Ultra crew arrival times: when to leave¶
Your crew is guessing.
Somebody who loves you is sitting in a car near mile 62. It is dark. The last they heard, you were moving well twenty miles back, hours ago, and the phone has one bar. Do they leave now and wait an hour in a cold car park, or wait here and risk you running into an empty stop?
Nobody chose this. It is how crewing has always worked: a printed spreadsheet, a race website that refreshes when it feels like it, and a lot of arithmetic done in the dark. This post is about taking that arithmetic off them, and how to do it by hand if you would rather.
Why crewing an ultra is its own problem¶
A few terms first, if this is new. A crew is the people who meet you at points along the course with food, dry socks and a chair. They meet you at aid stations, the tables along the course with water and food, but only the ones the race allows crew into. A cutoff is the time by which you have to leave a station to stay in the race.
At a road marathon, your people stand at mile 18 and you come past within a few minutes of when you said. An ultra does not work like that, for three reasons.
The gaps are long. The stops your crew can reach are often ten or twenty miles apart, and a runner can spend three to six hours between them. A small change in pace becomes a big change in arrival time.
The drive is not the course. The trail goes over the ridge. The road goes around it, sometimes for an hour, and then there is a walk in from crew parking to the station itself.
Uncertainty grows as the day goes on. At mile 20 you are close to plan. At mile 85, after a night and maybe twenty minutes asleep in a chair, nobody can say within ten minutes when you will arrive. Any plan that pretends otherwise sends your crew to the wrong place at the wrong time.
The runner at the other end of this has their own worry: reaching a crew stop, looking for a familiar face, and finding nobody there yet.
Doing it by hand¶
Worth doing even if you never use NavRun.
- List the crew stops, not every aid station. Check the race's crew information for which stations allow crew, where crew parking is, and whether there is a shuttle or a walk in. It changes year to year.
- Give each stop a window, not a time. Take your goal arrival and put a range around it. Keep it tight early and widen it later: a few minutes either side at mile 20, much more by mile 80. Widen it more for night sections and long climbs.
- Drive the route, or at least map it. Write down the drive between stops and the walk in from parking. At popular races crew parking can fill hours before the runners arrive, so ask the race when that usually happens. TrainingPeaks and Trail Runner both tell crews to arrive early: parking fills, and missing the runner is every crew's fear.
- Work the leave time backwards. Leave time = the opening of the window, minus the drive, minus the walk in, minus some slack. Then write it on the sheet so nobody does it at 3am.
That last step is the one that falls apart on race day, because every time your pace changes, the whole column is wrong.
What the crew page does¶
NavRun's crew page does that last step live, on one screen your crew opens from a link.
Web and iPhone. Free.
One link, no account. You make the link from your race on navrun.app or in the iPhone app (Share with your crew, in the race day plan). You do not need a written race strategy, and you do not need the Crew, NavRun's paid plan. Your crew opens it in a phone browser. They do not make an account or install anything.
The first line answers the only question. It reads one of three ways:
- Plenty of time. Leave by 2:40 AM for Ridge Camp.
- Getting close. Leave by 2:40 AM for Ridge Camp.
- Leave now for Ridge Camp.
The leave time is worked back from when you are likely to get there, the drive, the walk in from crew parking, and a quarter hour of slack so they are there before you are. It names the next stop ahead that crew are not barred from, so the biggest line on the screen never sends anyone to a station closed to them.
The arrival window is as wide as the truth. Mile 20 gets a narrow window. Mile 85 does not, and the page says so rather than pretending. Night, climbing, technical footing and how far out the stop still is all widen it. Every window says what it is built from: your live pace, or your planned one, and why.
A chair is not a slow pace. When you stop moving, at an aid station or asleep on a cot, the window gets wider and its middle stays put. Four hours on a cot widens it by four hours, not like a ten minute breather.
Where you are, in plain words. The second line gives the mile you are at and the stations on either side. If your last position does not land on the marked route, it says you are off the marked course instead of guessing a mile. If there is no course map on file for the race, your crew still sees your raw position. A position that has gone quiet for a while turns amber, never red, and the page never claims to be more current than it is.
Every stop still ahead. Below the top five lines, each remaining stop shows its arrival window, the drive, the walk in, whether crew can meet you there, and whatever you wrote for that stop. A stop nobody has checked says nobody has checked, which is different from no.
A button that goes to crew parking. "Drive to crew parking" opens their maps app at the place they can park, not at the aid station's own pin, which is often somewhere a car cannot go. The coordinates are there to copy, and the links keep working once the page is open, even with no signal.
Times on the race's clock. Leave times, windows and cutoffs show in the race's own time zone when NavRun holds one, and in your home time when it does not. The page says which, so a crew member who flew in from another state never has to guess whose hours they are reading.
Cutoffs as a sentence. Room before a cutoff is a plain line about the clock, counted at 25% slower than your goal. No colors, no countdown. Cutoff times are free whether or not you are in the Crew.
Part of Out Here¶
The crew page is the planning half of Out Here, NavRun's race day link. The same link lets your crew record voice messages to you, and they land the next time your phone catches signal. They do not play on their own: one tap per message, whenever you want them. Your crew stops waiting and starts doing something.
What it does not do yet¶
The leave time needs drive times. Drive and walk-in times come from crew routes in the NavRun race catalog. On a race without them, the first line says there is no drive time on file for that stop yet, and your crew still gets the arrival window and the parking button. For those races, the by-hand method above fills the gap.
Parking spots come from somewhere. The parking spot comes with a race from the catalog, or you set it per station in the iPhone app. If neither has happened, send your crew what they need.
Live windows need live tracking. With no live position, the page shows the planned window from your goal time and says so.
It does not buzz anyone yet. The page does not send your crew a notification when it is time to go. They open it and read the first line.
No leave times for timed races yet, since a loop past the same start area has no next stop to drive to.
Common Questions¶
Does my crew need a NavRun account?¶
No. They open the link you send in any phone browser. No account, no email, no app.
Does the crew page cost anything?¶
No. The crew link, the arrival windows, the leave time, crew parking and cutoff times are all free. The Crew, NavRun's paid plan, adds things like a written race strategy leg by leg.
How early should crew arrive at an aid station?¶
Before the window opens, with room to park and walk in. The crew page builds in a quarter hour of slack on top of the drive and the walk.
Why is the arrival window so wide late in the race?¶
Because late in an ultra, nobody knows within ten minutes. Night, climbs, technical trail, distance still to go and time spent stopped all make the honest range wider.
What happens when the runner loses signal?¶
The page keeps the last position and window, turns the position amber once it has gone quiet, and says how old it is. Nothing turns red.
The short version¶
Send one link the week before. On the night, the first line tells your crew whether to go.
More on the day itself: how to crew and pace an ultra runner, Ultra Aid Station Strategy and Surviving the Night in a 100-Miler. The runner on their first 50K and the runner on their fifth hundred both deserve a face at the next stop.
Start free. navrun.app