You know you've reached a certain level of, oh, let's call it maturity when "party music" becomes "gym music." We can't spend our entire lives dancing until 5 am to Calvin Harris remixes, but we'd all be well advised to plug in some ear buds and hit the pavement -- or the treadmill -- in the not-quite-wee hours of the morning. And since it's the time of year when adults generally return to the gym after carousing their faces off throughout the holiday season, HuffPost Entertainment and HuffPost Healthy Living have teamed up to produce the ultimate Best Running Songs of 2012 playlist to keep you going and going ... and going. (Seriously, you could run a half marathon to this thing.)
To create the list, we spammed emailed the entire, globe-spanning staff of The Huffington Post with a request for submissions. To qualify, a song had to have come out in 2012 (a few were released as singles in 2011 but on albums this year) and possess a beat you can run to (duh). You'll find most of the usual suspects -- nobody suggested "Gangnam Style," presumably because it seemed too obvious, so we just stuck it in -- but also plenty of hidden gems.
Research shows that you work out longer and have more fun doing it when you listen to music, so we hope that you'll get lots of mileage out of this playlist, which you can download to your mobile device if you have a paid Spotify account. We also hope you'll share your favorite workout tunes from the past year in the comments section.
And since we're not that old, we feel compelled to mention that this would make a highly danceable New Year's Eve party playlist, in case you're planning to give yourself one last long night to repent for in 2013.
Don't have Spotify? Listen to any song -- and see staffer commentary -- here:
