What's new

A way back to the race you have finished with

And your race stops finishing before you do. The last call a race asks you is not at its finish line, so the closing lines used to arrive the moment you answered it, while the board still had you out on the course with kilometres to run. Now they wait where you are: the screen tells you how far is left and when you cross, and the ending lands when you get there. The clock behind it was reading your race backwards as well. A runner who set off tired was scored as running well, and the tireder they were the further ahead of themselves they got. It reads the race you are actually having now, so the place on the board, the kilometre on the screen and the time you post are all the same race.

Your race ending now carries a link to the board. Cross the line or stop short of it and the field is usually still out on the course, with the order changing until the last of them is home. That board was on the screen you were standing on and nowhere else, so leaving it meant losing it. There is a way back to it from the ending now, for as long as the race is still being run.

Opened from the tile, and it asks about the pings

Open the game from its own tile for the first time on a phone or a laptop and it asks, once, whether you want the pings on. Saying yes is one tap and then your phone's own prompt; saying not now ends it on that device for good. It is asked per device rather than per account, because whether a ping can reach you is a fact about the thing in your hand, and a player with the game on a phone and a laptop gets the question on both.

The tile itself now carries the whole name rather than the first word of it.

This page, read back

This page had become a list of every change rather than a list of the things worth telling you about, so the last fortnight of it has been read back and cut by half. Nothing has been undone. What those entries described is all still true, and where four of them covered one morning's work they are now one entry with four paragraphs in it.

What has gone altogether is the extra runnings of WUU2K on the 16th, 17th and 18th. Those were not fixtures. They went on the calendar so the two of us could test a race against each other, and reporting them here told you about a start line you were never standing on. The quarterly WUU2K has not moved: 10 October, with the ultra at six, the marathon at seven and the half at nine.

Midpack Hero has its own address

The game now lives at midpackhero.com. It was at game.div.nz, a spare corner of an address a lot of other things share. Anything you bookmarked, pasted or shared still works and still lands on the same page, so there is nothing to go and fix.

Two things you have to do once, both because a browser treats a new address as a new place. Sign in again. And if you had daily pings switched on, switch them back on here. If you added Midpack Hero to a home screen, add it again from midpackhero.com and the old tile can go.

Mail from the game now comes from ping@midpackhero.com.

The about page says where this came from

Midpack Hero started as somebody else's idea, and until today the site never said so. The about page now opens on it: an idea about a race you read rather than watch, somebody who could not leave it alone, and the rabbit holes between that and the game you are playing. Both outfits behind it are named and linked, and the picture at the top is the pair of them out on a ridge above the harbour at dawn, drawn and then put through the same phosphor the rest of the screen is in. That is roughly what it looks like at six in the morning, give or take the sunrise.

The load bar says what is coming

Your load is charged when the work settles, and a race settles when the whole start line does. So from the moment the gun went to the moment the field was scored, the bar was quoting the body you had before the race, and the screen that said RESULT PENDING did not mention that the result was not the only thing pending.

The bar now draws where it is heading. Work that is on its way fills forward in amber; load that is about to come off, on an easy session or the walk home, fades back off the end of the filled run. Under it, one line says the figure, when it lands, and whether what is coming is what puts you into the red.

It never guesses. A race still being run, or a hill you are still on, can only get dearer than the number on its card, so that number is quoted as a floor: "+22 or more". A race whose story has ended is the one case that is exact, and it says so by not hedging.

Your race, written up

A finished race gave you a placing, a time and a list of names. None of it said what the morning was actually like: where you were at halfway, where it turned, or what you were doing when it did.

There is a short account of your own race under the result now. It says where you were at your best, where the places went and what the race recorded you doing there. It reads the runners on your list who were out there too, and it says one thing about the nearest of them. It is on the finish screen once the field has been scored, and on the replay whenever you want to read the morning back.

It only says what your race actually recorded. A morning where nothing much happened gets two sentences, and that is the honest length for one.

Your calls arrive where you actually are

A race laid out every one of its calls the moment the gun went, and never moved them. They came at the times a perfect run of the course would have reached them, so on a day that got away from you the call for 54 km landed while you were still short of 45, describing ground you had not seen yet. On a good day it went the other way and the far end of the course arrived late.

