How runfarwhere works

Races come from registration sites, the Western States qualifier and Golden Ticket lists, the UTMB World Series race list and races' own websites. They're gathered into one database, and a fact corrected by hand stays corrected: no import or scraper writes over it.

A race that has been run stays on runfarwhere with its page. Lists show upcoming races by default; past ones are a filter away.

Qualifier tags are matched from the source lists by name, date, distance and place. A race can carry a tag that a source has since dropped until someone removes it — check the source list before you plan around it.

Describe the race you're looking for and a language model reads the description, searches every upcoming race with a tool that scores how close each one comes, and picks the five nearest — saying how each falls short when none fits exactly. It only ever picks races the search returned.

A course comes from its course file: a GPX file the race publishes, or a published course that brings its aid stations and cutoffs with it. The file is stored as it was loaded, and that's the file the GPX download gives you.

Distance is measured along the ground between the track's points. A GPS track usually measures a little short, so when a race states its length, distances along the course are scaled to it — which is what the race's own aid-station chart counts in.

Climbing adds up every rise in the elevations read every 25 metres along the track. Reading at a fixed spacing ties the figure to the terrain rather than to how often the file recorded a point. Grades are smoothed over 100 metres, so a short wall still reads as a wall.

When a file has no elevations of its own, they're read once from the Terrain Tiles on AWS, and the race's page says so.

Race-day weather is read from Open-Meteo's historical archive at the course's start, or the race's town, on each of the last five editions' dates. The typical high and low on every race page averages the week around the race's date over recent years.

Winners, times, terrain notes and course histories are researched from published results and race descriptions, and each one links the page it came from.

Finding a race is free: search, describe the race you want, browse by distance and place, and read any race's page. Premium, $5 a month or $40 a year, adds what you need to run it: the elevation profile, aid stations with their cutoffs and the climbing between them, a pace calculator, grades, the GPX file, race-day weather and past results.