By Gavin Kentch
It’s been a heady few months for “Who Woke Me Up?,” by any measure one of the five most popular semi-regularly updated English-language podcasts about nordic skiing out there. (The joke, of course, is that there only exist five-ish such shows that fit these criteria; if you can think of n > 5 that qualify, then update this “joke” accordingly. Hilarity shall ensue.)
At first we were really earnest, but had abysmal sound quality. This prompted a still-wishes-to-be-anonymous, but very generous, listener to donate some better audio recording to our cause.
Then we needed some level of post-production work in there so that you could actually “hear what was being said” at “consistent and aurally pleasant sound levels,” or some such niceties. Audio engineer Nathan Shuttleworth has been on board since early November (Episode 4, with Ben Ogden; this would be the one I subtitled, “now with good audio quality”) — but we have yet to “actually pay him a fraction of what he is worth” in exchange for these efforts. More details, not to mention that now we can start to rectify this now that we are getting paid.
Our evolution continues, however: I am excited to announce that we now are being sold to Spotify for $196 million have a podcast sponsor on board.
Seriously, though, I am truly pleased that Rossignol likes what we are doing here, and wishes to lend their financial support to what initially began as just a wild idea but is now an increasingly legit production. The first eight episodes of this show have seen a cumulative [redacted, but if you would like to give us more money I promise that this number is very high] downloads, with listeners in 40+ countries across six continents. If you have any friends in Antarctica, tell them to please listen to, or at least play, one minute of one episode so that we can get to all seven. Tyia.
At the professional level, you may know Rossignol from Gus Schumacher winning a World Cup distance race earlier this month, or from, say, the 15 podiums that Pål Golberg has claimed over the last two seasons. At the citizen racer level, literally a third of the questions that we have received for the Zach Caldwell Q&A series have involved grinding or hand structure, so would you like to hear about factory grinds from two men who literally work at the factory? You just might!
The first of these two episodes discusses research and development at Rossignol, as well as discussion of the new SX skate ski and how citizen racers can use demo days to find the best skis for them. The second primarily looks at factory grinds and structure.
You can listen to these episodes below. You can also find them on Apple Podcasts here, on Spotify here, or anywhere else you get your podcasts (here is our RSS feed). As always, podcast content does not reflect the views of the Nordic Insights editorial side.
These episodes are, obviously, sponsored content. I feel like that’s pretty apparent by this point, but nonetheless I should note that explicitly. They are sponsored in the sense that both episodes involve Rossignol employees talking about Rossignol products, which is, admittedly, a pretty real sense in which to be sponsored. That said, I sincerely think that these episodes are interesting on the merits, and that you will learn something if you listen to them.
If you do not want to listen to the episodes, or you would like an overview of them first before listening to them, you can find summaries (with timestamps!) and transcripts here. All this content in the summaries/transcripts link is, to be clear, machine-generated. I actually find the summaries rather distressingly useful, to be honest; better workshop a few more math “jokes” for the next article to further distinguish me from our looming LLM overlords and show what value I can add as a human.
Zach Caldwell will be back in the next episode, either later this week or, probably, early next week depending on scheduling and workload. Expect several thousand words on ski choice alone. (Really, though, there were some great listener questions for Zach, and in a scant two-plus hours he gets through at least five of them!)
Thank you for your continued support of this podcast. We sincerely appreciate it.
