What this is
Run Houston is a free, community-focused directory of road, trail, and track races happening in and around Houston, Texas. It also lists local running clubs and shares short news updates from the Houston running community.
How it's built
This site is intentionally simple: plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no
framework, no build step, and no server. Every page loads its data from flat JSON
files under /data/ and queries them in the browser with
AlaSQL.
How the data stays fresh
There is no admin login, no CMS, no database, and no automation. Once a week, a human runs a carefully-engineered research prompt against claude.ai with web search turned on. Claude visits Houston-area race calendars, verifies each race against its primary source, and produces a clean JSON list. That JSON gets reviewed and committed to the repo by hand.
It's deliberately low-tech. Crons break, API keys expire, scrapers go stale, and silent failures are no fun. A human-in-the-loop workflow that runs in ten minutes a week is more reliable than a pipeline that runs at 3am, and it means every change to the data is a normal git commit that's easy to review and revert.
That said, data on this site is best-effort. If something looks wrong — a bad date, a dead link, a missing race — please email hello@runhouston.app.
Credits
Built and maintained by Fred OnDuty. Houston has a wonderful running community — this is for them.