Hey team. Rainy / terrible smog infested day here in NYC. Couldn't do my long run due to the wildfires so I decided to make my own My Fitness Pal MCP that connects to Endorphins Running API (which includes all daily calorie burn) and then ultimately created my own MCP for it to be interactable with Claude. User Story --> I am training for NYC Marathon. I need to lose 10lbs to be in race weight. I am running 40-60 miles per week. I want my My Fitness Pal to more closely connected to my training data from my Endorphins Training Plan. I have a full step by step overview here so anyone can do this. Disclaimer this likely will require some intermediate level coding knowledge as the tutorial will build an MCP from scratch. Additional disclaimer - I am the founder of Endorphins Running and don't want anyone to think this is promotional. Built this for my personal use. End result - a private, deployed web dashboard that pulls everything together, projects my progress, and that I can even ask questions to through Claude. Here's the whole thing, step by step, specific enough to follow along. **Before you start: what this assumes** This is an intermediate build. It's absolutely doable if you're comfortable in a few areas — but it's not a "copy-paste and you're done" tutorial. Here's an honest checklist of what'll make it smooth versus painful. You should be comfortable with: - The command line — running things like git clone, npm install, and npm run dev without it feeling scary. - JavaScript / TypeScript — you don't need to be an expert, but you should be able to read a function, follow data from one file to another, and not panic at a type error. - The basic web model — the idea that a front end (what you see in the browser) talks to a back end (a server), which talks to a database. If those three words make sense, you're fine. - Git and GitHub — creating a repo, committing, and pushing. You'll set up (all free): - A GitHub account - A MongoDB Atlas account (free tier database) - A Vercel account (free hosting) - Node.js installed on your machine (v20+)