USATF/RRTC Certified Courses

USA Track & Field - Road Running Technical Council
Info on US Domestic Certified Course List

There are a large many USATF-RRTC certified courses in the M@Deadlands. The USATF web site has searchable lists of the locations within each state. The web page includes EVERY certified course in the United States that the USATF has in Their records, whether or not the certification is currently active. Some certifications are no longer active because the course was replaced by a newer course, or destroyed by construction, or found short in a "validation" (measurement check after a record is set), or for various other reasons. Always check the "Status" column (described below) which indicates the current status of each course.

A L S O :

Do You Know the Difference Between Course Certification and Race Sanctioning?

Certified Course Search Tool

USATF Certifiers Page

Download National Course List

RRTC Course Measurement Manual

Here are the contents of each column of the list:

DISTANCE - Course distance in kilometers (km) or miles (mi). Marathons and half-marathons appear as 42.20 km and 21.10 km respectively (These figures are rounded to 2 decimal places; the marathon is defined as 42.195 km). For calibration courses and tracks, the DISTANCE column contains only the code "Cal" or "Trck" and the distance appears elsewhere in the listing.

COURSE ID - Composed of 3 parts, each in a separate column. These are:
1) State where course is located (2-letter abbreviation).
2) A 5-digit number combining Year(2 digits) and 3-digit sequence code.
3) Initials of USATF Certifier (2 or 3 letters).

ST [Status code] - These codes are formed from the letters:
"A" = Active
"D" = Deleted by state certifier (course may have been destroyed by construction, replaced by newer course, etc.)
"M" = No map on file, course not in good standing (applies only to some pre-1985 courses)
"P" = Passed validation
"F" = Failed validation
"X" = Expired - ten years has elapsed since original certification
"93" = Expired but later renewed & restored to list. The number (93 in this case) denotes year of renewal.

Often, two or more letters are used in combination. For example, "PD" means "Passed validation but later Deleted."

LOCATION - City where course is located

COURSE NAME/RACE - Self-explanatory

DROP - Net elevation decrease from start to finish expressed as a fraction of the race distance in meters per kilometer (Negative values indicate net climb). Courses with any amount of drop may be certified, but for record eligibility, drop must not exceed 1.0 m/km (USATF Rule 185.5).

SEP - Straight line distance between start and finish expressed as a percentage of the race distance. If separation does not exceed 30% and the course meets the drop limit, it is automatically eligible for records. If separation exceeds 30% but the course meets the drop limit, it is eligible for records when it can be shown that there is no significant tailwind.

MEASURER - Name of the person who measured the course.

Copies of the official Certificates (with course maps) are available for all courses in this list except those with "M" status codes. To obtain a Certificate/Map, contact the USATF/RRTC Course Registrar.

(Be sure to specify complete course ID, including prefix & suffix letters)

If you have any problems with operation of this downloadable version of the course list, contact Bob Baumel.