I don’t know about you, but when I’m doing a long indoor training ride or a long training run, I get bored pretty quickly. When indoors, I often have the tv on, but my go-to when I’m outdoors on a run isn’t music, it’s podcasts. I occasionally listen while on the bike trainer as well.
There are a lot of great fitness-related podcasts out there. I don’t listen to any of them. When I’m working out, I don’t want to think more about working out. I want an escape. And since I’m constantly adding and deleting podcasts from my list, I thought I would update what I’m currently listening to.
Welcome to Night Vale remains on my list. This is… well, I’ll just cut and paste their description.
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE is a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff’s Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events.
So… fictional (I hope) story of weird antics in a strange town. I definitely recommend going back in the archives and starting with episode one.
Staying on the fiction track, I recently picked up The Black Tapes Podcast. It’s a serialized docu-drama focused on the paranormal. If you liked The X-Files, you’ll like this. It’s definitely not alien focused or anything, just sort of the unusual and unexplainable. It’s getting better and better as the team gets more experience.
Next we flip over to Sawbones. This is a podcast by a husband and wife team, where the wife is a doctor and the husband is comic relief. They discuss medical history in a funny way, such as how people used to strap whole chickens to their face to cure mumps (or something, all I remember is chickens on your face). Definitely not too graphic, and pretty entertaining all around.
When I’m looking for random entertainment, I listen to My Brother, My Brother, and Me, a podcast by the previously mentioned comic relief husband and his two brothers. They do comedy and advice, and it’s hard to explain, but it’s pretty funny.
For great interviews by funny hosts, you can’t go wrong with Girl on Guy and Nerdist. I got into both of these because they were interviewing someone I was interested in, and the whole show was just so great that I stuck around.
Obviously, you can’t go wrong with the This American Life podcast, and I downloaded their app so I could have access to the show archives. Another standard is Stuff You Missed In History Class. Both of these are excellent and it’s worth the time to peruse their archives.
Another new podcast on my list is Mystery Show, which I didn’t think I would like, but I got totally sucked in. The host finds a random everyday mystery to investigate. And though the subject of the mystery might not sound interesting, the storytelling is so great that you get sucked in and you must know what is going on in the scene on the Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox or whatever the subject happens to be.
There are others in my podcast app, but I think these are the ones that get the most attention from me. I listen a lot while in the car or doing chores around the house in addition to during workouts. What podcasts do you listen to? Do you have different podcasts for different activities?