A call comes when you get there now. Every decision you make re-prices the road in front of you against the day you are having, so a runner who is emptying reaches the next aid station later than their plan promised and one who is flying reaches it sooner. The kilometre on your screen, the countdown to the next call, the five minutes you have to answer it and the hour of the day the story describes all move together, because they were always one number. It changes where you are, never what you post, and the same goes for a long night on a route.

And a race you step away from picks up where you left it. Go and look at the live board, come back, and you land on the line you had got to rather than at the top of prose you finished twenty minutes ago. Anything that arrived while you were away still types out from the first line you have not seen.

One race, one board

Two people watching the same race saw two different boards. Where a runner sat depended on who was reading it: your own place moved with how your race was going and nobody else's did, what you could see of the rest of the field was measured from where you were on the course, and somebody only watching got a third answer again. Your own race screen and the board could put you in two different places at the same time.

There is one board now. Every runner on it is read the same way, off their own race and their own clock, so a runner, their rival and somebody watching from home all see the same places and the same kilometres. It is also more current than it was: a call answered at the last second lands on it when it lands, and the board corrects itself. A runner whose race has ended is placed on the time they ran rather than on an estimate, so nobody sits six places ahead of somebody who crossed the line well in front of them.

And the gap to the runner ahead is the gap on the trail. It used to be the gap you would finish in, so two minutes into a 65 km race it could say the runner in front was fourteen minutes away while the two of you were still in sight of each other. It starts at nothing, opens as the race runs, and is the difference you finish in only once you finish. Anything longer than a minute and a half is said in minutes.

However long the start list gets, the board keeps the runners you came to watch: the leaders, where you are with the runners either side of you, and everybody on your rivals list, marked. If it leaves anybody out, it says how many.

A race you have started stays yours

Setting off with exactly the gels a race demands locked you out of it. The compulsory list is checked at the start line, and starting eats what it asked for, so a runner who carried the mandated number and no more owned none a second later. The next time they opened the race, the check turned them away and sent them to the calendar, while the live board went on showing them out on the course, which is where they were. The check happens once now, at the start line. Nobody is asked for their kit again at 40 km, and a race under way is still run for you while you are away.

Every screen that draws your runner knows you are racing. Today showed you at your desk while you were 7.8 km into an ultra, and out and the routes board had the same blind spot. All three draw the race now, the same picture the race screen does: the ground you are on, where you are on the course, and how far in.

And a start time that moves takes the start list with it. A race you have entered remembers the gun it was entered against, so a morning put back an hour used to leave everybody who had already signed up standing on the old one. Anybody entered is moved onto the new time, with the same field beside them. A race already under way is never moved, and neither is one that has been run.

The training board stays stood down after a race, too. A session offered on race morning came off the board if you opened the game before the gun, and sat there if you didn't, so coming home from a race could find the day's session still waiting. A race is the day's work. It is stood down either way, at no cost to Confidence.

The Wednesday race is a straight race now

The free race on Te Ahumairangi every Wednesday was a handicap: it placed you on how far you beat your own expected time by, so the field finished together if everybody ran to form and a runner in their first month could win it.

It is scored on the clock now, like every other race on the calendar, and it is called the Te Ahumairangi Club Night. Same hill, same nine and a half kilometres, same gun at six, still free, still over in about thirteen minutes. The fastest runner round it wins it.

A clock that runs while you are out

A route never said how long you had been going. The screen counted the kilometres down and the hours were the one number an FKT is actually about, and you could only read them at the end.

There is a route clock on the screen while you are out there, and it keeps running on the walk out. A day turned back still posts no time, so it has no clock either.

The race clock moves on its own now. It was a number written once a page and left, so it sat still while the prose typed and then jumped ten seconds at a time; it ticks by the second, at the speed the race is being run at, and the live board for a race under way carries the same clock.

And a screen you come back to asks what happened while you were away. A push saying a route was written up could land on a page still showing you on the descent, because a tab left in the background stops asking. Coming back to it now asks straight away, and so does the moment a countdown on the page is counting to.

The shop is a place, and your kit gives out

The counter is a place now. You could stand halfway up a route and buy a pair of shoes, put them on, and book a massage. While you are out on anything, a session, a hill, a route or a race, the shop and the physio and the wardrobe are shut, and the till says which of those you are on. You can still read the shelf, the prices and how worn your kit is. A start line you were turned away from still sends you to the shop, because the gun going is not what shuts it: buy what you are short of and go back to the line, and what it costs you is the ground the field covered while you were gone.

