The 11.01 Cappuccino is back with a new look
The Cycling Podcast is now on Substack
TL;DR: Listen to this post instead
by Lionel Birnie
Listening to Daniel talking to Larry Warbasse and Jeremy Whittle in last week’s excellent episode The Year Through the Media Lens got me thinking about not only how the way we cover the sport has evolved but also how the way we communicate with you, our listeners, has changed.
When we started The Cycling Podcast in June 2013, we relied on one tool to tell people what we were doing, and that tool was Twitter. As time went on, we added a page to Facebook, created an Instagram account and at some point began emailing listeners directly. If you’re reading this in your inbox now it’s because you subscribed to receive email updates from us.
For a long time, we emailed simply to say a new episode was available. Then the response to our two books – A Journey Through the Cycling Year and The Grand Tour Diaries – persuaded us to alter our communication style. We realised that many of you wanted to hear more from us in our own voices rather than the slightly detached corporate style we thought email newsletters had to use. Blame US Marketing Guy* for that.
A regular email gave us a chance to talk about what we were working on, share some of our experiences on the road, or give some insight into how a particular episode came together. It also enabled us to inject a bit of the podcast’s personality into our written communication. We did all start out as writers, after all.
Our hunch turned out to be right because immediately the number of people who read and engaged with our updates shot up.
Then, in April 2021, we gave our newsletter an exciting rebrand, renaming it The 11.01 Cappuccino. You can blame US Marketing Guy for that, too. The name wasn’t chosen just to irritate Daniel (although that certainly had something to do with it), but because it was a nod to a reference that had been made many times in the podcast.
The 11.01 Cappuccino is now on Substack and while the style and content of our regular email will stay the same there’ll be more opportunity to add additional posts to our Substack page too.
* US Marketing Guy, now there’s a niche reference for very long-term listeners.
A big thank you to our Friends of the Podcast subscribers
Daniel and I would like to send our heartfelt thanks to all of our Friends of the Podcast subscribers for supporting us through this most difficult year. Your support has kept us going in more ways than one. You may have heard Daniel’s message in this week’s episode explaining that we are pausing collecting subscription renewal fees until March. I’ll write more about that next time but if your subscription is due to renew in December, January or February you will continue to have access until March 1 no matter what.
This week’s episode
Comeback of the Year 2022: Geraint Thomas
Actually, don’t call it a comeback… Daniel talks to Geraint Thomas about podcasting and the perils of upsetting people, and about finishing on the Tour de France podium at the age of 36. There’s also a fleeting mention of Arsenal Football Club, but don’t let that put you off. The episode is online now.
The cyclist and his shadow
This week, we released an episode of Kilometre 0 featuring François Thomazeau talking about his favourite cycling book. Written in French by philosopher and former racing cyclist Olivier Haralambon as Le coureur et son ombre, it was translated into English by François and published by The Cycling Podcast earlier this year. The book is a sensory exploration of the relationship between mind, body and bicycle and, as François says, not necessarily the easiest read but definitely an immersive and richly rewarding one.
As Olivier writes, ‘What I am requesting from my readers, besides their forgiveness for writing in the first person, is that they ride along with me because I want to open up my skull. That bony box is the only place where performance takes place, where it enlightens, where its world takes its various shapes.’
Listen to Kilometre 0 here. Buy the book at thecyclingpodcast.com.
