The PerformanceRunner.com Blog

After almost 2 years of gathering content, designing pages, and updating race information, www.PerformanceRunner.com is now available to the public. It is a unique race calendar that provides information never before available for free in one central location. PerformanceRunner.com features cross country and road races around the US which offer prize money to the top performers. By making this information more readily available, I hope to help runners support themselves more easily. Prize money can be a great help in paying for training needs and other expenses; PerformanceRunner.com makes it less difficult to find your next race.

In developing this site, I have two goals in mind: to help top athletes fund their lifestyles and to help increase the level of competition at races. Both of these are extremely important in the development of US distance running as a whole. Athletes need to be challenged in order to improve and running has to remain a priority in life in order to train and compete. Too often runners with great potential are forced to scale back or even give up their serious training when faced with the pressures of post-collegiate life. I am hoping to help more runners earn a living, or at least make ends meet, in the years after college before the option of turning professional presents itself.

I want to help you pursue your goals, I want to see you win prize money at races around the country, I want to see faster times at those races, I want US distance running as a whole to become an international powerhouse, and I hope PerformanceRunner.com plays some role in those accomplishments.
This site will be updated as frequently as possible with new races and current race information. Please bookmark the site, subscribe to the newsletter, use it to find your next race, and visit often. Thanks for visiting today, on our first day of public availability. Feel free to email with any questions, comments, feedback, or race information.

Welcome to PerformanceRunner.com. Dedicated to Faster.

Thanks to everyone for their support of PerformanceRunner.com. The launch yesterday went very smoothly and exceeded my hopes. I received very positive and very enthusiastic feedback from many runners and race directors. It is great to receive emails from not only friends and family, but also from those of you I have never met. It proves that US distance runners truly are a community and are interested in both individual success and the success of US distance running.

Thank you to everyone who visited from the various forums and to everyone out there who immediately added a link to PerformanceRunner.com from their own site. Everything that I, and we, can do to get more people to this site is bringing improvements. I know that this site fills a void in the online race calendar space and hope that you find success at your races.

Already, I have been able to increase the number of races currently listed on PerformanceRunner. I started yesterday with 631 races and am now up to 641, not counting the numerous emails I still have waiting in my inbox. I am going to keep working to add races as quickly as possible and hope to break the 1,000 mark sometime. I have said this before: PerformanceRunner thrives on feedback; that that statement is being proven. I want PerformanceRunner.com to be seen as the number one resource for competitive runners to locate races. I am very excited to see the incredible interest level already surrounding the site.

I have a few new developments in mind for the site and will be working on those as well. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to bookmark the site. It will be growing to become even more user friendly in the coming months. Thanks again for all of the support and feedback.

In addition to helping runners find prize money races and better competition, I am also providing you with an easy way of getting your name out in front of the running community. The site includes a Featured Athlete section which will spotlight some of the best and potential talent available. Sure you can Google your name and find all sorts of race results, but why not tell everyone exactly who you are and where you want to go? That is where the Featured Athlete section comes into play.

Who should apply? I welcome submissions from anyone. If you are recently out of college, are about to graduate from college, have used all of your NCAA eligibility, or are at any point in your life trying to be a competitive runner, you are eligible. Men, women, master’s runners, recent college graduates, and those about to graduate can all be featured. If you have a passion for the sport, have high goals for yourself, and are dedicated to pursuing those goals, contact me.

You will be featured on the main athlete’s page for a certain time period, and then will remain in the full index indefinitely. Your profile will always be online and I will even update it for you with new info. If you want to get your name in front of runners, coaches, race directors, agents, and more, you need to be a PerformanceRunner Featured Athlete. And it’s free.

I want PerformanceRunner.com to be as useful and informative as possible. With over 640 prize money races listed on the site, you can easily find where you want to run, how much you can win, and how fast the race has been in the past. What I could not include by myself are details on all of those races. In the interest of being more user friendly, I would love to hear your thoughts on the various races.

If you have run any of the races listed throughout the site, feel free to share your experiences. Was the course fast? How well organized was the race? Would you go back and run it again? Any information that you can provide to other users will be very helpful. You could find a race that looks like an easy win to you, only to show up and find massive elevation changes. If you know this kind of inside information, other runners would love to know it too.

If you want to contribute, just send an email to enders@performancerunner.com with your race feedback. Any length is acceptable, just be as objective as possible. If you know details that will help other to run faster, it should be listed on the race pages. Thanks in advance to everyone who helps by submitting a race review.

How did you get to PerformanceRunner.com? I have seen a few major running sites begin promoting and linking to PerformanceRunner.com. This is great news and welcome to everyone who has found this site through another running site. I am very happy to see high interest levels so quickly.

After being launched on February 22, PerformanceRunner.com has been featured on LetsRun.com, as a daily bookmark on RunnersWorld.com, on RunnersWeb.com, and on a variety of other sites. I know I haven’t found all of the sites out there that have begun promoting PerformanceRunner, and I apologize for not mentioning you here. Thanks to everyone who has been helping to support the site. Your recommendations to friends, updates on races, suggestions for new races to include, and links on your sites are what is making PerformanceRunner.com a great site.