And the shelf says what you already own. Owned · in use, owned · 1 in the cupboard, or how many gels are left in the box, on the card you are looking at rather than a fold and a scroll away at the top of the shop. A vest, a set of flasks or a singlet is bought once and lasts for ever, so the shop will not sell you a second one at all. The cupboard has a bin now, for the broken poles and the pair you will never put on again. There is no money back, and it does not come back either.

A shell wets out, and old shoes keep getting slower. Past its wet outings a jacket stops counting: the weather starts costing you again, and a start line that asks for one will turn you away the same as if you had never bought it. You get told twice before that happens, at four fifths of its life and again in the race-week kit check. Shoes do not die on you. They cost more the further past their kilometres they go, up to a ceiling set below what running with no shoes at all would cost, so there is never a point at which you would be better off throwing them away.

And you can give a cause more than the month. There is a dial on both cards: walk it up and the month costs ¤160, ¤400, ¤800, ¤2,000 or ¤4,000 instead of ¤80. It buys nothing extra, and that is deliberate, because Reputation in this game is something you are owed for what you did and a purse that could climb that board would make it a different board. What it buys is a number. The shelf keeps a running total of what you have given across both causes, and there are three things in the cabinet for the people who go a long way past the month.

What you can read about somebody else

A dossier named what sort of runner somebody is twice over, and never said what they do for a living. It names the job now, gives their class once, and the line at the bottom of the readout is that job talking. One of the field gets its background in that row instead, because a bot has a class and no job.

And it says what they have been up to. What they have entered, because races run on the shared clock and every start list is already public. The last few pieces of ground and routes they put a time on, with a mark where they took one off whoever held it. Ten race results, newest first, however far back they go, where it used to stop at six months and arrive oldest first. Their division, their cabinet, and the routes they hold, which somebody holding three route records and no hill used to be told counted for nothing.

A person on a start list is marked as one. Anyone on a start list, a live board or a results sheet with somebody behind them says so, and is shown by their class, rather than being filed as a local runner along with the rest of the field. Your own row still says you.

And all of it reads as a table. What somebody holds, what they have been out on, what they have entered and what is on their record are each one table, one line per thing, with the column headings said once at the top instead of a bordered box per row. The head to head has a you and a them column, so you no longer work out which of the two times was yours from the sign on the end of the line, and a hill only one of you has run is no longer marked as a loss.

The game has a new name again

The game is Midpack Hero. It was The Midpack for a day, which had the right idea and the wrong shape: it named where you are standing rather than what you are doing about it. Nobody plays a game to stay put.

The midpack is still the honest description of where almost everybody out on a trail is. What changed is the second word. The hurt is the same as it is at the front, the day is longer, and no one is filming, and that is the whole of what this game is about.

Nothing else moved. Your runner, your ground, your kit, your badges and your results are where you left them, and the address has not changed. Mail from us says the new name, and so does the icon if you have the game on a home screen.

The FAQ is called help, and you can search it

The FAQ answers about eighty questions and it was in the footer, which is a fine place for a page nobody is looking for and a poor one for a page you only open because something has gone wrong. It is called help now, it is on the bar beside the five doors, and /faq still takes you to it.

There is a box at the top of it. Type what happened and it keeps the answers that match and puts everything else away: injured, gpx, holiday, ¤. It looks for the word you used rather than the word we used, so tired finds load, money finds the purse, and hurt finds the injury ladder. It searches in your browser, so it answers as fast as you can type and it never sends what you typed anywhere. A search is a link, too: game.div.nz/help?q=holiday opens the page already filtered.

And typing on a phone stops moving the page. On an iPhone, tapping any box in Midpack Hero zoomed the page in and left it there. That is Safari, and it has one cause: a box whose typing is smaller than 16 pixels. Every box in the game was 15.2. Pinch-zoom is untouched, and it stays untouched.

The game has a new name

This is The Midpack now. It was The Long Game, and we were fond of that, but the name already belongs to a podcast, a board game, a couple of books and most of a page of search results. A game nobody can find is a game nobody plays.

