Daniel Watrous' desire to start running provided the inspiration for him to develop a Web site called Maintain Fit, which offers people an opportunity to keep track of their fitness goals and to interact with others who share those same goals.
The free site, launched in 2001 at www.maintainfit.com, has sections where people can keep track of their exercise progress in a fitness log, keep track of nutrition with a food log, and communicate with others in an online forum. The site also has articles and links to fitness information. For now the Web site is a side job from Watrous' day job as an engineer at Micron Technology. He makes about $1 day from online advertising. But Watrous, 31, has big plans for expanding the site.
The Utah native, who lives in Boise with his wife and two young daughters, said he also hopes to launch separate sites that would give fitness enthusiasts a chance to create their own blogging community. He is also exploring the possibility of licensing the content and the features of his site for use by fitness companies to promote to customers or for businesses and corporations to use in corporate wellness programs.
Here are excerpts of Waltrous' Statesman interview:
How did the Web site progress?A. Maintain Fit was nothing more than a hobby. I had full-time job, I was going to school and ready to go full- time into an electrical engineering program. I built the site but didn't do anything to actively market it. Registration was free, and new registration was really slow for the first two years. But for three years I have compiled all the ideas I have received from users. The new site went live in January. Since mid-last year I've had been getting 10 to 20 new accounts a month, but then in March I got 90 and doubled the amount of traffic to my site. I'm getting a lot of growth, and I think there are a few reasons. People are searching more for fitness logs to find the tools that will help them exercise, and the site is a lot more user friendly.
Is this your first effort at building a Web site?
A. I've been writing software for about 10 years now and in 2000, I was working for an ad agency in Salt Lake City where I was the lead on the Intel.com Web site and was working with larger local businesses, health companies and banks. I did the Intranet application for Novell. I became fascinated with the idea of storing information online, and about the same time I started running.
What prompted the running?A. I had never been a runner, but I remember one morning I woke up and was laying in bed staring at the ceiling and thought if I don't get up and run today, I'll never be a runner. I got up that morning, put on some cross-trainers and ran four miles. Before that day I hadn't even run a mile. I thought, "Great, but I'll never do that again." I told my cousin about it, and he said he was doing a lot of running and invited me to run with him. I think there are a lot of people who find It is easy enough to get the motivation to do something one time, but to turn it into a habit it is a lot harder. It takes a lot of discipline, a lot of commitment and a lot of motivation.
And that experience inspired you to start the Web site?
A. Looking back after that first run, I probably wouldn't have run again had it not been for finding a running partner. I thought, "What if I can build a Web site that could become a social or online place that people could communicate with one another? A place where they could keep track of their running, where they could see how much they have accomplished and maybe find that social motivation to keep them in the habit."
Have you been using the site to track your running?A. That is what is fun about the site. I can tell you every run I've had since 2001. In 2001, I ran 911 miles and two marathons, and it's really motivating to go back and see what you did. Since the first year my miles have dropped, but last year I had the first gain in a number of years. I've run more than 2,000 miles since 2001.
Where do you see this ultimately going?A. The main goal of this site is to build this idea of community and social accountability. There is this big movement about social networking and this ties the social element into fitness. I hope to tie the fitness log into blogging and give users the option that every time they log their fitness they can blog about it and have a modern way of communicating with others their fitness goals to allow them to stay motivated and receive feedback. That's my vision.
What would people be surprised to know about you?
A. My left ankle is broken. I'm not sure when it happened, but here is the short version of the story.
About two years ago when my second daughter was two weeks old, I went out for a late evening run. It was dark, but I have run hundreds of miles in the dark and didn't think anything of it until I rolled my ankle. I heard a very loud pop and was sure it was broken. The next day I went to a clinic and an X-ray verified that it was broken. They instructed me to not put any weight on it and to come back in a week. When I went back in, the radiologists and orthopedic specialists asked me when I broke my ankle. When I answered that it was a week ago, they looked at me puzzled and explained that what the X-ray shows is an old break. The end of my fibula is broken off and floating in my ankle. The only time that I can think of that I might have broken it was at age 15. So, as it turns out, I've run two marathons and about 2,000 miles on a broken ankle.
Ken Dey: 672-6757
