An icy spring wind howled across New Hampshire, down the Merrimack Valley and into the athletic complex at Manchester’s Livingston Park. When Lance Armstrong and I stepped onto the track, a few walkers, bundled up in parkas with scarves wrapped around their faces, were trundling around the oval, heads down against the early evening gale.

I was there to run. Lance was there to run the stopwatch for 40 minutes of high speed and recovery intervals, spin some tunes and make occasional motivating comments such as, “You’re halfway there. Stay strong and steady.” I was cold and tired, feeling burned out after a long day at work. Lance, riding along inside my MP3 player, didn’t say how he was feeling. But he sounded cheerful enough. Probably recorded this thing somewhere warm, like Texas.

I know what you’re thinking … guided audio workouts, aren’t those just used to line the bottom of the home entertainment-center drawers of people who don’t work out? That’s what I thought, too. And I was skeptical of a running coaching mix for a couple of reasons: Isn’t Lance Armstrong a cyclist? And why should I expect we have the same taste in music? And why would I assume that he’d have a good voice for motivational speaking?

Some of these reservations were accurate. Lance is, for example, no Mickey Goldmill (you remember, Burgess Meredith’s character in Rocky?) or Winston Churchill when it comes to vocal delivery. He doesn’t even sound particularly like the coach of your local cross country team. On the other hand, this turns out to be a good thing. He sounds like a guy; the guy from the office you go running with at lunch sometimes. And he doesn’t talk that much anyway. He tells you when you have a minute left during a specific interval. Urges you not to slack off. He gets the job done without being distracting. Lets you go with the music.

Which is pretty good. The mix includes tracks from bands including Wolfmother, Audioslave, Beck, Keane, Weezer and Queens of the Stone Age and others (see track listing below). The mix does a great job of upping the ante in tone and tempo during the hard intervals and bringing it down (without coming too far down) for the recovery segments. When “Woman” by Wolfmother comes blasting out of your earbuds at the start of the first fast interval, man, you can’t help but start cranking.