The Midpack is the truer description anyway. Almost everybody out on a trail is in it. The hurt is the same as it is at the front, the day is longer, and no one is filming. That is the game this has always been about.

Nothing else moved. Your runner, your ground, your kit, your badges and your results are exactly where you left them, and the address has not changed. Mail from us will say the new name on it.

Every race, live, and worth watching

Every race on the calendar now runs on one clock, and you can watch any of them, not only your own.

Open a race's own page and you get its whole arc on the one link: the start list while entries are open, a live board once the gun has gone, then the result sheet. The board shows place, kilometres covered and which way each runner is moving, marked provisional until the whole field is home, because a runner still out there is a projection and a projection can be wrong. The clock decides who crossed and when. A finish is stamped at the gun plus what your legs actually took, never at the moment you happened to press a button, and the field settles as soon as every time is in rather than making the fast finishers wait on the slow ones.

Races now run at the pace a real one would: the WUU2K half costs about two hours, the 65 the better part of a day. The Wednesday club night at Te Ahumairangi is the exception and stays quick, over in about thirteen minutes, still free. And a call standing on the course now sends a push, on every race, not only the Wednesday one, so you know the moment a decision is yours to make, wherever you're carrying your phone.

You get five minutes to answer a call, on every race. It used to be fifteen on most of them and three and three quarters on the Wednesday, which was the race clock talking: a race four times faster than life gave you a quarter of the thinking time. The time you get to think is yours rather than the race's now, and it does not shrink because the field is moving faster. Entering a race says less, too. The dialog had grown into the whole contract; it is the price, when it goes, and what happens to a call you miss.

The whole S–K, in pictures

The Tararua S–K had eight stretches that told you what was happening and never said where you were. They do now, and each one comes with the picture to go with it.

You get the Mangatainoka swing bridges on the way in, by daylight or in a torch beam depending on the hour you started. Walker and the lumpy tops to Arete, and the wrong spur off it if that is the way your navigation goes. Dracophyllum Hut, and the water. Nichols Hut, four bunks and a tank. The knobs from Concertina to Boyd-Wilson, which take longer than anything else on the range and now look like it. And Kiwi Ranch Road at the end of it, gravel and headlights, which is the first time the route has had a picture of its own finish.

Twenty-one places on the S–K carry art now, up from thirteen.

The hills are a skill now, and you can be winched off one

The routes have always been the biggest days in the game. From today they also ask something of you that a fast pair of legs cannot supply: backcountry, which is what the hills teach you by being in them.

Every route says what it earns. Jumbo–Holdsworth is worth 3 the first time you get round it, then 2, then 1. The Southern Crossing starts at 5 and the S–K at 10, both stepping down a point a trip. A day you turn round on still teaches you something. Your running total is on the FKT board, on each route's own page, and under your runner on the hub.

And a route you are not ready for ends with a helicopter. Go onto the Tararua tops with nothing behind you and the day can end at a hut or a trig with LandSAR winching you out: no time posted, nothing paid, and a knock to your Confidence and your Reputation that everybody hears about. Nobody dies out here. They get found, and they get a ride they would rather not talk about.

Nothing stops you going. The board will not refuse you, and it will not tell you which route is beyond you either. It carries one line saying that one of them is, and that is all. Turning round at the hut is still the careful call and still pays for itself. Walking onto the main range on your first morning is a decision, and now it is one with a cost.

Start on Jumbo. It asks nothing, and it is where the hills start teaching.

New runners start at the bottom

Sign up on Monday and you could be in the Tops, the region's top group, by Thursday. Three days is not a career, and the ladder was not the thing at fault.

The field was seeded too slow. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two local runners were weaker than somebody on their first morning, and the slowest of them could never have caught one however long they trained. There was also a gap in the middle of the region with nobody in it at all: you outgrew the runners below you around week six and then had nobody to chase until about week thirteen.

Every local runner has been stood up against a real career. The five standards now run from somebody at your own day-one level all the way to somebody at the top of the sport, with no hole in between, and the quickest of them is a runner a maxed-out career can still beat, but only just. A new runner now starts in the Valley, whichever class they pick, with the whole ladder above them.

