Joe,

Are you using ear buds or speakers to listen to the podcasts ? Using ear buds will lower the audio processing load by excluding ambient sound. If you have not tried using ear buds, I suggest trying them. You can reduce the processing load by increasing the contrast between the target sound and the ambient sounds. Ear buds, ear phones and such can do this.

The Buffalo protocol is based on finding the pain threshold of effort and staying just below it for repeated efforts then slowly increasing the level of effort in week to two week stages, always staying below the pain or other symptom trigger threshold.