‘Race Purse’ by Mountain Outpost

Yet another Mountain Outpost/Aravaipa/Jamil project, and the second vibe-coded platform aimed at entertaining spectators/fans of the sport that’s dropped this week. This one has a bit of an ‘impressum‘ at least:

Race Purse – by Mountain Outpost

Turn live hype into real support. 100% of contributions go to athletes. This is crowdfunding, not gambling.

The second project needing to explain itself that it’s definitely not gambling. But what it is, is Aravaipa’s acknowledgement that prize money at one of America’s biggest (the biggest?) and one of the highest grossing trail races, managed by the world’s second largest trail running events organizations (after UTMB) might be high time. Folks have been asking for prize purses for Aravaipa events, but especially at Black Canyon years now.

What does Race Purse do?

Race Purse lets fans contribute in real time to increase the athlete fund for select endurance events.

So, the prize money (mostly) comes from the fans.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback (look at me being inspired by the Super Bowl and adding a second football reference in as many posts) and spend Jamil’s money, but to me this is beyond the question of how money should be spend, but rather a matter of: ‘Just because you can “vibe-code” this, doesn’t mean you should’.

When people say ‘AI will influence and inspire every segment of our lives’ maybe this is what they are talking about. None of these platforms would exist without AI-supported coding and development. These tools are early stage startup project – playgrounds if you will. They don’t give us any indication as to ‘what the future will bring’ so it’s too early to claim that ‘this will change everything’. But something does seem afoot and that seems to have jumped the shark. You’re welcome for all the idioms today.