Running in College Program

Bretton Bonnet, the coach at Paul VI, is coordinating a seminar for high school runners and their parents to talk about the transition to running in college. You can learn more about it on his blog - http://pvixc.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/introducing-the-race-to-college-speaker-series-brt-group-scholarship/.

This is a great idea. While the idea of getting a college scholarship for running is outside the reach of most high school runners, the opportunity to continue running in college is within reach of many. It makes me so happy when runners from Moorestown extend their running beyond high school. And many have been pretty successful as I wrote in the blog last fall - some even appearing in the NCAA's.

The picture above is the start of the Women's NCAA Div III race in 2008. Below is a picture of some of the Washington University in St. Louis fans at last year's NCAA meet. As you can see, college running can be a lot of fun!

RunSignup.com - Alpha Ready!

We went live with the Alpha of RunSignup.com today.

Right now we are focusing on just the user registration side (although we have most of the race creation and editing done as well). We just want to make sure we get this part right and are able to focus on it. So far today we’ve had about 100 people test it out and things seem to be going well. We are processing credit cards and Paypal transacjavascript:void(0)tions and are giving users a very simple way to cancel the transaction and not register.

Our little effort to make life easier for race directors of running races and their participants is off the ground!

A New Venture

Well, I am about to launch another new little venture. It combines my interests in running and technology.

The basic idea is a web service that makes it easy for races to allow users to signup online. We will go live with an Alpha version of the service in the next day or two (hopefully) for a local race that has agreed to test the service.

This is an old idea that I have been harboring for several years. I’ve used the big market leader, Active.com, as both a runner and as a race director for a number of years. However, they have become un-focused on the running marketplace. Their website is hard to use and certainly does not take advantage of Web 2.0 technology or approaches.

So our site will have focus on running races, it will be simple to use, and it will be much more cost effective than the alternatives in the marketplace. Hopefully people will like it and it will provide a valuable service to others. I’ll be blogging about this a lot over the next few months…