In the world of Endurance Sports/Running, there are few key websites, I feel like all of us should subscribe to. Since April 2016, I have spent a good amount of time to figure out how to manage my race results, training details/progress and found some seriously good websites for that.

I use Athlinks.com to manage my race results, look other runner’s race time to see how they improved, how they did in the past in a race I am planning to do this year etc. Its pretty good site, and every one should be on it if you race! My second favorite website is Strava.com. For a longest time I used Garmin Connect website, and even tho its pretty good, its not as rich as the analytics Strava provides. At this point, I stopped using Garmin Connect, except to upload my run data, but use Strava mainly to track my training and progress. Also, the social feed aspect of Strava is phenomenal!

Now the third part is to figure out which race people are running and liking!

Back in April, when I knew I liked running races, I went looking for races to sign up, and I started with Yelp, which was ok, but something about using yelp to check for races, along side of looking for the next best breakfast burrito, it just didn’t feel right to me. Even then, I did go write about my race reviews on yelp for a while. (https://www.yelp.com/list/races-races-races-5k-10k-half-tri-updated-july-06-2016-laguna-beach). The problem with Yelp was, its more ‘business centric’, than ‘event centric’. I had to pile all my new reviews for 2016 along with 2015, and so on. Which is unfair, because each year’s event is different.

When I ran Long Beach Half Marathon in October, there was a race give away through our Snail’s Pace Running group, that told our members to sign up and review the race on RaceRaves.com. That is the first time I heard of that site, but 10minutes into using it, I was hooked! It had everything I was looking for in a Race Website, (not my running data, or race results, but information about races).  This site provides Race names, year, weather data for the race day(if someone liked a race on a nice day as opposed to a hot humid day would be a good information to know!).

The site works similar to Yelp, in which runners, sign up, review races. If the race is not found, you can add them. Runners get to rate races. So if you want to look for 4 or 5 star race,  you could do that! The California International Marathon race already has a staggering 83 rating already! And they use shoes instead of stars which is kind of cute!

The quality of Sites like RaceRaves, relies on the quality and genuineness of the contributors. The master mind behind RaceRaves site, has been promoting the site with runners are lot of major races, through give-away and such which attracts, lot of good runners to join the site.

As of this writing, they already have over 10,000 races, with thousands and thousands of quality reviews! Also, as a side perk, I do thoroughly enjoy reading through their blog. Lot of helpful good tips and information to better with ones’ training and running!

RaceRaves fills in the need for a Yelp Like website for Races, and this week they turn 2! I really wish them all the successes!

If you run races, do sign up with RaceRaves.com. Along with getting to read reviews of races and contribute reviews, you will have a chance to win some free entries to races as well!

Some of the features I  like about RaceRaves.com

1. When you check races, you can add it to your ‘past races’ or ‘future races’, and mark either as ‘paid’, or not paid. This gives a one page status of all the races you done, and all the races you are planning to do/paid for etc. This is such a nifty little feature. Right now I struggle to manage this with an excel sheet, and this will be very helpful for those of us that want to sign up for races that haven’t even opened for registration yet!
2. The race finder option works similar to Yelp’s restaurant search. You key in distance and or zip code, and it gets you the closest races, and rating etc.
3. You can follow other runners as they refer to as ‘Lunatics’ in a endearing way. You can see people’s future race schedule as well. This could be very handy, as I mostly run races depending on the races people run from my running group.