The premier of the new season of Mad Men started me thinking again about how much things can change in a relatively short period of time. And that got me thinking again about the way the internet is changing the way I view trail running, not least through the decision to start WRC.
Like a lot of people, running as been from the start a very solitary pursuit for me, and not just in the day-to-day sense. I grew up in a tiny town with little or no running ‘scene.’ Sure, I ran high school cross country, and a few runners and other outdoor athletes parachuted into town from time to time, but that was about it. Pretty fleeting and amorphous. I knew there was a larger running community out there through magazines and such, but I never felt particularly a part of it. For whatever reason, that never really changed much as I moved around as an adult, not even during stints in towns and cities well-known to have a high number of outdoor athletes per capita.
But it has changed — gradually yet dramatically — over the past few years with the internet. One of the beauties of the medium is the long tail effect by which people with uncommon interests can connect. It’s easy to be cynical about technology (even anti-technology technology) and its commercialization — heaven knows I often am — but, at its best, it really does do something for us. I love that I can now easily find information, inspiration, and, yes, even gear that increases my enjoyment of trail running. And I also notice I feel more like a member of a community. Wilderness running still feels iconoclastic, but less borderline misanthropic. So technology can be nice per se, but I think its real value is best measured by its human dimension.
And that was really the genesis for WRC: rather than growing organically out of an established scene or building one from nothing, like two companies I admire and which occupy similar space in the market to us, WRC was meant from the beginning to go out to all the trail runners operating outside any established community. Whether we are actually serving that (or any other) purpose in a way that justifies our continued existence is still up for grabs, but it has been fun so far.
I was unable to embed this clip, but it is good enough to merit the jump: Mad Men, The Carousel
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