It was, as I remember, the 3rd or 4th site set up for a running event. By July 1997, there were well over 500 Web sites devoted to running and they were still growing exponentially. If you aren't interested in the technical stuff you can skip to the next section. The internet is a composed of two kinds of computers, clients and servers. Servers generally contain most of the data or documents and programs to dispense them.
Clients access the servers to get data, documents and even programs to run locally on the client.
Your home PC is most likely a client. All the computers on the internet are hooked to each other via a network. Ultimately, by hooking millions of computers together world wide through various connection lines you wind up with a giant web like network called the Internet. So computers can talk to each other, each has an assigned number called an address. These are assigned by a governing body to assure they are unique.