dailymile

» see dailymile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

dailymile.com still resolves, and what it serves is its own gravestone. A pale blue page, a drawing of running shoes hung up by the laces, and four lines of text: dailymile has shutdown, thanks to all who were a part of our global community of athletes, 2008 to 2019, and an address to write to if you have questions. Nobody ever took it down. It has been sitting there since March 2019.

Ben Weiner and Kelly Korevec built the site in 2008 as a social training log. You entered a run or a ride, it went into a feed, and the people you followed left encouragement underneath. The New York Times described it as a place where runners could broadcast their miles to anyone willing to listen, which was accurate and also missed the part that made it work. The feed was full of people going slowly. A first 5K collected the same volume of replies as somebody else's marathon best, and that norm held for years, which is rare for anything with numbers in it.

A paid tier arrived in June 2011 under the name dailymile PRO, which is usually the point where a community starts arguing about whether a free thing has any business charging. It did argue. The site kept going anyway. What eventually beat it was Strava, which had the same social layer plus GPS segments and leaderboards, and which by the middle of the decade was where anyone buying a running watch ended up.

~ the record ~

~ from outside the sport ~

Endurance-log culture is a specific thing and I have never been inside it. The people on dailymile had already decided that a Tuesday evening run was worth writing down and showing to two hundred acquaintances, which is a habit you either have or you do not. I was a software person in Ankara for the whole eleven years it ran. The closest I have come to it is reading, long afterward, that a running website put its own closing notice on the front page and then left it there for seven years.

~ the export window ~

The shutdown was handled quietly and reasonably. Users were given a route to export their history into Strava, and the window closed on 20 March 2019, the same day the site went dark. Some people had a decade of entries in there. One long-time member counted 948 friends and roughly ten thousand logged miles on their profile before pulling the file.

What did not transfer was the part people actually missed. Strava imported the distances, not the eleven years of comments underneath them. An alumni group formed on Facebook afterward to keep the roster together.

Neither founder said much publicly about any of it. When a runner who had been on the site for years wrote to Kelly Korevec after the shutdown, the reply was that they were long removed from dailymile and would rather leave that chapter in the past.

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