Podcasts

A little while ago my buddy Dan Hammond put me onto a great series of podcasts called "Tri Talk" by a bloke named Dave Warden. He's got this great American accent and a really easy to listen to voice and he has a real passion for independent studies and the hard science behind everything to do with triathlon training, racing and equipment. Each podcast is about 20-25 mins long.

I spent a couple of weeks listening to all his old podcasts on the way to work and back. I was addicted! I started to feel like Dave was a personal friend and his voice became a real comfort, it's such a weird thing. How many times do we just sit and listen to somebody speak for hours? But they only come out every fortnight or so and once I caught up I started looking around for others...

I found "Endurance and Nutrition", a series of only 4 podacasts recorded late last year which are very high quality. Recorded by Dave Scott, another American and a six-time winner of the Ironman World Championship, along with a couple of different experts in the field in every podcast, they are an outstanding source of information for nutrition strategies pre, during and post training and racing. I listened to them all a couple of times just to make sure I caught everything. Highly recommended.

I tried another couple of triathlon based podcasts (can't remember all the names now) and they were rubbish. One UK one grated on me about 30 seconds into an hour episode and after 2 minutes I had to shut it down. I also tried the McMillan running podcasts but really couldn't get into them either.

Next stop was a couple of weeks of "Dharma talks" by Bob Thurman (father of Uma Thurman and a long time Buddhist scholar and supporter of Tibet). Again really interesting stuff, easy to listen to on those easy/recovery commuting runs to work and gives you plenty to mull over.

After running out of those podcasts and getting some new music (new albums from The Shins, Bloc Party, The White Stripes and Clap Your Hand Say Yeah) I've gone with the music option on the old Ipod shuffle for the last couple of months which has been great, but just lately I've been a bit over it and have been running sans headphones lately.

Then last weekend Dan told me about a new podcast he'd found which was quite good -
"Zen and the art of Triathlon". Long episodes of over an hour, basically this bloke from Texas who goes out for a long ride with some show notes in his bento box and muses about a whole range of things - some related to triathlon, some related to zen, and plenty related to neither! It's more conversational and rambling than scientific, but it's actually very easy to listen to. I've only heard three episodes but I'm downloading more tonight.