working out I’m thinking about everything except working out. I may be mentally engaged in a work project, or laying out a blog entry in my head, or letting my mind wander untethered around an interesting idea for a poem.

No genre of music does all this quite like Trance, and I have a playlist on my iPod with lots of different dance floor sets from the likes of Paul Oakenfold, Tiesto, Sasha, Digweed, BT, Apotheosis and more. I could have chosen from a long list of tunes today and it wouldn’t have made much difference, but what the heck, let’s go with an old favorite – Oakenfold’s remix of “Silence” by Delerium and Sarah McLachlan.

Get your sweat on, yo?