Launch: runclubs.ca - All the best running clubs in your Canadian city
A quick side project that lists all of the running clubs in Canadian cities, laid out in a convenient, weekly schedule for easy reference.
Running is my favourite hobby, and run clubs are getting incredible publicity right now about them being the new social clubs, the new dating apps, etc. I've been using run clubs while I've been travelling the world for the past 10 years, working remotely. Going to run clubs has consistently been the best thing I've done when arriving in a new city. It makes it easy to meet new people, explore running routes in a new place, and just get a vibe for the new city/country.
I've recently moved to Vancouver, and from my experience visiting in the past, I knew that there were a ton of running clubs / groups going on in the city - unfortunately they are mostly scattered across Instagram / Facebook pages. I hate having to log onto Instagram to find information.
So, I somehow nabbed the domain name runclubs.ca - which surprisingly was available. I thought that surely someone else had thought of this idea, but it turns out nobody has in Canada (to my knowledge).
The goal
An easy way to view all the run clubs happening in your Canadian city, easily viewable on a weekly schedule / grid. That's all.
Since building it, I have really enjoyed being able to load up the site and see immediately what clubs are happening at what time tonight. Such a better experience than loading up Instagram, scrolling through 100 stories or searching through run club accounts to find the one that runs on a Monday night in my city.
It's simple. I currently have running clubs from Vancouver, Toronto, and Kitchener/Waterloo, with hopes to add a bunch more (but it takes some time / effort to find them all) and hoping that anyone who checks out the site will submit a few of them along the way.
Club Pages
Built into the site is individual club pages, which right now just show some really basic info; but so many clubs don't have websites and simply rely on Instagram page and I think there is a cool opportunity here for running clubs to get more exposure through these pages that will surface on Google / AI search engines, etc.
Clubs in Google Search Results
The potential with the domain name is really incredible. Just within a few days of launching the site, it is already being picked up by Google and showing quite high in search results. Specifically searching for a run club (say, Beer Run Club Vancouver) is already on the second page (in a few cases, the first page) of Google search results. Again, I think at the very least this website can send a few more runners to these run clubs, particularly those people who aren't already deep in their local cities Instagram run community.
I'm not too sure what the real long term goal is here, or if there even is one, but the running community has always been incredible, and run clubs are picking up more steam every day, so having this domain name and a useful page like this I think will open up the door for opportunities in the future.
Building things for communities
I've tried many times to build things that help bring community together. Traveling solo for so many years has shown me how special a good community is.
I started by building kwconcerts.ca a few years ago for the music scene in Kitchener Waterloo. It was incredible how quickly the local music scene took hold of it, and how many people immediately reached out thanking me for the website. It still runs on autopilot, scraping the internet for concerts and shows in KW - but now that I've moved away I haven't had the chance to update it for a while. (It still gets hundreds of page views every week).
Now that I'm in a brand-new city in Vancouver, with not many friends and no support system, I'm looking for a community again. I think building this runclubs.ca, for me, is a way to open the door to nudge my way into the running community here. There are so many running groups in this city, and if this site brings me into the circle of run clubs here, it will be absolutely worth the effort.
There is something to be said about building things for niche communities. Facebook groups about local mushroom foraging, forums on archaic technology, etc. These places have always existed, and hopefully always will. I think my intent behind these little side projects is to help build these scenes wherever I go, as it not only helps everyone else out, but it also gives me a great introduction to meet people and be brought into circles that otherwise I would not be exposed to.
It's all about finding interesting people, really.
The tech
With the help of the Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I was able to spin up the website incredibly fast. It is built on SvelteKit and hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
The site is actually open source, you can check it out on GitHub here. It's sort of my first real open source project that could be forked by someone, so this is very much a learning experience on that front.
It uses JSON files for all the data, for now. I'd like to switch it to SQLite / Cloudflare D1 eventually; but for version 1.0 it was easiest just to use JSON. I am very quickly reaching its boundaries and pains for updating, though.
That's all
For now. I will be posting it on various subreddits (/r/vancouver) and sending the site to run club owners / organizers. Maybe it will take off, maybe it won't.
I'll use it, at the very least.
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