I love podcasts.
Long before any of the rest of this, I was the host of The Mustang Report, my middle school's news podcast. The career trajectory has improved since — marginally. I came up in public radio: interning at KUAF in Arkansas making Ozarks at Large, a show about food and agriculture in the Ozarks, then going to CU Boulder for a master's in environmental journalism, where I worked with Threshold Podcast.
From there to Aspen Public Radio, hosting Morning Edition, covering skiing and the outdoor recreation economy and the politics of public land, and producing Mountain Edition.
At Trail Runner magazine, I launched and hosted DNF, a 12-part series about how failure shapes the lives and careers of endurance athletes — "This American Life for runners," someone generously dubbed it.
And in 2024, I started something of my own with Kylee Van Horn: Your Diet Sucks.
See my two current podcasts below.
Your Diet Sucks
The premise of Your Diet Sucks is that endurance athletes are sold an enormous amount of nonsense, and that someone should probably read the actual studies. Kylee and I take on the things that get pitched to runners every week — carnivore diets, fasted training, expensive electrolyte schemes, the latest "biohack" written by people who appear to have never met a biologist — and ask what's actually supported by science and what's just well-funded mythology. We talk to dietitians, exercise physiologists, and the occasional researcher willing to be candid about what we still don't know. We try to be funny about it. Episodes twice a month.
The Trailhead Podcast
The Trailhead is a running podcast that isn't really about running. Brendan and I make it on the theory that the most interesting people who run are interesting for reasons other than running — and those reasons are usually what we actually want to talk about. Recent guests include a cattle rancher, romance novelist, evolutionary biologist, music critic, philosopher, DJ, and a science journalist. I promise we will talk about running.