26th of October 2007... Blog is 1 year old today !!! -

It seems a lot longer than 12 months since I started this blog. A year ago, I had been mulling over the idea of starting one. I had a few reasons for starting one but no good one!! One reason I had was that I wanted to mess about with a blog just to see what they were like and see what they were about. Some people write blogs as you would a diary but I had no interest in anything like that. I think I'd get bored writing it let alone reading it! The second reason was that I thought it might be a useful way to keep track of my own training. Maybe set a target, write up a training schedule and chart my progress so I could look back over it. After all, blogs can be private as well and I could have blocked access to it. So, a year ago, I set myself some targets for 3 months time, i.e. February 2006. However, after a small bit of speed work, I reached my target a lot sooner than I thought I would and I began thinking at that stage that the idea of the blog might be pointless.

At the same time a year ago, I started off doing the East Cork AC Winter 3 km series, which I try and do every year. I noticed however, that while the results were e-mailed out, they were not available on any website. So, putting them up on the blog seemed like a good idea. From that and the feedback I got, I put up more results of other races. Then, I started getting queries about the races....When is it on? / Where is it on? / Where is the registration? / What is the course like? ....and so on. So, then I included maps, race previews and other info. It soon became clear to me that there were a lot of new people out there who were looking for information on what was happening locally. As someone who has been doing races for some 15 years, I knew I could provide some of the answers that people were looking for.

At the start, the traffic to the site was pretty low but soon built to 200 to 300 hits per month. That's roughly 7 to 10 visitors per day which suprised me...I thought it would be a lot lower!! The blog also appeared in the Google rankings but it was way down on the 8th or 9th page so I rarely got any hits from it. And so it stayed until the Cork City Marathon and the Summer races. Then, the hits started coming hot and heavy ;o) And as the traffic went up, so did the blog's rating within Google. Now, the blog gets on average about 70 hits per day and very often appears on the first page after a Google search. At the moment, each month breaks the record for the previous month and it looks likely that with 1 week to go, the blog will easily break the 2000 hits mark for the month of October 2007. So, for the moment, it is very much 'work in progress'. I kept the term 'experimental' blog in the introduction as I don't know what it's future is. I know that for some, they use it as their primary source of information as to what is going on locally and that's great!! So, as long as I feel that people are finding it of value, I'll keep it going. For me, I feel that if I can in some small way encourage people to attend more races and help keep the local running scene more active, then it is worth the effort.

And finally, I'd like to thank everyone who contributed in their own way to the blog over the last year. Be it snippets of information, photos, links, results, etc. I like to think that this blog acts in a way like a public noticeboard for others as well so that they can share information with their fellow runners. In that way, we all benefit from it.

So, roll on year 2..!!