Pacing, explained

One row per checkpoint, and for each of them 2 scenarios: optimistic, the day when everything goes well; pessimistic, the one where you have been walking through mud for 3 hours. Everything is worked out for both in parallel, from start to finish.

• Each runner has their own times. 2 runners on the same race do not hold the same rhythm: tabs appear as soon as you enter a second one.
• You enter the duration or the pace, the other one follows. Whichever speaks to you, depending on whether you think in “2 h 30” or in “8 minutes a kilometre”.
• 3 ways to fill it, at the top of the table: 🕐 Final time, 🚧 Cut-offs, ⚡ Super pacing. One click opens the settings of a mode, a second closes it — and none is open to start with: none is the right one by default.
• A new race is born with an empty plan. While it is, the split times show “—” and the cut-offs are not judged: an invented time would be worse than a dash.

You have a goal — “14 h at best, 16 h at worst”? At the top of the table, 🕐 Final time: at best, at worst, and a button. Every duration is worked out to land exactly on it.

It is not a rule of three. Each section becomes effort kilometres — its distance, plus its climb divided by the climb cost of the runner: a climb gets more minutes than a descent of the same length. And fatigue spreads across the hours, a little faster before halfway, a little slower after.

• Your breaks come off first. A 20 h plan with 50 minutes of breaks is 19 h 10 of actual running — otherwise you arrive late on your own goal, by exactly the time spent at the tables.
• You entered none? You are told, and shown what forgetting costs. The plan fills in anyway — but it is the plan of someone who never stops.

With 🚧 Cut-offs, you enter the cut-offs on the checkpoints, and the whole schedule appears. As long as a duration has not been typed in by hand, it is anchored to the cut-off: you leave the aid station 30 minutes early in the optimistic case, 15 minutes early in the pessimistic one. That is the starting point, and those margins can be set: the one you keep depends on the race, the weather and the runner. More margin at worst than at best? You are asked first — it is nearly always the 2 fields swapped round.

• An anchored duration shows in italics and follows everything: change the cut-off or the stop, and it recalculates.
• The moment you type a duration, it freezes and stops moving. The 🚧 Cut-offs mode puts them all back on automatic — it asks you to confirm first.
• A race longer than 24 h? The cut-offs carry their day — D, D+1, D+2 — because “10:00” on its own means nothing on the 2nd morning.

The third mode fills the plan from what the runner actually held on their past races, analysed in Cailloux — not from your hunch.

It does not decide in silence: it opens the same window as the other 2 modes, and says what made it — the races analysed, the climb cost, the fatigue, and the duration that comes out.

Each scenario has its own cut-off column. Green as long as your departure time holds, flashing red the moment it is missed.

The tooltip gives the exact margin: “Margin at worst: 0 h 15”, or “Cut-off exceeded by 0 h 38 at worst”.

A kilometre on the flat and a kilometre at 15 % do not cost the same. The effort kilometre converts climbing into flat distance, so your paces can be compared from one leg to the next:

So every pace has 2 readings: in large type, minutes per effort km, climbing included — that is the one you enter, and the only comparable one. In small type underneath, minutes per real km: what your watch will show.

When entering, 8:20 and 8.3 both work. Below 3:00 per effort km the app warns you: it is almost always a mistyped duration.

At the top of your screen, 4 tiles, in the order of the questions you ask yourself: Race time · Ahead or Behind · Next aid station · Estimated finish. The word says “ahead” or “behind”, the number stays bare: at km 70, at 3 in the morning, nobody translates a minus sign.

• The gap counts from your real start. Set off 20 minutes after the road book time, and you are not “20 minutes behind” your plan. The cut-offs stay at the time set by the organiser: a late start does eat into your margin, and the app says so.
• The countdown aims at an aid station, not the next checkpoint on a col: knowing a col comes in 24 minutes does not tell you when you eat.
• At life bases, a timer — if the module is switched on for your race. You check in at the base, a message announces the timer in 3 s, and it shows in huge figures, with the stop your plan allows next to it: you know whether you are dawdling without doing sums. Touch the message to cancel if you are only passing through; a long press takes you out. The time actually spent goes into the end-of-race report.

A plan filled in the night before is worth nothing if you burn it in the first 20 minutes — the one moment of the race when you are fresh, surrounded by people, and nobody looks at their watch.

If the alert is switched on for your race, the app compares your real pace with the pace of your plan for your first 20 minutes. More than 10 % over — the default threshold — and your phone shows “You are 12 % faster.”, vibrating if it can. Nothing else: what to do about it is up to you. As long as it lasts, it tells you again every minute.

• It asks you first, when you check in at the start: it reads the GPS every minute, and that uses battery. You can refuse — you will not be asked again.
• It measures over a sliding 3 minutes, in effort kilometres: otherwise every descent would shout “too fast” and every climb “too slow”.
• The threshold is set per runner, and follows them in the notebook from one race to the next.