When ChatGPT 'Tried' to Build My Half Marathon Playlist

I had a simple ask. I needed a playlist for my upcoming half marathon, but not some generic "pump up" mix. I wanted something that understood my target pace, my tendency to start too fast, and exactly when I'd hit that mental wall around mile 10.

So naturally, I asked ChatGPT to be my DJ.

What Worked: ChatGPT Turned into a Running Strategist Here's where things got interesting.

ChatGPT didn't just spit out a list of songs. It built me a complete race strategy disguised as a playlist:

Miles 1-2: Easy tempo tracks to prevent my usual rookie mistake of sprinting out the gate. Miles 3-8: Steady BPM songs perfectly synced to my target cadence. Miles 9-12: Strategic "anthem placements" which is basically musical caffeine for when everything hurts. Final 5K: Pure audio adrenaline.

The AI even offered multiple export formats (CSV, M3U) and explained the psychology behind each track placement. It understood that running isn't just physical, it's deeply mental. And music is the hack.

What Amazed: Direct-to-Spotify Magic Then ChatGPT flexed its integration muscles.

With a few prompts, it created actual Spotify playlists, complete with embedded widgets. No copy-paste. No manual searching. Just "here's your playlist, click to play."

We're talking about going from conversation to curated experience in seconds. This is the promise of GenAI realized: natural language as the universal remote control.

What Failed: When the API Goes Silent And then... reality check.

My final request was a "Motivational Anthem Edition" (I needed a few songs from the mid-90's Jock Jams CDs we used for basketball warmups in high school) with perfectly placed power songs between high-BPM tracks, but I hit a wall. The Spotify integration died. ChatGPT could still describe exactly what it would create, how it would structure the energy peaks, where it would place "Eye of the Tiger" for maximum impact.

But it couldn't actually make the playlist anymore. The brain was willing. The API was not.

Takeaways We've mostly solved the intelligence problem. ChatGPT can think like a coach, a DJ, a sports psychologist, and a data analyst simultaneously.

What we haven't solved? The plumbing.

The gap between AI's capabilities and real-world execution isn't about smarts anymore, it's about connections. It's about whether Spotify's API is having a good day. Whether authentication tokens are playing nice. Whether the digital bridges between platforms are open for business.

The bottom line: GenAI has graduated from "can it understand?" to "can it ship?" And right now, that second question depends more on APIs than algorithms.

ChatGPT gave me the perfect race-day playlist strategy. It just couldn't hit play.

Tools Used

Today's experiment: Building a personalized half marathon playlist with AI, specifically using ChatGPT's Spotify integration