Trail Race is an iOS app for preparing trail races. It syncs your runs from Strava or Apple Health and, from a race’s GPX track, calculates your split times at every aid station, your nutrition plan, and the gear to pack given the forecast. On race day, a public link lets friends and family follow your position live, with no account or app required.
The app is published in France by an independent developer, in French, English and German. It covers the whole preparation: importing a GPX track or picking an official course from a partner organizer, splitting it into sections, waypoints and cut-offs, mandatory gear, then the result once the race is run. The 3D flyover replays your runs over satellite terrain.
Trail Race is free and available on iPhone (iOS). There is no Android or web version of the app for now; the public race page and live tracking, however, work in any browser. The app is for people aged 15 and over.
An account is required to use the app (email, Apple or Google); it can be deleted at any time from Profile → Delete my account, which erases races, tracks, activities and pantry and revokes Strava access. The terms state that any future paid features would come with conditions accepted before purchase: nothing of the kind exists today.
Yes, through Strava: if your watch uploads your runs there, Trail Race imports them automatically, with the track, elevation and heart rate. Apple Watch workouts come in through Apple Health. When a run exists in both sources, the Strava version is kept. There is no direct Garmin or COROS connection yet.
Trail Race asks Strava for read-only access to your activities and never posts anything there. With Apple Health, the permission stays on the phone and covers running and hiking; the track comes from the watch when it has GPS. A run present in both sources (start within ten minutes, distance within 15 %) is counted once. Heart rate is health data: it is only imported with your explicit consent.
You turn on sharing in the app and send a link: it opens in any browser, no account needed. The page shows your position on the map and the elevation profile, your progress, your recalculated split times, the weather and the next aid station. Your position is sent every 30 seconds, 1 or 2 minutes depending on your setting; only the latest one is kept, and it is deleted as soon as sharing stops.
Sharing opens two hours before the start and stops by itself at the finish or at the end of the window (estimated finish plus three hours, at most 36 hours after the start). The page is excluded from search engines; your family can show their own position on it to find their way, without it ever leaving their browser. Disabling the link stops sharing and kills the old link within minutes. Live tracking depends on GPS, network and battery: it is not a safety device.
The app cuts the GPX track at every waypoint, then applies to each segment a pace derived from your training: a base pace taken from your races of the last twelve months (or your best recent runs), a personal pace model per 5 % gradient band built on six months of runs, and a fatigue factor late in the race. The resulting times are checked against the organizer’s cut-offs.
The flat-equivalent pace comes first from your actual races, weighted by recency and corrected for your form over the last six weeks; without a reference race, from your best runs of the last 45 days; without any run, from a default pace of 6 min/km and a generic gradient model. The plan states which basis it used. You can override the pace of a section, add breaks and cut-offs; regenerating the plan keeps them.
An hourly carbohydrate target matched to your expected duration (from 30 g/h on a short race to 80 g/h beyond five hours), plus hydration and sodium from two hours of effort, spread between aid stations as gels, bars, drink mix and flasks to refill, using the products in your pantry. These are general guidelines to test in training: they are no substitute for medical advice.
The pantry holds your products (gels, bars, drinks, salt tablets) with serving size, calories, carbohydrates and sodium: the plan works out what to take and when, from start to finish, and how many flasks to refill at each aid station. The written advice is generated on the device, without sending your data to an external AI service. The plan also appears on the race’s public page for your crew.
From Open-Meteo forecasts for the race location and start time, available up to 16 days ahead and refreshed automatically as race day approaches. The app shows temperature, feels-like, precipitation, wind and sky hour by hour around the race, and takes them into account for gear and nutrition advice.
The race location is geocoded once, then only its coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo, in the local time zone; no personal data is transmitted. Beyond sixteen days, no forecast is shown. The suggested gear (waterproof jacket, windbreaker, poles, headlamp, cap, sunglasses) is derived section by section from rain, wind, temperature, sunshine, night-time passages and gradient.
Nobody, until you share something: your races, runs and plans are visible to you alone, hosted in the European Union, with no ads or tracking. Only a race whose public link you enable becomes viewable, with its track, plan, nutrition, notes and your position if you share live. You can revoke the link or delete your account at any time from the app.
Trail Race falls under the GDPR: your account and race data are hosted by Supabase in the European Union (Paris region), with no tracking cookies or analytics. Providers are limited to what is necessary (Netlify for the website, Strava, Apple, Google, Resend for emails, Open-Meteo for weather). You can exercise your rights of access, rectification and erasure by writing to contact@trail-race.app.
