If We Were Riding

If We Were Riding runs on a simple conceit: the episode is a group ride, and everyone is expected to sit in the pack. Kelly O'Mara and Sarah True lead it. Khadijah Diggs and Jocelyn Wong-Neal ride along regularly, and Laura Sadal handles the weekend results in a segment called Sid Talk. Fridays are the drop day. The pace changes constantly. A race recap gives way to a story about cross-country travel with a baby, or a Mother's Day 5K where somebody broke the tape, or the strange etiquette of sharing a pool lane with professionals who have no idea who you are. Austin, Boulder and Bend come up as places where pros migrate and ordinary swimmers end up on a first-name basis with athletes they have only watched from behind a start line. The show calls itself triathlon-ish, and that hyphen carries real weight. Half the conversation is the sport. The other half is everything around it: what people watch on the trainer, how a local newspaper somehow knows who won an Ironman title, why a triathlete robbing a bank on television counts as representation. When the sport produces actual news, the tone sharpens. A special episode recorded the evening the women-only Kona world championship was announced pulled two Feisty shows together and put Andrew Messick, the CEO of Ironman, on to explain the decision, with the pros and cons argued out on air. Advocacy is not a side note here. Coverage of women in endurance sport is the spine, and a run of Title Nine episodes replayed during a summer break makes that lineage explicit. Listener voicemails shape the segments. The archive also records a handover: earlier episodes are led by Sarah Gross alongside Sarah True, and a later stretch documents the producing role passing to Kelly O'Mara as the group ride format launched and the feed relationship with the Iron Women podcast shifted. None of that transition is hidden from the audience. It gets discussed on mic, complete with jokes about derailed plans and tolerated tangents. The humour is dry, a little bawdy at the edges, and reliably self-deprecating. Sponsor reads are frequent and delivered in the same voice as everything else. What holds it together is a group who know the sport from the inside and see no reason to perform neutrality about it. Anyone who has raced, wanted to race, or simply follows the results will recognise the shorthand immediately.