It started with a marathon in Barcelona

A while ago I signed up for a marathon in Barcelona. Entering the race was one website. The flight was another. The hotel a third. Then the small things: how to get in from the airport, which day to arrive, when bib pickup closed. All of it sat in a different tab, a different inbox, a different booking reference.

Honestly, it was not hard. I have booked plenty of trips and entered plenty of races, and none of those steps take long on their own. But something clicked anyway. Not the difficulty, the scatter. There was no single place where the trip existed as a whole thing, nowhere to open a week later and see it at a glance.

How nice would it be to have one place where the whole marathon trip lives, and you can just come back to it?

That thought stuck, partly because Barcelona was not meant to be the only one. There are a few more marathon trips I would like to do this year, and the idea of starting from scratch each time, with the same scatter of tabs, was reason enough to build something.

So Marathon Trip became that place. You put the race in, then add the pieces as you book them elsewhere: the flight, the hotel, the transfer, race day. Nothing gets booked here and nothing is required. What you get back is one overview you can share with the people coming with you, look over the week before, and edit whenever a plan changes.

The courses came from the same impatience. Looking for footage of a route before a race, I found there are options, but most of them feel a decade old. I write software for a living, so filming the courses properly and putting them next to the plan seemed like the obvious thing to do rather than a separate hunt through old videos.

It is deliberately small and plain. Enough to hold a trip, not so much that keeping it up to date becomes another job.