TechRadar gets fit: learning to jog with tech

I was recently asked to run a half marathon by Sony Ericsson at its forthcoming Run to the Beat event on the 27 September.

The premise for the event is simple - run for 13.1 miles around lovely Greenwich on a pleasant Sunday morning, and to help out, Sony Ericsson has partnered with Dr Costas Karageorghis from Brunel University to inject an element of science into the proceedings.

And, of course, there's always the added boost of technology - high tech trainers, fitness and heart rate monitors, those special stretchy tops you always see the fitter people wearing - to help pick up the slack when the fitness lacks.

I'll be testing out all the options on offer in the coming weeks to see if it helps out (or makes things easier) so if you're thinking of heading out on a long jog you'll know which fitness kit is best.

But there's more to it than tech. Sony Ericsson and Dr Costas Karageorghis' thinking goes like this - music helps runners train better and more efficiently, a theory I'm sure most people know already, but what's different is that he's spent years looking into the whys and wherefores of this notion, and has come up with some good guidelines people might not have thought about.

Here's some of the less obvious advice for choosing music for your run:

• Do the lyrics contain positive affirmations of running such as "keep on running", "born to run" or "run to the beat"? Other positive statements such as "moving on up" or "I believe" also lead to positive motivational consequences.

• Does the music create imagery in your mind that is motivational; maybe through associations the piece has within popular culture (for example, the Rocky film series soundtrack) or through personal memories?

Sony Ericsson will be putting live music all around the course, designed to help motivate the runners with the most popular songs chosen by the field.

Having never managed to run farther than the distance it takes to get from my house to the chip shop and back (to keep supper warm), I'm not sure what 13.1 miles will feel like on the legs, but we at TechRadar are always up for challenge, so we're going to give this a try.

I recently had a meeting with Dr Karageorghis during a 'training day' at a gym in London and he gave me all sorts of training advice and dietary tips.

It was at this point that I realised that it might not be as easy as I thought, when the good doctor was telling me about the levels of carbohydrate and protein I'll need to ingest every day, as well as trying to convince me to get up at 6.30 AM every day.

I can certainly up the jacket potato count, but as for getting up at 6.30 AM... we'll see how that goes (I get the feeling two words will cause that part of the plan to fail: 'snooze' and 'button').

And to make it seem like all this will be worth it, I've also signed up for the Royal Parks Foundation Half Marathon (of which Nokia is a corporate partner) on 11 October, in order to give me something to aim for. So, given the maximum time for completing the course is 3.5 hours for the RTTB event... shouldn't be too hard to better that time for two weeks later.

I'm a bit perturbed by the fact the Run To The Beat website suggests I take Vaseline and plasters to stop the sore skin - where am I supposed to put that?

And if you're interested in running the Run to the Beat with me (at the back, whistling a jaunty tune... we'll take a sandwich) there are still places going, although the Royal Parks Run is sadly closed.