Jonathan Levitt on making a running podcast, and 2019 Western States picks

The rare episode about how the sausage gets made, recorded at Broken Arrow in 2019.

Most running podcasts never discuss themselves. This one does, at length, which is why it has outlasted a lot of the interviews around it.

Jonathan Levitt, a runner from Massachusetts, had started For the Long Run earlier in 2019. The conversation was recorded at Broken Arrow and works through the practical questions anyone starting a show runs into and nobody writes down.

Format and guests

The core argument is that the guest list is the format. A show built around accomplishments produces one kind of episode; a show built around the shape of somebody’s life produces another; and a show that avoids controversy sounds different from one that goes at it. None of these are wrong, but choosing late means the show never settles.

Booking is the other half. The runners who make good guests are not always the ones winning, and the ones winning are frequently the least practised at talking about it.

The equipment section

There is a long and unusually specific stretch on gear and workflow — recorders, microphones, a mixing board, levelling software, and the editing sequence used to turn two channels of field audio into something listenable. A funicular running directly overhead put a click through the whole recording, which the levelling pass removed. The advice underneath all of it: fix your levels at the source, because no amount of processing afterwards is as good as getting it right in the room.

Why so few women

The episode’s most substantive thread is the question of why the running-podcast space was so heavily male in 2019, when the running-writing space was not. No tidy answer is reached. The episode also carries an on-page correction, added afterwards, noting that the conversation had overlooked one of the fastest-growing shows in the field — which is a fair illustration of the problem being discussed.

Predictions

It closes with Western States picks for that weekend and some talk about Broken Arrow — the part of any predictions episode that ages fastest, and the least interesting eight minutes of it.