There’s a famous expression that says “all good things must come to an end”. While The Run Up is not closing its doors, we are moving in a new direction. You may have noticed last year we started a blog. In all honesty, the content was hit or miss and we took a bit of a break in December. The idea was to continue to drive people to our site while we worked on the fantasy side of things. However, all work on the fantasy side of things came to an end last year. After the season ended, we took a long break. Over that time we realized that The Run Up will now be a cyclocross commentary website.
Where we went wrong
The biggest reason for this change is that after a strong start a few years ago, we decided to grow and expand rapidly by heavily modifying our code base (nerd alert). This involved rewriting thousands of lines of code and essentially redoing the entire website. In addition, the UCI changed the way their results section worked and our auto scraper no longer worked. Adding results became a manual process. With the added work and rapid expansion, we ended up in a place where we had no working code and finalizing it would be a full time job. Since The Run Up is a one-man operation, this just isn’t feasible. It was a very hard lesson to learn. We should have stuck with what we had and made tweaks along the way.
On a side note – if anyone is interested in picking up this project, we have all the code in a private GitHub repo. It is written in PHP and designed to work with WordPress. Feel free to reach out if you are interested.
Where we are headed
As we move forward, we are learning lessons from our blog section. The Run Up will be a place of cyclocross commentary and analysis. You can expect 2-3 posts a week covering all that is cross. We will write about the European and North American circuits as well as venturing into general opinions about cross as a whole. We will not be doing results; there are plenty of sites for that. We are also going to shy away from “lists”. Most of last seasons coverage consisted of top-ten lists. You can find things like that on other sites. Our aim is to provide interesting and honest commentary on all things cyclocross.
Hopefully this change in direction will breathe new life into this site and the cross community as a whole. We are excited to focus solely on commentary, opinions and analysis. If you like the site, please share on social media. We don’t make any money off this site – in fact, it’s a losing endeavour. But it’s fun and we enjoy writing about our favorite sport. We hope you enjoy the ride.
