The Rise and Fall of 3athlete

In the early 2000's, I was a triathlete. I few in love with the sport right away. It allowed me to stay competitive after my swimming years and I wasn't half bad. Being a tech-geek, I registered a domain name and started a quasi-blog/slashclone related to triathlon. And in November of 2000, 3athlete was born.

As the injuries added up and I fell out of love with the sport in late November of 2002, I killed 3athlete with prejudice. I simply turned it off one day and walked away. It was no longer fun.

A few months later, as spring made an appearance, I wanted to keep track of triathlon news. Since very few sites had an RSS feed, I had to create my own. With some perl scripts to parse html, a mysql database to store all the strings, and a php front end, I accidentally launched the next version of 3athlete with a few hours of coding.

3athlete grew over the years into a 50k hit/hour site. Many of these hits were to my RSS feeds (every page on 3athlete had an RSS feed) or from spiders, but it was sill interesting scaling a large volume website. The 3athlete volume was laughable compared to my day job, but for "shared" hosting, performance was top notch.

All was rosy, but as web 2.0 blossomed, my interest in the project dwindled and more triathlon sites had native RSS feeds, 3athlete started to become irrelevant. While I had a core dedicated following, there was limited growth and I had no desire to integrate social features into 3athlete to improve its relevance. Due to these factors, 3athlete essentially turned into a link farm.

So, with little fanfare, I killed 3athlete yet again. It is possible I will launch something again in the future, but for now, I should really concentrate on the half-baked, yet useful, *.racechecklist sites.