3 Hours and 20 Minutes

That’s how fast I would need to run 26.2 miles in order to qualify for the Boston Marathon. That breaks down to running each mile in 7 minutes, 38 seconds (or faster), which I’m not quite able to do for 10K, let alone a full marathon. At least I get 10 additional minutes when I turn 45 (3:30, 8:01 pace).

Hmm, maybe I should register 8minutemiles.com…

7 Minute Miles, the Company

In 1997, an S-corp was founded in Minnesota called Golden Links Publishing Limited. Our first product was a multimedia CD-ROM golf guide to all of the public golf courses in Minnesota called Minnesota Golden Links.

In development for almost two years, we traveled around the state taking our own photographs and gathering scorecards and other course data for the product. It was introduced at the 1999 Great Minnesota Golf Show, but it never caught on and most of our inventory was sold to Golf Galaxy for use as promotional items.

After the demise of the CD-ROM, we needed to decide how best to use the huge library of photos and the large amount of information we had gathered. Another version of a CD was out of the question, so we decided to test the waters of the Internet. GoldenLinksGolf.com was launched in the spring of 2000:

Traffic continued to build in 2001, peaking at 124,353 page views in July 2001, with 5,547 unique hosts and more than 5GB of data transferred that month. Despite the rise in viewership, online advertising wasn’t really a mature business model yet and the major assets of the site were sold to TwinCitiesGolf.com after the 2001 season.

After the GoldenLinksGolf.com sale, the name of the company was changed to 7 Minute Miles, Inc. and the focus of the company shifted to technology consulting. We did work for a number of small clients before signing a log-term contract with a company in St. Paul.

MN Web Publishing

Plans for a new “MN Publishing Company” began when a golf blog was spun off from the main 7minutemiles.com blog. Golfing in Minnesota (golfing.mn) launched in April 2006 and was followed by hockey (hockey.mn), running (run.mn), skiing (skiing.mn) and baseball (baseball.mn) blogs.

The .mn domain is the country code for Mongolia, but also provides a unique branding opportunity for Minnesota-based web sites. There are some downsides, though, to dealing with an unusual domain extension – user confusion, search engine optimization issues, higher cost and inferior domain administration tools.

All of the .mn domain content has now been consolidated on 7minutemiles.com.

7 Minute Miles, LLC

7 Minute Miles, Inc. was dormant for several years and by law ceased to be an official corporation on December 31, 2006. On August 28, 2009, a new company was registered with the state of Minnesota called 7 Minute Miles, LLC. Watch for news regarding the LLC coming soon…