Going Off!, the snowboarding history podcast conceptualised and presented by Jen Sherowski and Tricia Byrnes, is a brilliant concept.

Each episode, they take key stages in snowboarding's history and development and dip into their enviable black book of contacts to tell the story expertly and even-handedly. Together they've made Going Off! into something different: not yet another four-hour interview show, but an oral history of snowboarding's early days, pieced together from the people who were actually there.

And they make a great team - Jen with her journalistic and storytelling chops honed through years in the snowboard mag and creative industry trenches, and Tricia with her unimpeachable connections to snowboarding roots and history; both through her own career - she won the US Open halfpipe as a 17-year-old amateur in 1992, and rode for the US at Salt Lake in 2002 - and her links in the East Coast snowboarding firmament.

Thanks to snowboarding, and the places it has taken me, I have known them both for years, so when they got in touch with me back in April 2025 when Going Off! was still in the planning stages and were canvassing a few people for advice on how to set it up, I was intrigued to hear more.

I thought it was a great idea then, and having watched them pull it off since it launched last October, I still do.

So when I came back to the podcast this summer, after a four-month break, they were the obvious choice for my first recording. We sat down in July, and as a way back into Looking Sideways it was a perfect conversation for me.

We talked about all of it: why they aim for 80% accuracy and leave the next 10% to the comments; why so many snowboarders of a certain age need the record to show they were a skateboarder first, and why nobody ever says they were a skier first; what snowboarding would rather forget, which Jen answers in one word; and why there's no Going Off! Patreon.

With magazines like TransWorld gone, as they discuss in their latest episode, The Birth And Glory Of Snowboard Magazines, somebody has to tell these stories. I'm very glad it's these two.

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00:00 Introduction

04:19 80% Accurate

20:05 Skateboarder First

31:08 Transworld and the Olympics

44:01 Memory, AI and Archives

1:02:52 What Snowboarding Forgets

1:07:20 No Patreon, No Ads

1:19:28 Clip Culture

1:35:05 Housekeeping Corner