I don't get exercise.That isn't to say I don't like sports: Give me pick-up basketball or Ultimate any day (and my squash serve is as unreturnable as an anonymous letter).

But exercise--cardio, weightlifting, jogging, spelunking, whatever--has always been anathema to me. Perhaps I prefer competition. Or maybe my baby fat--though after three-and-a-half years of a college diet, it's hardly babylike--just never seemed worth working off.

So the new single by LCD Soundsystem, the disco-punk project of the Brooklyn-based producer James Murphy, posed a bit of a dilemma for me. Nike released the song--titled "45:53" and running just as long--through its iTunes store last month, intending it strictly for joggers. Murphy wrote in a press release that he designed the track to "reward and push at good intervals of a run."

Music, as far as I'm concerned, should be heard as its creators intend. Take for example The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka, which features eight songs spread over four discs. Different parts of the tracks areon each CD; only by playing all four at once--a complex process requiring multiple boom boxes, meticulous volume adjustment and an aberrant sense of humor--can you hear the album properly. The result isas the title, the aggregate of the words "Zaire" and "eureka," suggests: a perfect blending of entropy and genius.

So when I first read about Murphy's latest release, I knew that that exclusive demographic, the Web-savvy jogging hipster crowd, could count me as its newest recruit. But not wishing to repeat the apocryphal fate of Pheidippides, the Greek soldier whose trek from Marathon to Athens left him deader than Hall and Oates' chances of making a comeback, I realized I'd have to get in shape.

There was only one logical regimen: running to songs of increasing length--techno and dance punk seemed the most appropriate genres--with the goal of eventually managing a three-quarters-of-an-hour run. If "45:53" was music for joggers, I figured, then a jogger I would have to be.

My iPod in tow, I set out two weeks ago on a chilly afternoon to the soundtrack of "Rise," by the ambient-electronica duo Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, who record for Murphy's label DFA. At 12:58, the song was the perfect length--short enough to lend me a dangerous and false sense of confidence--but with its pulsing synthesizers and no percussion, perhaps too hypnotic. Carelessly racing across crosswalks in the neighborhood around my house on Dartmouth Street, I nearly met my end several times at the nervous hands of soccer moms and student drivers.

But the running was a breeze, so with newfound hubris I continued two days later, this time to "Hakuna Matata," a tortured 14:54 epic by the New York art rockers Oneida. At first, things went well, my lungs feeling their strongest in months. But in the song's final two minutes--in which phase-shifter effects bring the distortion-heavy instrumental to a terrifying climax--my muscles tensed up. A sharp pain seized the space beneath my ribs, stabbing my insides with the wrath of 1,000 late-night Wendy's runs. I gasped. Squeezing my side with my left hand and brushing sweat from my brow with my right, I kept jogging, collapsing on my stoop as the song's dissonance reached a boiling point.

After several days of recovery--mostly spent listening to therapeutic songs by Otis Redding and Cocteau Twins--I resumed my training last weekend, still shaken. But aware of the task still before me, I reached further, this time selecting the mother of all techno songs, the 22:43 "Autobahn" by the German electronica pioneers Kraftwerk. Jogging to the song felt at first like the opening sequence in Chariots of Fire: running across an idyllic beach in slow motion, with majestic-sounding synthesizers as my muse. The illusion was short-lived. As the song hit the ethereal respite at its 16-minute mark, I lost balance, desperately throwing my arms around the mailbox on Highland Street to save my face from eating pavement.

I knew then that my quest had reached a premature end. So leaving my pride with my New Balances, I burned "45:33" to compact disc, placed it in my car stereo, and shamefully backed out of my driveway.

The song, unsurprisingly, lends itself perfectly to running. It begins leisurely with a pair of winding synth lines, which gradually speed up just like an athlete building rhythm. Soon enough, a sexy piano lick weaves around a thumping disco beat before Murphy's vocals--disguised in a smooth baritone--enter the fray. For 45 minutes, he never maintains momentum for too long, as though anticipating inclines and changes of pace.

The hovering specter of my unatheticism notwithstanding, I felt then a sense of kinship with Murphy, who is a regular jogger. I hadn't measured up to "45:33," but after a punishing week of exercise, I'd certainly earned the right to finally hear it.