Endurance athletes track training progress in cyberspace.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

Peter Davis used to keep track of his running miles in his head. Then he switched to pen and paper. Then he gave that up. Then he found out about WeEndure.com, a Web site for endurance athletes designed to solve the age-old problem of how to log training miles.

"I like the fact that it allows you to keep in touch with other people out there," says Davis, a Eugene database consultant who's been training for the Butte to Butte 10K race. "It allows for supportive commentary back and forth between people who are interested in the same sort of (activities)."

Aimed at runners, cyclists, swimmers and triathletes, the Web site is the brain child of Joshua Cohen, a 31-year-old Web developer, who picked up cycling after moving to Eugene from New Jersey in 2003.

"The idea actually came to me in the shower," Cohen says. "My friends were all cyclists and we would all exchange e-mails about how we were riding. I thought it would be cool if we could make a Web site and upload it from there."

Cohen's site, which has only been up since March, is similar to the social networking site MySpace.com, but in this online community, all of the participants are endurance athletes. The site allows users to not only keep track of their miles on their own personal training page, but also to create charts, crunch numbers and compare those numbers with other users. Athletes can exchange tips, offer advice, search for a training partner and post photos.

Jacob Shaw, 32, a Eugene network engineer who's into running and biking, says the best part about the site is being able to see what all the other users on the site are doing for their training.

"It's just being able to put (the numbers) out there," he says. "Not to compete necessarily, but to compare with other people's training schedule."

Shaw lists his upcoming races and recent training runs on his We Endure page. His race calendar includes a listing for the Haulin' Aspen Marathon in Bend this August and some of the recent bike rides he's taken. He also can upload running data from a wrist-mounted GPS device and heart rate monitor.

"I'm new to the running thing and I've been getting a lot of valuable (tips)," Shaw says. "But I think it needs a lot more people to become really valuable."

Currently, We Endure has only about 1,000 members but, Cohen says, membership is growing exponentially and traffic picks up anytime the site is mentioned on a blog or Web site.

The page is fully supported by Google ads, but Cohen plans to launch a paid subscription service offering more features and no advertising. He says membership is divided fairly equally among the various endurance activities and many users are casual athletes looking for a little motivation.

"It just seems to be regular, everyday people who are out running or biking or swimming," he says. "I just think it's a lot more exciting to be able to see how my friends did (with their training) and say I rode more miles than you last week."