What are you listening to? (The East Germans used Springsteen to get gold)

I'm inspired to ask you what music you're all listening to, to help you get out the door, or while you are training? What's hot?

Partly, this is because old geezer brought up on Stones, The Who and The Faces though I am, I recently discovered Pink ("I'm not here for your entertainment" goes a killer line in U and Ur Hand) and Boys Like Girls. In fact the Boys' The Great Escape is the one I am playing as a soundtrack as I watch the latest Chasing Kimbia trailer. Magic!

And partly, because my pal Dwight has just sent me a news story about the new secret subterranean training facilities the East German athletes were sent to in order to keep their training secret from the Russians (see the full story below). But apparently a highly organized program of doping wasn't enough for the EGs. As a special privilege they allowed their elites to listen to Western rock and pop. It sounds a bit bizarre, but the story reports that Springsteen's anthem "Born in the USA" and Supertramp's "Dreamer" were favourites.

So Music Power works. I am seriously considering getting one of them tiny Shuffle thingies to clip to my bra strap so's I can have music on my runs.

German athletes trained to rock
(Source unknown: probably copyrighted).

Bojan Pancevski, Kienbaum, Germany
September 24, 2007
FOR more than two decades they were the world's greatest cheats of track and field, taking vast quantities of steroids in an attempt to prove communism's sporting superiority.

Now, though, another great guilty secret of East Germany's Cold War Olympic success has finally been revealed — not a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, but a mixture of Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen and Shakin' Stevens.

Hits such as Dreamer, This Ole House and Born in the USA have been revealed as motivational soundtracks for the country's athletes as they trained at a top-secret sports complex, now earmarked for reopening after lying disused for 16 years.

Despite pop music being banned by communist authorities, a discreet exception was made for sports stars as a treat to help them train harder.

"We always had good music, the latest Western hits," said Torsten Gutsche, 59, a multiple Olympic gold medallist in kayaking, one of nearly 100 successful Olympians who were coached there. "It was quite a privilege because that kind of stuff would not be played in East Germany."

Built in 1979, the underground training facility, consisting of a depressurised bunker simulating high-altitude conditions, was developed as an alternative to steroid programs when international doping tests became more sophisticated.

The complex had remained forgotten until this northern summer, when a doping scandal involving German cyclists sparked renewed interest in the East's controversial sporting past. Now there are calls for it to be made into a museum.

The East German government camouflaged the training centre at Kienbaum so that it would be undetectable from the outside, a move designed to keep it hidden even from the occupying Russians, unofficially as much a sporting rival as Western nations.

Athletes were ordered to train underground for weeks on end. Because of the immense psychological strain of the hard training in a subterranean environment, some considered it a form of torture.