This episode was shot in under a half hour and edited in under 90 minutes. We're really getting in a rhythm with this show. It's partly due to time constraints that we're all facing (me with my app development company, Julie with her freelance theatre directing and Carrie with her upcoming second child and other media appearances), but I mostly attribute it to our solid chemistry as a team. Carrie is nailing her lines in 1 take, Julie is writing solid copy and I'm cutting episodes together very efficiently. It's a cool experience when you can be a part of something so superb and efficient.

Although we got off to a rough start with some technical difficulties, our Skype interview with Kate was a rousing success. For those who want a little more technical behind-the-scenes for how to record a video Skype call, we use Ecamm's excellent Call Recorder for Skype to record both streams to a single file.

We use an all-Apple Intermediate Codec workflow when editing our shows. We could keep the recorded Skype call in the same H.264-compressed MPEG-4 container, but two problems arise:

1) You can't watch the file in Safe RT; you have to roll with Unlimited RT. 2) The audio doesn't even render, making the whole thing useless anyway.

In order to just save headaches, I convert our MPEG-4 file to AIC with the infinitely-useful MPEG Streamclip. If you're a professional video editor using a Mac and don't have this as part of your tool chain, you're nuts.

Like I said before, Call Recorder for Skype places both streams side-by-side in a single file. That's pretty much what you see when both Carrie and Kate are on screen at the same time:

For those curious as to how we turn that into a single-clip, we just crop the video to the full width and height of Kate and drop it on a second track. In order to do the multi-track switching, I just cut the parts of Track 2 where I want to see both of them:

Apparently, I am a terrible judge of determining which episodes will be successful and which will be total flops. I thought that an episode where we shot zero b-roll, failed to mic one of the participants and lasted for more than 8 minutes would surely be a flop. Fortunately, this is one of the most successful episodes we've aired this year based on social interaction. People have gone out of their way to tell us how helpful this episode was. While I'm sincerely proud of my work and glad I can help people out, I'm still just unable to see why this episode did so well, while other episodes I would assume would be popular just aren't.

Anyway, we've been hoping to have Katie as a featured guest since day one, and I'm really glad we were able to talk her into walking us through her post-workout routine. We actually had to cut a few good parts of the show because we only have two lav mics. We make do with what we have, but it's times like these I wish we had another lav mic and a field mixer. And a quad-copter.

Sometimes, the best episodes are the ones that get cut together in 10 minutes. When an episode comes together that quickly, that means all of us were on our game. Julie had a great script in place, Carrie was top-notch with her delivery and I was able to luck out with the lighting in the room. I laughed out loud several times while editing this one, and it's only a couple minutes long, so definitely check it out.

Andrew is a really fun guy to interview, and he and Carrie have a great chat about the cancellation of the NYC Marathon and his unreal performances at the Olympic Trials and the Houston Marathon.

But just in case you're not all that interested in elite athlete recovery, feel free to jump to 4:25, where Carrie says she wants to take a tour of Andrew's apartment. This was, perhaps, one of my favorite spots I've cut for C Tolle Run so far.

Another cooking episode. I didn't have time to grab our normal tripod, so I had to shoot this with the tripod Dale "found" at the middle school he works at. No wonder they were throwing that thing out.

Also, our wireless lav mics were giving me a lot of problems. I'm almost certain it's interference, which means I need to start getting good at setting the frequencies on those puppies.

On a lighter note, my favorite part of this episode was getting to sample some Midnight Ryder from Indeed Brewing. Some seriously great beer.

A new year calls for new opening credits. We tried to do something different this year, so we garnered inspiration from The Mindy Project and tried to make things a little more funky. Since it can be overplayed, I was a little worried about doing an episode on New Year's Resolutions. I think that we executed quite well, thanks in no small part to Carrie's personality and the good people who recorded resolutions for us.

Because the host of our show is pregnant, we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to do a series of episodes that would help mothers-to-be to stay fit and healthy during their pregnancies.

Even if you're not a pregnant woman, you will still really enjoy this episode.

Reason 1: this episode features show-favorite Bill Welle of Welle Fast. Carrie and Bill have a fantastic rapport that absolutely shines on film. The episode actually gets more funny as it goes, so be sure to watch through the end.

