From goal time to finish line: race day on RunPact

In August we published race pages for 33 ultras, built from 28,350 real finishes. They answered the question every runner asks before a race they have never run: what does this course actually do to people?

Since then most of the work has gone into the obvious next question, which is what you do with that once you know it. The answer is a set of tools that follow you from picking a goal time to the week after the finish. You can use all of them without an account.

Start with a finish time

Every race page now has a slider for your finish time. As you move it, the page tells you what share of finishers were faster than that, which checkpoint would be your tightest cutoff and how much time you would have in hand there.

Below that you get your arrival time at every checkpoint. These are not an even split of your finish time across the distance. They spread your time the way the median finisher spread theirs on that course, so the slow climbs and the night hours take their real share, and aid-station stops are included because they are in the recorded splits.

The goal gets its own link, so you can send it to a training partner or whoever is coming to crew. A 26:50 at Western States looks like this. If you have an account, you can save the goal and it shows up on your dashboard with a countdown.

Race-day tools

From the same goal you can open three things built for the day itself.

A tracker for your phone. Start the clock at the gun, then tap "I'm here" as you reach each checkpoint, or type the time in afterwards if you forgot. After each one it tells you whether you are ahead of your plan or behind it, what finish time your pace so far points to, when you will reach the next checkpoint, and how much you will have in hand at the next cutoff. Open the page before the start and it keeps working without signal, which on most mountain courses is most of the race. Your times stay on your phone.

A live link for your crew. If you tap "Share live with your crew", the tracker gives you a link to send them. They see every checkpoint you log on their own phone, along with when you should reach the next one. When you drop out of signal, your latest checkpoint goes out as soon as you are back in range. The link stops working four days after you make it, and nothing is shared until you tap the button.

A crew sheet. Even without the live link, your crew gets a page with the expected arrival time at every aid station for your goal. They can enter the real start time, so a delayed start or a wave start doesn't throw off every number on the page.

On a computer you can also print your checkpoint times as a strip to tape under your watch.

After the finish

Back on the race page, you can tell it you ran the race. Enter your finish time and it shows you where you landed among the finishers in the data, and where every checkpoint would have fallen on a run of that length. That result has its own share link too, and with an account it is kept on your dashboard under the races you have run.

Two email options sit on the pages as well, and each one sends a single message and nothing else. On a race page, you can ask to hear when registration opens for the next edition. On a course we don't have results for yet, you can ask to hear when the organiser publishes splits and the course gets its own race page.

Choosing a race

The race directory now has a map, search and a distance filter, and there is a filter for races usually run in the next three months. That one is based on the month the latest edition in our data was run, not on a confirmed date, so check the organiser's site before you plan around it.

If you are deciding between two races, the compare page puts them side by side: distance, climbing, finish times, finish rate and where the cutoffs get tight, with the two profiles drawn over each other. It suggests a few pairs to start with if you don't have one in mind.

The race pages themselves picked up a few things along the way:

• A course profile chart shaded stretch by stretch by how much the field slowed down or sped up there. Point at any stretch and it shows when the median finisher got there and when you would on your goal time.
• Race-day temperatures by year. The year-by-year table now shows the coldest and warmest hour at the start while the median finisher was out on the course, so you can see how much a hot year costs the finish rate.
• Feet and Fahrenheit on mile races, so Western States and Hardrock read the way their runners think about them.
• An embed for organisers, clubs and bloggers who want a race's numbers on their own site.

The flythrough, rebuilt

The 3D course flythrough has always been the part of RunPact that nobody else has, and it got most of the attention this month.

Every checkpoint on a race page now has a "Fly it" link that drops you into the flythrough at that point on the course, so you can look at the descent you are worried about without flying the 80 km before it.

The world looks like the place now. The sky is worked out from the course's latitude and date, so the sun and moon are where they would really be and daylight fades the way it does in that valley. Terrain, trees and buildings cast shadows. Lakes lie flat, including mountain lakes that used to tilt with the slope around them. Forests come from OpenStreetMap properly, which fixed courses where large forests were missing entirely. Trees lean in the wind, water ripples, village windows light up after dark, and on night sections you see the headlamps of the runners ahead of you.

Where a course has a race date, you can replay the real weather of race day, hour by hour along the course. For past races that comes from the weather archive, and for a race in the next couple of weeks it comes from the forecast, so you can fly your own race with the conditions you are likely to get.

There is sound as well, all generated in the browser: wind that picks up with altitude, rain and thunder, birds at dawn, crickets on warm nights, footsteps at your pace, and cowbells and a crowd at the checkpoints. The mute button remembers your choice.

The camera also directs itself now. It builds its shots from the course's climbs, checkpoints and steep descents, so you don't have to steer.

If you would rather look around than fly, the free view (Eagle Eye) draws the route coloured by gradient, with aid stations and distance markers on the terrain and a profile strip underneath that follows your cursor. On a larger screen you can turn up the vertical exaggeration to 2x or 3x to read the shape of a flat course, and flying always runs at true scale.

Try it on your next race

Find a race you are thinking about in the directory, move the slider to the time you would be happy with, and send the crew link to whoever will be waiting at the aid stations. Then fly the section you are least sure about.