RunCal is an independent calendar of running races across Australia. Road, trail and track, from 2km family dashes to hundred-mile ultras.
RunCal is built by Tim and Matt, both of Delta Running Project in Sydney. They got got sick of chasing race details across multiple sites and decided to just fix it themselves. Tim looks after the site itself: the data, the research and everything technical behind it. Matt handles the relationships with race organisers, event partners and sponsors, which means a good share of what's on this calendar has been confirmed by talking to the people putting the race on.
We're club runners who run as much as our bodies (and wives) allow us to. Tim's clocked 2:36 in the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival and 1:10 at the 2023 Australian Half Marathon Championships at Alexandra Headland. Matt's taken on the Western Australian IRONMAN and continues to rack up results in Sydney's biggest races TCS Sydney Marathon and Voltaren City2Surf. That background matters less as a credential than as a reason we built this: we use the calendar ourselves, most weekends.
Between us we've raced our way through a genuinely long list of the events on this site, with a couple of our favourites being the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival and the McGrath Launceston Running Festival.
Certification is checked against the register, not the claim. An event is only marked certified here if we have found it in the World Athletics' published list of certified road courses, in the AIMS member directory, or, for trail ultras in the UTMB World Series. We don't repeat an organiser's "certified" claim without confirming it. If you are chasing a qualifying time or a legitimate PB, that badge needs to mean something.
Results come from the official timing provider. We give you a sneak peek at the top finishgers and provide a link to the timing company's own published data.
It's a clean, easy to use, race directory. Access the site on any devcie and find your race, hassle free. We keep adverting to a minimum, to ensure your expericne is a premium one.
Certification and course data is all in one place. Whether a course is World Athletics measured, whether it is a realistic PB course, what the surface actually is.
Runner's notes. First-hand notes on individual events: where the hill genuinely hurts, how quickly entries go, whether the parking advice is optimistic. These are written by real people who ran the race, us or someone from the organising club.
RunCal is free to use, and free for organisers to be listed on. It is funded by display advertising and by partnerships with events and sponsors, which Matt manages.
We'd rather be direct about what that does and doesn't buy. A partner can be promoted on this site, and where they are, it's labelled. What no amount of money changes is an event's certification status, or where it sits in the calendar. Those are set by the research, not the commercial relationship, and if we ever let that slip the calendar stops being worth using, including to us.
We would rather hear about it than leave it sitting there. If a date is out, a distance is missing, or an event has moved or folded, tell us. We will check it against the organiser and correct it, usually within a few days.