Reason 2: even though the exercises are modified to account for her condition, anyone can apply the principles preached in this segment to their own routines.

I really like Bill's approach of throwing additional stabilization moves in with "regular" lifts (e.g. Single-Legged Bicep Curls or Stability Ball Bench Press).

This week, we launched version 3 of CTolleRun.com. It's the result of several months of planning, organizing and development, and I thought I would take a few moments to share exactly what we've changed and the process behind it.

Our last redesign of the webpage was earlier this year. Truthfully, the site was rushed out in a hurry because we needed to have something live, so I pushed it out with the intention of upgrading it piece-by-piece down the line. Of course, we never got around to actually upgrading anything, and ultimately, we decided that time would be better spent on re-building from the ground-up.

The biggest conceptual change on the site was to give each episode its own page. This would give us a chance to better showcase our content, as well as drive our SEO. In order to implement this, however, required implementing a more robust, custom CMS¹. Before this redesign, we were able to input the basic information: episode name, description, YouTube link, etc. Now, we are able to add several elements which make each page unique and more appealing for our viewers:

Links Almost every podcast I admire includes a list of links with each episode. This makes it easy to give viewers the chance to dive deeper into a specific topic, as well as share links we've mentioned in the episode. It also allows us to drive more traffic to the photo albums we've uploaded to Facebook.

Featured Guests We have the luxury of having some pretty awesome people on our show. Unfortunately, many of the guests we've had on our show aren't yet household names. Many people know who Kara Goucher is, but not a lot of people recognize Hassan Mead. If a viewer doesn't recognize who they're about to watch, it doesn't give them a lot of incentive to watch the episode.

To combat this, we included a short biography of each guest. We figured it's a simple way to boost viewership of those episodes as well as rank them higher on Google. In the future, I'm hoping to add links to these guest's social media accounts, as well as personal blogs or team pages.

Sponsors Before I became an avid podcast consumer (and creator), I loathed advertising. I ran ad-blockers on all my computers and I skipped over every sponsorship spot I possibly could.

It's really a shame, though, because a lot of the advertisers who throw money at podcasts like ours really seem to get it. They just want to put their product or race in the hands of people who maybe would've never even heard of it otherwise.

It's understandable that you don't want ads shoved down your face, though, which is why we've presented our ads in the ways we have. Each episode with a sponsor gets mentioned at the top of the show, and each sponsor gets an ad permanently embedded on the episode's page. We also have two "title sponsor" spots that are prominently displayed on the main page. That's it.

We think this is win-win-win: we are able to get you in touch with our sponsors, our sponsors are able to get permanent placements of their product and you are able to find out about some cool products, services and races without being hassled.

Social Media A huge focus for this redesign was to better integrate the site with social media. Here's what we did to optimize for our key three networks:

Facebook: If you're a developer, and you're not using Open Graph tags, you're missing out. By using Open Graph tags, we were able to turn our bland-looking links into this:

An added bonus: if you specify the OG tags for og:video and og:video-type, Facebook will embed the YouTube video in-line! Here's the code I used for that: <meta property="og:video" content="http://www.youtube.com/v/<? echo $youtubeID; ?>?version=3&autohide=1" /> <meta property="og:video:type" content="application/x-shockwave-flash" /> Twitter: If you're not simply sharing an article or some photos, Twitter's new Cards functionality is a bit more complex than simply adding OG tags. In order to make a functioning Player Card, Twitter wants you to build a page that gets embedded in an IFRAME. In a similar vein to what we're doing with Facebook, we're standing on the shoulders of giants and simply embedding YouTube's Player Card with our episode ID passed through: <meta name="twitter:card" content="player" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@CTolleRun" /> <meta name="twitter:player" content="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ echo $youtubeID; ?>" /> <meta name="twitter:player:width" content="640" /> <meta name="twitter:player:height" content="360" />

And out comes this:

Note that the Twitter Card API requires the use of twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image and so forth. Thankfully, if you're already using og:title, og:description, og:image and so forth, you don't need to re-include them.

