Editorial policy

How every listing is sourced

Each club page says which of two things is true of it. Confirmed from the club’s own page means someone here opened the club’s own site, crew page, or social account and read the schedule off it. Listed from a directory means the club is real and was found through a reputable aggregator or a press piece, but nobody has read its own page yet.

We publish the weaker label rather than hiding it. A directory listing can be out of date, or can describe a club in a different city with the same name — both have happened here — so a runner deciding whether to turn up on Tuesday should know which kind of listing they are reading. Roughly half the directory is currently in the second category, and moving rows into the first is ongoing work.

What happens to a club someone sends us

Anyone can tell us about a club we’re missing, and nothing they send is published as they sent it. A submission goes into a review queue, not into the directory. Somebody here opens the link, checks the club is real and meets where the submission says, and writes the listing from what the source actually states — which is why we ask for a link and why a submission without one cannot be accepted.

A club that comes through this route is published as listed from a directory, the weaker of the two labels above, until someone has read the club’s own page. Being submitted by the club’s own organizer does not change that: an organizer’s word about their own club is exactly the kind of claim this step exists to check, and no submission buys a listing, a ranking, or a stronger label.

What “Attended by RunVibe team” means

A RunVibe team member joined a normal public run with that club. Each callout names the month and year of the visit, so runners can judge how current the observation is.

What a field note covers

A field note may describe what the team observed at one visit, such as the newcomer welcome, pace grouping, route feel, post-run social scene, or practical arrival advice. A note can be absent even when the attendance callout is present; we do not manufacture editorial copy to fill it.

What it does not mean

An attendance callout is not a rating, safety guarantee, official affiliation, organizer claim, paid placement, or promise that every session will be the same. Clubs without the callout are not lower-quality; the RunVibe team simply has not published a firsthand visit for them.

Independence and disclosures

The RunVibe team attends ordinary public runs. If a club hosts, pays for, or otherwise compensates a visit, that fact appears with the field note. A disclosure does not turn into a rating or a guaranteed recommendation.

How races are listed

Races are not researched the way clubs are, and they are labeled differently because of it. A metro has hundreds of dated races a year that change constantly, so RunVibe syncs them from the registration platforms where race directors maintain their own listings — RunSignup, Race Roster and Active — and every race page names the platform its information came from. That is a weaker claim than the club listings make, and it is the honest one: the platform is close to a primary source for a race’s date and registration status, because it is where the organizer keeps them current and where being wrong costs them entries.

A handful of races are added by hand, at the same standard as a club listing: somebody here opened the race’s own page and read the date off it. We never fill in a date, distance or address we have not seen stated, because a runner who turns up on the wrong morning is the worst thing this site can do to someone.

Races we leave out

Some listings on those platforms do not publish a start line — the course is emailed after you pay, and no venue or address is given. We do not list those, for the same reason we do not list virtual races: a page announcing a city and a date for something with no place to turn up to is not useful to anyone deciding where to run this weekend. This is a judgment about what belongs in a directory, not a claim that those events are not happening or that anything is wrong with them.

About the training plans

The training plans are general templates, not coaching and not medical advice. Each one is arithmetic on a hand-written schedule — one per distance and starting point — scaled to the weeks you have; every mileage traces to a reviewed line, and nothing is generated by a model or tuned to you personally. They cannot see your history, your injuries or how a week actually went, so they are a sensible starting point to adapt, not a prescription to follow to the letter.

Build up gradually, and see a doctor before starting if you have any concerns. When a plan names a run club beside a session, it is saying that club runs that day — not that it runs that distance or that pace, which we do not claim, and not that it has endorsed the plan.

Affiliate links and how we make money

If you register for a race through a link here, RunVibe may earn a small share of the platform’s processing fee. It never changes your price. It also never changes what gets listed or how it is ordered — placement is not for sale, to a race or to anyone else, and no race can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a competitor removed.

Where a race sells on more than one platform, we link all of them on the race’s page, even though the main button points at the one we may earn from. Ordering by what pays us is only defensible while it hides nothing, so if that ever conflicts, the link stays and the commission goes.

How listings are maintained

Field notes supplement, rather than replace, the source research behind club listings. Schedules, locations, and club details can change; please use the club’s official links for the latest information before you go.