User guide

This is where everything begins — the cairn you stack stone by stone to guide those who come after. You create the race: name, date, start time, the GPX track, the checkpoints with their cut-off times, your runners, and the nutrition plan of each one. Or you start from a race sheet: the course is already entered, as the organiser publishes it. Your runners come from your notebook — the 🏃 Athletes tab, where each one has their code and settings.

💻 Do this on a computer. It works on a phone, but you are juggling tables, a track and timings: a wide screen changes everything. And in any case this gets done calmly at home, weeks ahead — not on the start line, in your race kit.

Load the track first: the elevation of every leg fills itself in, read from the GPX. You correct it if your track lies — per leg or cumulative from the start, just like your road book: each column works the other one out.

Every checkpoint accepts minutes of stopped time — the 15 minutes of soup shift all the following times by themselves — and the cut-off applies to the time you leave the aid station, as the race officials count it. For races lasting more than a day, every cut-off carries its day: D, D+1, D+2.

Then, each runner has their own split times, in a tab under their name. 2 friends on the same race do not have the same mountain in their legs: they no longer share a schedule. For every leg you enter either a duration or a pace in effort km/h — the app works out the other and updates the time of day. And to fill everything in at once, 3 ways: the time you are aiming for, the cut-offs set by the organiser, or Super pacing, which starts from their past races.

Once published, the race appears on its own in the app. Each runner comes in with their code — the one from your notebook —, the crew with the crew code of the race: 6 digits each, with a button to pass them on in a single message. “Publish” tells you everything missing at once, and each line takes you to the place to fix. And if you forget to publish, the race goes online by itself 24 hours before the start — an email tells you, and the “Automatic go-live” toggle prevents it. This is your cockpit, and the only place where you can genuinely break everything. 😇

At every checkpoint, you check in. The check-in offers itself when you reach the point, and is confirmed with a swipe — a slipping thumb checks nothing in. A “Now” button fills in the time for you, because at km 60, reading a time off a screen becomes surprisingly complicated.

At the top of the screen, 4 tiles: race time, ahead or behind, next aid station, estimated finish. You also see the map — which survives the dead zones —, the ground ahead with the slope in colour, the weather on the col at the time you will be there, and your nutrition plan. The “time to eat” reminders are on by default, your intakes tick themselves off, and you message your crew without hunting for signal for a call that will not connect.

You can also drop pebbles — your real position, snapped onto the track — and the app recalculates your arrival at the next aid station from the pace you are actually holding, climbing included. And if you forget to check in at an aid station, it reminds you a kilometre later.

If they are switched on for your race, a timer opens at life bases, and an alert warns you if you start too fast in the first 20 minutes.

🚨 And when it goes wrong, 2 buttons. A quiet “I'm withdrawing” link under your check-ins: it tells the crew, stops the forecasts, and reminds you to call race control, with numbers you can dial straight from the screen. And if the feature is switched on in Le Cairn, a 🚨 Alert my crew tile (🆘 SOS in version 1.1) stays at the top of the screen — held for 3 seconds, it sends the crew your call and your GPS position, then follows it as long as the alert lasts.

The button calls no emergency service: not the fire brigade, not race control, not the organisers. And with no signal, it says so plainly — the alert waits, nobody has been told yet. That is worth knowing before race day, not on your knees in the rocks: the guide is worth the detour.

🗄️ And if you identify yourself with your first name, last name and code, you find your page: your published races on one side, your Cupboard on the other — what you have at home, what you take out for a race, what you put back afterwards.

Estimated position in real time, expected arrival time at the next aid station, and an alert if a cut-off starts to look tight.

A notification arrives at every check-in, even with the phone locked. No more “where are you??” shouted into the void, and no more wondering between “dead in a ditch” and “just very slow”.

Each runner's tab carries their gap to plan and a ⚠ when the cut-off gets close; a tile says when they will be at the next point you can get to, with a range; and a 📜 log tells you what happened while you were asleep in the car — check-ins, pebbles, alerts, withdrawals, messages. And the screen turns light if your phone is set that way: at midday at the aid station, that is what you can read.

Read only: they follow the progress and the estimated arrival time, with nothing they can break. Reassuring for everybody.

Better: from Le Cairn you can send a direct link — or a QR code — to one single runner. It opens their tracking page with no sign-in at all. Perfect for your mother, who “doesn't understand any of this stuff”.

And a button sends the tracking in one gesture — the race and the runner on screen —, because an installed app has no address bar to copy. The screen turns light if the phone is set that way, and the printed report stays there for whoever follows from a computer.

A coach or a dietitian can work inside your race, on the races you open to them only. They ask for their account from their profile in Le Cairn, I open it on the strength of their credentials, then you choose. They suggest in purple, with a note saying why; you decide, line by line. And they never receive the codes or the phone numbers.