Soundtrack of a marathon: Adagio for Strings?

No matter what happens Sunday during my running of the White Rock Marathon in Dallas, it is sure to be a memorable event.

The last two marathons, I've let the event photographer post photos online and then pay the money to have them ship a photo to me.

But this year, I'm trying something different. I've hired one of my co-workers at the newspaper to follow me around on the course. Andrea Ahles is going to shoot video and still photography and then give me a short 5-minute video of the event a few days later. How cool is that?

Anyways, I figured that a good marathon video needs good marathon music. I didn't wanna go with Chariots of Fire because that's just too hokey. Any of the Rocky songs would be too predictable. I love dance music, absolutely love it, and my favorite dance music artist is Tiesto. A few years back, he did a remake of a song called Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. This song (Barber's original) is usually played at the funerals and wakes of famous dead people. It played hauntingly in one of the final scenes of the movie Platoon. (Barber died of cancer in 1981 and spent his final days clinically depressed. Maybe he was listening to his own music too much).

But the Tiesto version is very upbeat, very spirited and full of life and when you listen to it, you don't even know its the Barber song. The last 2 1/2 minutes of the Tiesto cover absolutely makes my spine tingle when I'm in the car listening, so I figured, "That's it. That's my marathon song. Here is a small cut.

The real cool thing is that Andrea, my co-worker, was willing to follow me around for 3 1/2 hours at White Rock Lake. So while I'm bummed that the weather is going to be a little warm (mid 50s to 70s), I'm glad Andrea will be comfortable. There was a little method to my madness in hiring Andrea, who is actually one of the business writers at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She's an Ivy League grad (Penn) who attended the same high school in Hawaii as Barack Obama and she spends most of her days chasing around Cowboys owner Jerry Jones writing stories about the $1 billion stadium he is building in Arlington. So, she's got good karma (if you don't count the time last month that some stupid azz, in a fit of road rage, shot at her husband on Loop 820 - nobody got hurt, just a bunch of glass everywhere).

So, I'm hoping the good karma from Andrea rubs off on me and I have a good race.

Wish me luck