The race, explained

Save keeps your work. Publish live sends it: this button, and this button alone, is what shows the race to your crew and to the public. Until you publish again, the people following see the previous version.

Before anything goes out, Le Cairn reviews everything in a “Before publishing” window. What blocks: no name, no date, no checkpoint, a finish still at kilometre 0 — and above all no athlete in the race. What only warns: no cut-off time, a distance that does not match the track, a date already gone. You fix it, or you click “Publish anyway”.

• The race code suggests itself from the name and the year — CHOUFFE26 for the Trail de la Chouffe 2026. Letters and digits only. It is what you read out to your crew and share to the public; it locks while the race is online.
• One live race per account. Publishing another one takes the first offline. Its tracking is kept: check-ins, messages, pebbles and alerts come back if you republish it.
• Take offline stops the tracking, and destroys nothing: everything comes back when you republish. To close a finished race, it is Close, at step 6.

A safety net for rushed days. In the 🧩 Modules tab, the “Automatic go-live” switch is on by default: “If the race is not online 24 h before its start, it goes online on its own — the last saved version — and you get an e-mail.” This applies to any race that has a date, in the local time of the race.

The e-mail says all you need: the race code, which version went out and when it was saved, the other race of the account that went offline if there was one, and 🎒 what is missing from the drawers for this race, athlete by athlete.

• A race you took offline after its automatic go-live does not go back on its own: each start is handled once.
• No safety net for a race? Turn the switch off: it will only go out if you click “Publish”.

Next to the start time, a “Time zone” field: the one of the place of the race. Brussels by default, which is the time of France, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. Change it only if the race is not run on Paris time: Réunion Island, Québec, Nepal… 25 zones are offered.

You often have nothing to do: the track suggests it. When the GPX is imported, the first point — the start — sets the menu to its zone, and Le Cairn says so: “🌍 time zone from the track: Réunion Island”. Suggested, never imposed: a zone chosen by hand prevails.

From then on everything reads on the local clock: cut-offs, passages, projections, weather, nutrition reminders, the automatic go-live — for the athlete, the crew and the public, wherever they are. And if your computer is not on that time, Le Cairn translates: “That is Friday 16 October at 03:00 where you are.”

On your race card, the 👥 button invites another person to prepare it with you, by the e-mail of their Cailloux account. They can edit the race and take it live. Deleting and closing stay yours.

On their side, the race shows up under “👥 Shared with me”, with your name. They can step out whenever they want: you keep yours. And if you both save the same race from 2 devices, Le Cairn does not decide for you: it warns that the race was changed on another device, and lets you reload or overwrite.

• When the invited person publishes, the race stays with you: it is your other live race that goes offline, not theirs.
• The end-of-race report goes to your address, not to the invited person. Closing removes the share.

Le Cairn refuses to publish an empty race. But the automatic go-live publishes it anyway: a race that starts with nobody on the line, nobody can check in or drop a pebble on it — neither the athletes' app nor the crew's. So Cailloux warns, rather than refusing.

Every morning, after 9:00, it looks at the starts of the next 3 days. A race about to go online — or already online — without a single athlete gets an e-mail, once: “has no athletes yet”. And if nothing has moved the day before the start, the go-live e-mail says it first, in its subject: WITHOUT ANY ATHLETE.

The remedy fits in one sentence, and the e-mail gives it: add them in Le Cairn, from your notebook, 🏃 Athletes tab, then publish the race again — that is what brings them into the live tracking.

The race has been run. The 🏁 Close button archives it with its report, stops the live tracking if it is still running, and frees the code for a next edition. Le Cairn tells you so beforehand, and refuses if a Back from the race is still pending in the Cupboard — kit taken out of the drawer and not yet put back.

The report arrives by e-mail, athlete by athlete: “Finished in 5h32” or the drop-out and where, the real start if it differs from the plan, each passage with its time, gap and stop time, the intakes taken and the ones that were not, the drink prepared. With an attached table for a spreadsheet.

The race joins “🏁 Closed races” in Le Cairn: its 📊 Debrief compares planned and actual segment by segment, gives the percentage of planned time and the drift per hour, and accepts the GPX from the watch. You can duplicate it for next year, or delete the archive. On the athlete's side, the checked-in finish opens the 📊 End-of-race debrief: what goes back to the drawer, what went down well — and a finisher card to share.