Two Years of Electric Cable Car

June marks the anniversary for Electric Cable Car – happy birthday! It’s been two years since I launched this blog. Yes excited to call this a blog again. After years of mourning the erosion of individual websites in favor of social media profiles, it seems that the tide might be turning. Yes, AI will destroy even more of what we’ve experienced for a brief moment in the early days of the internet, but as long as individuals still get to register domains, throw WordPress installs on self-hosted servers and design, code and publish, I will have hope, and continue on. This is my web, and I enjoy it that way.

Back in 2022 when I started this blog here’s what I wrote:

I wanted to create a space to comment on the evolution of mountains sports and specifically trail, ultra, and mountain running. We’ve seen incredible growth in the area over the last few years and I, as keen observer and huge fan, wanted a place to collect what I find and share what I think about it all.

That was two years ago and the trend line for the growth of our sport and favorite pastime is still only going upwards.

Last year, for the first anniversary of Electric Cable Car here are the numbers I shared:

• I published 411 posts and articles. This is post 412.
• In total I wrote 55,374 words, not counting these.

Since then this blog has grown to over 950 posts and around 140,000 typed and published words.

Traffic has grown by 500% over last year. I’m pretty happy with this.

The focus of this site and my writing hasn’t changed:

Lots of people and organizations are tweeting, insta-posting, and sharing news, changes and happenings on their various channels. I am following them all. I won’t be posting a giant firehose of information but will post the pieces I consider most crucial and share them here with a few of my observations trying to link them together and make sense of it all.

Well, the focus of Electric Cable Car remains but the firehose has opened up a bit. There’s a lot going on in our sport. A lot of movement, momentous decisions, and some big stumbles along the way. Listening to a couple podcasts over the last few weeks I was reminded of two things:

• What got me excited about the internet is the ability to carve out my own space and with social media companies continuing to wreck their own platforms this becomes more and more valuable.
• Sometimes to make a difference is taking inspiration from another area outside of your niche and introduce this to the field you’re operating in. Not everyone needs to follow the same path and copy each other and while it might’ve proven successful in the past, it doesn’t guarantee success going forward. An unproven path could indicate impossibility or genius. Which one it’ll be still waits to be seen.

As I am continuing to establish the exact place for this blog in our sport and culture I am excited to expand the stories I follow, the voices I listen to and amplify, and the narratives I get to weave.

Here are a couple things that you can look forward to and some changes you can expect to see:

• ECC started off as a companion to Singletrack, my podcast. I’m working on reversing the order of priorities. There are SO. MANY. PODCASTS out there. There are very few blogs. Singletrack will remain, but the frequency, and focus will change bit.
• That change is already visible in the name change the Instagram handle. There I will post more links to stories I write here.
• I’ll be in Silverton for Hardrock 100 this year. First time for me and I’m stoked. How will I cover the event for Electric Cable Car? Stay tuned! But it won’t be the usual “here are a bunch of interviews with athletes” format. I’m working on a new and unique angle – hope you’ll enjoy what I’m cooking up.
• The Hardrock media coverage will be a test case for what I am trying to do for Chamonix during UTMB week. I’ll be there and I am working on a strategy for this week that’s informed by what experiences I gain covering Hardrock while also acknowledging that I won’t be arriving in the Alps with a team of people and a truck full of gear. Heck, I still gotta run OCC too, right?

Alright, what’s left to say is that I want to thank you for reading and for being part of the journey. There’s more, so much more to come. Let’s get to it.