Pinterest: Unfortunately, Pinterest doesn't have a public-facing API yet. Essentially, all we can do is include a "Pin It" button for each episode. We'd really like to get a bigger presence on Pinterest, however, because it seems like a good portion of our target audience is there. Here's hoping for that API soon!

A note about Google+, App.net, etc.: I think it's important to not get too crazy with social networks. Sure, it's easy enough to drop a +1 button on each page, as well as a hundred other buttons. However, for each service you include, you're not only adding more visual clutter to your page; you're increasing the page's load time by executing a hundred different pieces of remote Javascript code.

If we get a huge demand to add another service to our site, or if Facebook loses a million followers, we'll go there. We're not dummies, but we're also not in the business of predicting which services will be the best. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest seem to be our best options today. We'll adapt as time goes on.

More Robust RSS Feeds Our RSS feeds (video and audio) aren't the most popular way to get our episodes², but it's my personal favorite, so I made an effort to optimize this experience as well. Each item in the feed includes the linked list as well as the episode's sponsors. We also include the file size and run time of each episode, which means the fancy podcast clients will be able to show that information without any big-city processing on their end.

MailChimp We converted our mailing list over to the incomparable MailChimp. It's everything you could possibly want in a mailing list provider, but for free. My only gripe with them thus far is that the templates aren't 100% customizable, but it's just about the only fault I can find with them. Seriously, if you do mailing lists, you should be doing them through MailChimp.

Front Page Slide Show Whenever a client requests a rotating slide show, my go-to choice has always been Nivo Slider. For this project, however, I needed a solution that allowed me to use two <div> tags for a caption (one on top, one on bottom). With Nivo Slider, the solution I came up with was to put two smaller <div>'s into 1 giant <div>. Unfortunately, that meant the image wasn't clickable, which defeated the purpose of the slider.

I tried a few different sliders and ultimately settled on Camera by Pixedelic. This awesome slider allowed me to place as many <div>'s (or any other kind of crazy mark-up) on top of the image while maintaining its clickablilty. My only gripe is that the slideshow doesn't work as well in IE, which is, of course, no surprise to anyone.

Internet Explorer Fixes Speaking of every web developer's best friend, Internet Explorer provided the majority of trouble for this redesign. I kept getting alignment issues with IE while using Nathan Smith's excellent 960 Grid System, so instead of learning a whole new system (like the Responsive Grid System which I'm highly considering for future projects), I just added the <meta> tag which forces IE to render everything as if its IE7 (even if you're on a newer version):

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />

Of course, this is a very inelegant solution, but I'm just sick of wasting so much time making sites look good in IE when every other browser (even Opera) gives me less guff.

Embedded Tweets in the Footer It's all about keeping your site fresh and up to date, right? I thought the best way to do this was to write a script that cached our latest Tweet server-side. I'm not sure if it fully complies with the infamous Rules of the Road, but since our use doesn't really allow for tons of Branding®©™, I think we'll be okay.

I ended up using WebcodingEasy.com's fantastic Convert twitter created_at time format to ago format script to make our time appear like Twitter's "12 minutes ago" format, as well as another open source script (which I, embarrassingly, can't find right now) to convert all tweeted links into clickable links.

The toughest part was writing the Tweet caching script. Essentially, my script reads a Tweet which was saved onto the sever from the Twitter API. When it's saved, I append a variable called cached_Tweet_Time along with the current server time. When someone loads the footer, it will read the cached Tweet and check the time. If it's less than a minute old, the script returns the Tweet from the server. If it's more than a minute old, it fetches a Tweet from Twitter. If anyone is interested in the source code, let me know and I'll post it here.

In the future, I'd like to append the script so it only returns Tweets which aren't "at-replies".

In Conclusion This has been one of the most ambitious site designs I've ever completed³, and I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Front-end design has never been my strong suit; in fact, most of my designs end up looking the same. This time, however, I forced myself to look outside of my wheelhouse and try something new. I hope you guys like it, and if you have any questions, let me know.

It's always a treat when event directors bring us out to document their race. This is the third time we've been out to the Columbus Marathon, and every time I go, it makes me want to race it. I've never seen so many people run across the finish line with smiles on their faces.