We are very proud to announce that we have arranged partnership with ahotu Marathons, the biggest race calendar on the web. As partners, we will try to inform the website’s author about all trail races in Croatia. Their database doesn’t include only trail races, so if you want some road race to be included in their calendar, you can contact us or send them e-mail directly. The only condition is that the race should have a website or webpage. It doesn’t have to be in English, Croatian is just fine.

We talked a bit with Jean-Loup who runs the website all by himself and he explained us how his project started as a database of international marathons, then extended to ultras and then to half-marathons. As lot of events contained shorter or longer races, so he started adding data about them too. Today, ahotu Marathons covers more than 13500 races in more than 100 countries allover the world and it has more than 150 thousand unique visitors each month. Impressive numbers, for sure.

If you ask yourself how could you find a race for yourself in this vast database, there are numerous possibilities:

• browse races by their length. You can also refine found races by continent, country, year, month or tag (e.g. charity, desert, flat, etc.)
• browse races by country. There are also filter options when you can refine results by type, year, month, tag and location. Just select your region and further filter the results.
• basic search allows searching for race by some keyword.
• advanced search offers you options to search for race in vicinity of some location, search for race in some period of time or search by some race attribute (type, tag, distance…). Search results can be viewed inside Google Maps, in a list or calendar view.

You can tailor your search by area that you are visiting, by the period of year when you can go on holiday, by type of the race that you want to run, the possibilities are endless… If you register on a website, you will be able to post reviews and build your running resume. For those of you who like to see on the map all the locations where they have raced, it’s a nice feature 🙂

At the end, we asked Jean-Loup if he can see some trend in racing. He says that he finds new races everywhere (almost every country, all the continents) and that running is becoming a global phenomenon. There is an explosion of new trail races and even ultra trails. Apparently, there is also a growing number of female only races! 🙂 Go directly to his Advanced Search page and search by tag for ‘women-only’. When I checked, there were 85 races, just for year 2013! Great!

We hope this partnership will help us promote Croatia as a beautiful and diverse destination for trail running, that it will allow foreign runners to more easily search for and locate our races. As for myself, I just got a new tool for finding races anywhere I want. 🙂 I’ll definitely use it and I highly recommend it to you too.