Soon I will be blogging about races, running news, and anything else that I come across. I will also begin designing new functionality for the site soon, so keep checking back often. Also, I will begin posing Featured Athletes soon. I have a few profiles in the works and am looking forward to promoting individual runners from around the US.

Thanks again for supporting PerformanceRunner.com.

I am happy to announce that we are now beginning to post athlete profiles in the Featured Athlete section. The first published profile is about Ed Schlichter, a fellow North Carolinian who has his sights set on the 2008 Olympic marathon trials. Take a look at what is going on in Ed’s life and what he has to say about his running.

If you want to see yourself online, email enders@performancerunner.com and I will send you the necessary information.

Thanks to Ed Schlichter for being willing to become the first ever PerformanceRunner.com Featured Athlete.

Outdoor track and the spring road racing seasons are upon us. Maybe it’s time for a new pair of spikes or road racers? Eastbay.com is offering 20% off orders of $100 or more. To get the savings, you have to use code “LKS1632M” at checkout. The order total must be over $100 excluding taxes and shipping. It is valid through 3/31/06, so you still have plenty of time left this month. If you are going to buy new gear, you may as well save on it.

This offer is valid on more than just shoes. The discount will be applied to anything you purchase, including shoes, apparel, equipment, etc.

When I launched the site a few weeks ago, I received a lot of positive feedback, lots of tips on new races I didn’t currently have, and one major point of feedback. Many of you said that if there were a way to search by race distance, it would be very helpful. I am happy to announce that I have added new functionality to the site.

Visit www.performancerunner.com/distance.html to view all of the prize money races currently listed on the site, organized according to distance. I have added 30 new pages to the site making this possible. The races start at 1 mile and go all the way up to 50 miles. I also included a distance converter so you can easily tell how far a certain race is.

I hope that this new tool makes searching for prize money races even easier. Keep the feedback coming!

As you browse through the races listed on PerformanceRunner.com, you may notice that some of them have prize money for USATF members. Some races will have special award categories for USATF members, and other races will require you to be a USATF member in order to receive any cash award at all. This is not true of e very race, but there certainly are some races out there which require or favor USATF membership.

As a serious distance runner who wants to make a living from running, you should consider joining the USATF. The membership fees will vary by association, but will never exceed more than $20 per year. You can find more information and sign up at the USATF website.

I would personally recommend that you become a USATF member as soon as possible. Not only will your membership make you more likely to be able to receive prize money, but it also shows your support for distance running. The USATF is responsible for a lot of what happens in the running community in our country. It can only help to be recognized as a member of that community.

FinishLine.com has released a new product line that is pretty interesting: shoes, jackets, shorts, and tops inspired by Steve Prefontaine. The product line is a bit limited at the moment, but it seems like as good of a marketing gimmick as any. Take a look and see what they have to offer in the Prefontaine Collection.

If you do see something you want, use one of these two codes to save at checkout:
$10 off orders of $60 or more with code 885421
$15 off orders of $90 or more with code 455478

EastBay.com is offering a new deal.  If you spend $100 or more on your order, they will send you a $25 gift card via email.  If you need to order a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment, place multiple orders and you will get the $25 gift card for each order you place that is over $100.  All you have to do is enter the code EM01625R at checkout (that’s a zero in there, not the letter “o”).

 The catches:

Visit EastBay.com to get your free $25 gift certificates now!

Adidas has just come out with a new discount offer.  They are giving 10% off your next order of 2 items or more.  They suggest that you use the offer to buy shoes and apparel together, but it will work on any other combination of products as well.  To get the 10% discount, you have to use the code AFF46BUY2 at checkout.

Adidas has also just improved their shipping policy.  All domestic orders are now shipped via regular ground shipping for only $5.  It doesn’t matter what you order, it only costs you $5 to ship.

Check out shopadidas.com to pick up your new gear.

Here is a great offer for all the female runners: Champion is currently selling all of their sports bras for only $19.99.  They did not tell me when the sale is ending, but the site says it “ends soon”.  If you are in need of a new sports bra, especially now that we are moving into the warmer months, this may be the sale for you.  Check out ChampionCatalog.com for details.  This is their biggest sale of the season.

 have just added a new race to PerformanceRunner.com: the New Balance Moonlight 5k in Connecticut.  The race will be held on May 26, 2006 and offers $1,000 for first place.  It pays through 10 places for men, and 7 places for women.  There is also prize money for the top 3 male and female masters.  Finally, there is a $250 bonus for new course records, which are 13:58 for men and 15:51 for women.  This looks to be a fast race with a good amount of prize money available.  Check out all the details for the New Balance Moonlight 5k.

If anyone who runs the race would like to submit a review, email me at enders@performancerunner.com.

Here is a note I received directly from the assistant race director:

My name is Michael Hall and I am the assistant race director for the New Balance Moonlight Run 5K in New Milford, CT.  The race is an official USATF certified 5K in its 13th year and currently holds two national road records.  (Lindsey Sherf -11 years old -1998 17:45 and Bill Borla – 65 years old – 18:12)  The race is May 26th, 2006 at 8:00 PM.