⚠️ The local ground is held at faster times than it was. That is the same change seen from the other side, and it is deliberate. A local runner may only hold one piece of ground now, though, where they used to hold two, so the board is spread across a lot more people than it was and a good deal more of it is within reach of a runner a month or two in.

And your group now reads the whole runner, not just your training. Your division used to be decided by your seven qualities alone, so a season of racing counted for nothing towards it while a fortnight off the training counted for a great deal. Reputation counts too now. That is what ground, marks and race results pay you, and it quietly fades if you stop going out. Fitness is still most of it: racing hard for a season is worth a few places, not a division.

Reputation buys you a name

Reputation only ever did one thing: move you up the region board. Now it buys the thing everybody out there already has and you did not.

At 25 Reputation a nickname field opens on your account. Pick one, and from then on it sits between your first and last name everywhere your name appears: the region board, a race results sheet, the feed, even the notification that lands on your phone in the morning. Everybody reads it, so it goes past a check before it goes up, and you can change it once a fortnight. Drop back under 25 and it comes off, though it stays yours and goes straight back on when you are back over the line.

The locals are on exactly the same terms, which is the part that changed for them. Every runner out there has had a nickname baked in since the day they were made, and from now on they only wear it while they have the results to back it up. On a fresh region that is about five of the thirty-two. The rest have to go and earn it, same as you.

And the cabinet holds what you won, newest first, with a count of how many are still out there. It used to be mostly a list of things you had not done: seven badges, each with the time it wants and a paragraph about it, so a runner holding two of them read five rows about days that had not happened. What each route has on offer is on the route's own board and its record page, which is where you are standing when you can do something about it.

Two things at the shop worth giving money to

There is a Causes shelf at the shop now, and it is the only counter in the game that hands you nothing back. Eighty a month, to either of two outfits.

LandSAR are the volunteers who come and get people off the hill. Give them a month and, if they ever do come for you, the callout costs your name half what it would have. You will still feel just as stupid about it.

Trail Running NZ put the volunteer crew on the tracks: the ones who cut the benches and replace the markers. A month to them opens the trail crew green on the race singlet, a colour nobody else can buy, and it stays open for good once you have given it.

A month is a month, and it is up when it is up: nothing renews itself, you cannot pay twice in one, and the shelf tells you the day it runs out. Each one is worth a point to your name. It will not carry you up a board on its own, because a month of not going out anywhere costs you more of your name than a month of giving pays back.

Both have a badge on them, and neither will ever be worth a second on a hill.

Less on the screen, more in the FAQ

Ten screens have been read line by line and had their explaining taken off them. What a route pays, what holding a piece of ground is worth, what a level costs, which pings email you, what the four divisions are: all of it is still true and all of it is on the FAQ, with a link where the sentence used to be.

What stays on the screen is what you are deciding and what it will cost you. No kit, no start. A route beyond your experience ends with a helicopter. Miss the cutoff and it is a missed race, and the fee is gone. Those got shorter, not quieter.

And telling us something goes somewhere now. The contact form used to send a mail and stop there, and a mail sits in a pile. What you write becomes a numbered job on our side, with a status and somebody who has to close it, and the reply comes from the same address as before. If you're signed in, your name and your address are already in the boxes.

And three small faults are gone. A More about drawer stays open rather than being shut by the board refreshing itself underneath you. A hut book or a ground log stays open on the note you just left, marked just now. And watch on somebody in the region works, where the press used to never leave your phone.

Five screens, and a lot fewer words

Everything was the same volume and competing for your attention. That is two problems wearing one coat: nothing on a screen was louder or quieter than anything else, and there was simply too much of it.

Every screen has three levels now. One headline that says what to do next, in a bigger size, above one filled button, and at most one of each per screen. Under that, the live state worth reading: your condition, your load, how you're going today, the race window, the kit you're short of. Under that, everything you look up rather than act on, folded into drawers that stay shut until you open them and that say what's in them on the front. A warning wears a ▲ as well as a colour, so you can find it by scanning rather than by reading.

The nav is five words: today, out, region, shop, account. It used to be nine plus the FAQ, which on a phone meant three or four of them lived behind a menu on every screen. out is the one question that used to be three doors, ground, routes and races, and the three boards carry a strip along the top so you can move between them.

