Fantastic 4 for Electric Cable Car

It is time again. Time for the annual moment to reflect and celebrate this very blog/website/experiment. I’m four years into doing this thing I call Electric Cable Car. A lot has changed around me and a lot keeps changing. I will get to some of the changes, but first, a look at what has been and is happening at ECC.

If you’re interested in catching up on what I wrote in previous years, here’s my intro and about page with the full list of all my anniversary posts.

Let’s start with some numbers:

For the full year 2025 I ended up publishing 497 short posts and 39 full articles, but only 13 episodes of my podcast Singletrack – which makes me sad, but that’s for another day. Overall that’s fewer overall posts than the year before, but with my current workload on various other projects – hello TRFF, hello Beast – it’s about as much as I can publish here. This still comes to an average of about 46 posts per month, or 1.5 posts per date, which feels about right.

Traffic in 2025 was up 66% over the previous year. And so far for 2026 I am tracking about 85% growth over 2025. Something seems to be happening, and I hope it’s not all AI crawlers.

And this one is just for fun: Overall I’ve written 423,800 words, resulting in 2,108 full articles, link posts, and podcast announcements since the first day of Electric Cable Car back in 2022.

In 2025 I also launched the ‘ECC Live Ticker’ for several of the longest and most important trail events. I’m still experimenting with it and am trying to find the usefulness and manageability of it all. Others have started offering similar features, which I welcome and wish them luck – it’s hard!

Last month I also pushed the first bigger layout revision on the homepage since ECC first launched. Now, all race results – which have proven popular – are out of the main feed and are neatly tucked on the homepage, for easy access. I really like the way this reorganizes the homepage. I hope you find it as useful as I do. One fun challenge with this is it requires – or invites me rather – to write a very brief highlight of the race results. How do you capture in 20 words or less a weekend of events with thousands of runners and multiple distances? What’s the one story worth featuring there? A fun challenge indeed.

Now with the caretaking taken care of, let’s talk about the artificial elephant in the room.

When I started ECC I had two goals: 1. To build a website that I love to use everyday – I know how to write code and love designing websites, and 2. To give myself a platform to write, which I’d been searching for for years, decades even. I had made several attempts in the past to share my life (how quaint!) to report on a topic – technology (overdone), politics (exhausting) but nothing stuck over all these years. ‘Endurance running, mountain sport, and trail culture’ is a topic broad enough to give me fuel to write here every day. But most importantly I am truly passionate about this area of interest. In some form or another I engage with it daily, professionally and personally. I run, I love the outdoors, mountain culture is my favorite culture.

A couple major things have changed in these past four years I’ve been publishing ECC (and the eight years I’ve been producing Singletrack, plus the additional four years I co-owned The Outdoor Society before that):

First there was the transition to, and then away from social media. The “away from” part we’re still in the midst of it. But the “to” part massively shifted the way people use the internet. Everything became siloed, hard to track and link to. The algorithms – primed to keep us outraged and filled with ads – are ushering in a departure from social media as average users get increasingly frustrated with their inability to keep tabs on their favorite accounts, voices, creators, and yes, brands – the very thing that propelled social media to the forefront of “world wide web” usage for most people.

When I started ECC I wasn’t so much banking on this, I was more just being stubborn and wanting my own website, my domain, my blog as a creative playground. I grew up with the thrill of publishing directly to a place anyone could visit, and I just created it to get that piece back into my life. But since then Twitter has died, Instagram is becoming useless, and everyone is splintered to countless little siloes, from WhatsApp Groups to little Mastodon servers. But aside from people fleeing to various platforms and tools the other things folks rediscovering is the written word. Most social media sites have pivoted to rich media like video, but these take lots of time to create, so people want to go back to basics – they write.

What an incredible time this is for ECC. I get to link to people’s writing again. Yes, there are still podcasts – but they come with transcripts now, and there is still tons and tons of videos on Youtube, but what makes my day, and work here at ECC fun is to be able to link to people’s writing. That’s a big portion of what makes this blog shine and it creates such an incredible ‘system of record’ or ‘log book’ for the trail running world. I link to what someone wrote. I share a sentence or paragraph of what that person published. I give credit (link back) and I track (searchable) conversations, comments, posts and articles. I don’t post every race results, I don’t share every product announcement from a brand, and neither do I post training updates from the elites. But what I post I have a comment on and try to weave into a bigger story of what I believe is important as trail running progresses, evolves, grows and professionalizes.

The second big development, and that has really arrived in the trail running space over the last six month is the adoption of AI.

• AI is being used to write anywhere: this still hard for me to catch sometimes and it’s even harder to comprehend. Why would a person who wants to have their voice heard let AI write for them?
• AI is being used to modify workflows for people. The reliance on existing tools, apps, SAAS offerings, and platforms is shifting and people are building their personal stack of how they navigate their world and the internet.
• AI is heralded as the toolbox to create the next products: this is, so far, much hyped but very little actually field tested.

How do I use AI?

• I don’t use AI to write – doh.
• I don’t use it for research. AI is just too often wrong in the most charming and confident way that I don’t trust it, at all.
• I probably should use it for proof-reading (I know, I know, but I am reluctant as of yet as I don’t want it to change my voice too much.)
• I cautiously use it for small code edits. In the past I searched the web and mostly found the answer to a WordPress PHP problem I had on Stack Overflow or another forum for WordPress developers. These searches I have always relied on when writing code, be it HTML, CSS, Javascript, or PHP, but over the last couple of years online search has gotten so bad, so gummed up, so useless, that it’s been maddening to find the right solutions. When I can’t find the answer on the open web, I use one of the AI tools and sometimes find the answer there. This is a minimal workflow change for me, I essentially just augment the regular web search with an additional AI search if I can’t find the answer in a reasonable time.

This is where I am currently at with my AI usage on ECC. Am I looking at what others are building and wondering if there’s something that I can adopt to help me and ECC? In short: yes, but very very cautiously.

Clearly the AI tools are coming. But I currently hesitate calling them actual solutions. They are tools and how much they can solve still waits to be seen. We’re still overhyping the glitzy interfaces that are being teased. Behind the overly verbose code experiments there’s still a massive task waiting to bring any of these things to life – and turn them into anything resembling a sustainable contribution to our trail media landscape.

As a writer and observer of culture all these changes and developments are my fuel. There’s movement, there’s excitement. People’s are building stuff and I get to report on it – good or bad. This is what makes getting out of bed in the mornings fun. This is what I created Electric Cable Care for, and this is why I’m excited for the coming year.