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Women Runners Unite!

Posted on June 27, 2008 by S Running
Culture, Projects

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about a social networking site that we released into Beta a few weeks ago called Traxee. In late 2007, I was having a discussion with a friend and colleague about how she had in her early thirties, been an out of shape chain smoker, in poor health, and a person who could hardly jog 100 yards. Even worse, she didn’t think she had the power to do anything about it. One day she thought to herself, maybe I can run 10 yards – so she did. Then she tried to run 20 yards, then 100, then 1,000 and so on. Flash forward to the present, she (her name is Beth, by the way) runs 4 plus days a week and is currently training for the San Francisco marathon.

Beth is a marketing executive by day. Part of her bag of tricks is to spot trends and to understand how to relate to a mass audience as well as communicate effectively. Mixing her marketing perspective with her viewpoint from the shoes of a woman runner, she noticed that the majority of society grossly diminishes women’s sports as compared to men’s. Perhaps even more disappointing is the way women athletes are commonly portrayed in women targeted media: women’s fitness articles tend to be about losing weight or sports fashion. She identified a gap in the industry. Namely, that the huge community of focused women runners did not have an online place (nor, arguably, an offline place) to exchange ideas, offer support to each other, and to arrange real-world interactions. To have a place just to connect with like-minded women who love to run.

She created the concept of Traxee as the online community designed for the needs of a woman athlete. It would be a platform for women to create posts, make friends and even log their daily miles into the ‘Trax Log’. Once she had her vision, she enlisted our team at Tuesday Creative to be her social networking architects. I’ll save the behind-the-scenes technical details of how we did it for another post, but we are very proud of what we were able to accomplish for Beth and her crew of dedicated runners.

We invite you to check out Traxee and – especially if you are a runner who happens to be a woman – encourage you to create an account and start logging your miles. Hopefully the Traxee community will break a million miles in the near future!