Producing the podcast for edition two of The Accursed Race (#TARNo2)

In May, I produced the podcast for the second edition of The Accursed Race, a 1600km ultra-distance cycling race around the Balkans. It was the seventh consecutive race that I’ve worked on with the lovely team at Lost Dot.

Like those that came before it, this was a race packed with wonderful human stories, from Justinas Leveika storming to victory despite a collision with a lorry in Montenegro, to the delightful, thoughtful Urs Mannhart and his experience riding amongst the wonderful mountain wildlife.

Here's the first pre-race episode.

Of course, It helps if you are into cycling, but I really think that anyone could enjoy these podcasts. We never know what will happen over the course of a race, but several story arcs always emerge. Each rider has their own journey and there is always a star of the show. (Urs, for me, this time.)

Anyway, you can search for and listen to the Lost Dot podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all the usual places.

Producing the podcast

I’ve long-planned to write a meaty essay that goes into detail about how I actually produce these race podcasts. My first was the second Trans Pyrenees Race in 2022, where I was there in person trying to record, edit and publish episodes while travelling around in the media car.

Needless to say, this was a tricky business and I felt that I could do a much better job if I was stationed in one place. So, since then I have produced the podcast from home. The team record interviews with riders on the road and send the audio back to me to edit.

Several races later, as a team we have refined this process. This edition of The Accursed Race saw me produce 13 30-minute episodes in as many days. Effectively, I have to make a daily audio documentary and every day I wake up with no content whatsoever.

The magic of it is that we don’t know what will happen that day and we are never sure which riders the team will get to interview. And the audio clips come to me throughout the day and sometimes pretty late on, so the content for an episode is constantly evolving.

Again, I intend to write about the process and my experience working on these podcasts fully in a standalone piece. But for each episode, I have to:

• select and edit clips from rider interviews
• improve and level the audio from all the clips
• write a script that tells a story of the day and threads it all together into one narrative
• use that scrip to record the ‘narrator’ voiceover
• edit the the whole thing together into a coherent episode

One of the reasons I want to do the fuller post is that the only reason I am able to do all this (remember, I am not an audio engineer!) is by using an app called Descript. It has a number of features that make it different to a traditional audio editor and I would be lost without them.

Perhaps the most important thing Descript does is transcribe an audio file into what effectively looks like a text document. And the best bit? If you I edit the text, it also edits the audio.

That means I am able to turn all of the rider interviews into good-enough transcriptions and assemble the best bits into a ‘master’ composition that becomes the actual episode. I’ve been working with Descript like this for a few years and it still feels like it shouldn’t be possible.

Thankfully, once an episode is ready I am able to hand it over to Lost Dot’s media manager who handles the uploading, publishing and social media stuff. All I have to do is get a few hours sleep and then on to the next episode until the race is over.

Backdating episodes

I’m slowly trying to update my website to better reflect who I am now and what the heck I’ve been up to the last few years. I stopped posting in November 2023 and as a result, it appears like my world just stopped too. But it didn’t! I am still here! Things, I have done them!

I’d also quite like this site to be much more like a record of achievement. The older I get and the more frustrating it is to see the collapse of meaningful, interesting social spaces online, the more I feel like hey, why not just make sure my own corner of the internet is in shape?

So, with that in mind, I’m going to post and backdate all the episodes I produced for this year’s edition of The Accursed Race. I may also go back and do the same for the six previous races I worked on. You’ll only notice if you are subscribed to the RSS feed.

Of course, I don’t have to do this, but each episode is effectively its own mini-documentary and although I can and do send people direct to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, I’d like a permanent record of them here too.

Next race: back to the Pyrenees

I’m taking a break for this year’s Transcontinental Race, which starts in a few short weeks. But I will be back behind the mic for the fifth edition of the Trans Pyrenees race (and my fourth) in October.

I have a real soft spot for the Pyrenees having been out there in person for that first race I worked on. And it’s such a unique place to ride a bike that we always end up with some brilliant rider stories. Feel free to tune in!