‘Music is a legal drug for athletes,” claims Dr Costas Karageorghis, an expert on the effects of music on exercise, at Brunel University. In his latest book, Inside Sport Psychology, he claims that listening to music while running can boost performance by up to 15%.

If this is true, then the Rock’n’Roll marathon series is on to something. The events, a fixture in the US for almost 15 years, are extremely popular, with 450,000 people running in one of its 2012 races alone. Many other big city races have the occasional band along the route, and London has had the Run to the Beat half-marathon, lined with DJs, for the past five years. But on 15 April the UK finally got its first taste of the action, with the inaugural Edinburgh Rock’n’Roll half-marathon.

-allindstrom.com