About RunJudge

Hi, I’m Filip. I’m a recreational runner based in Prague, Czechia, and the guy behind RunJudge. I’ve run a few marathons, with a PB of 3:29.

For me, RunJudge didn’t really start out of frustration. Reading about running shoes was actually part of the fun.

I could spend way too much time reading reviews, comparing models and figuring out what different reviewers thought about them. There are some genuinely great running shoe reviewers out there, and their work is still the foundation of what RunJudge does today.

But the deeper I got into it, the more familiar the whole process started to feel.

I’ve spent years working in a legal environment, where part of my job is helping companies make important decisions in situations that can initially look pretty messy. You figure out what actually matters, gather the relevant information from different sources, separate the important signals from the noise, and put it together in a way that lets someone make a decision with confidence.

At some point I realized I was doing something surprisingly similar with running shoes.

There were hundreds of models, different reviewers focused on different things, and there was rarely one obvious answer. I was gathering opinions, looking for agreement and disagreement, comparing the evidence and eventually coming to my own conclusion about which shoe made sense.

That’s where the idea for RunJudge started.

The legal connection probably explains part of the name. But another big inspiration came from somewhere completely different: investing apps.

I always liked how investment platforms could take something incredibly complicated and make the conclusion easy to understand. You could look at a stock and immediately see something like Buy, Hold or Sell — but you could also dig deeper and see the information behind that judgment and decide for yourself.

I wondered if the same logic could work for running shoes.

Not just another review and not just a database of specifications. Instead, take the work of trusted running shoe experts, bring several independent opinions together, apply the same framework to every shoe, and arrive at a clear judgment.

And importantly, show enough of the reasoning behind it that you don’t have to blindly trust the verdict.

Price became part of that idea too. A shoe can be great at $100 and a pretty bad deal at $180. So RunJudge doesn't only ask “How good is this shoe?” It also asks “What should this shoe actually be worth?” and compares that with what it currently costs.

That basic idea eventually became RunJudge.

It’s still an independent project built by one runner, and I still genuinely enjoy reading about running shoes. I’ve just built a much more structured way of making sense of all of it — and made it available to anyone else who finds it useful.