Today and your runner are one screen. They were the two longest screens in the game and most of the second was the first one said again, the same level bar and the same division and the same purse drawn twice. The runner sheet is six drawers under the hub now: Your runner, Standing, Kit, Forecast, Work and the purse, History. The hub came out shorter than it was before it absorbed a whole screen. /game/runner still works and lands on the drawer.

The three boards lead with the decision. A name, what's standing on it, what it's worth, and then only the rows that bite today: today's conditions, the fuel, the kit, the retreat warning. Everything else, who found it, who the Regular is, the landmarks, the badges, the record, is behind a More about drawer. The compulsory kit list only shows when you're short of something, which is when it's the row that matters. Measured: the ground board went from about thirteen phone screens to under two.

The region opens with the people. It used to be a ladder thirty-three rows long on which the only way to tell a person from a simulated runner was that one of them carried a level. Now /game/region is the people first, one row each with a watch button on it, then what everybody you watch has been up to, then the four divisions with yours open and the rest folded. A person is marked wherever runners are listed.

And watching somebody finally tells you something. When a rival takes a piece of ground, sets a mark on a route or posts a race result, it lands in your feed, with both the person and the hill as links. It's still one way, they're still never told, and none of it ever buzzes your phone.

Living costs come off the wage. Money was piling up with nothing left to buy, because the shop is finite and the wage was unconditional. Rent, power and a supermarket shop now come off every morning before anything reaches the purse, so what you bank is the difference, and the jobs board prints all three figures for every job on it. Two lives pay nothing, because barely working and studying both mean living at home. There's no bankruptcy and no debt: a thin month is a squeeze.

The shop is a shelf at a time, and it opens on whatever you're short of. What you need, shoes, poles and shell, light, pack and water, fuel, physio, and a shelf for a look. The jobs board folds by band, with the life you're living open.

Two new things on the counter. A recovery session, which takes the tail off a heavy week and stops dead at the red zone, so it buys back the part that was always coming back and never a red zone you ran into. And a race singlet, in the same three colourways as the shoes, which does nothing at all: no seconds saved, none lost, and nothing will ever ask for one. It's the thing you buy because you want to look like that.

That second one is a rule loosened on purpose. The purse buys what money buys a runner in life, kit, entries, treatment, recovery, a look, and never what only training buys: fitness, a result, a start line somebody else earned, a name on the region board, or a mend for an injury you ran into with your eyes open. A strain and a real injury are still refused at any price, and an earned hat is still not for sale.

Your first week has a thread through it. Creation deals you a runner and folds the dresser underneath, four numbered steps instead of sixteen rows of arrows. The orientation page is six cards, a third of what it was, and one of them is about the other people, which it never mentioned. And for seven days the hub carries five things worth doing once, each linking to where it's done: finish a session, look at who else is here, get kitted for a mountain route, enter the free Wednesday race, sign a ground log. It pays nothing, it isn't a tutorial you have to clear, and then it takes itself away for good.

The FAQ is grouped the way the game is, today then out then region then shop then account, with a one-line answer at the top of every section and the jump list finally naming all nineteen of them. It's about a third shorter, because anything a screen now says for itself doesn't need three paragraphs here as well.

Names lead somewhere

The feed has carried links for a while: a hill goes and you can tap the hill, tap whoever took it. Every other screen in the game named the same things and printed them flat.

The standings were the worst of it. Under a name it lists the ground they hold and it said "Skyline" with nowhere to go, on the one screen whose whole subject is who holds what. A rival's dossier was worse again, because it is the screen a feed link lands you on: ground held, the ground you have both run, every race on their record, and not one of them led anywhere.

They all do now. Where a name has a page behind it, the name is the way to it, and it looks the same wherever it turns up: the standings, a dossier, the career log, the two boards, the hub, the last race. Whoever holds a piece of ground or a route is a tap away on the board you are already reading.

And the teaser sits still on a phone. Scrolling it made the footer slide up and down under your thumb, and the strip at the top with the clock and the battery in it showed whatever you had just scrolled past. Both were things pinned to the height of the screen, on a phone where the height of the screen changes as the address bar comes and goes. Neither is pinned now, and the front of the site is fixed with it.

You can see how everybody else is going

The ladder could tell you what a runner had been doing over a week and nothing at all about the state they were in today, so somebody deep in the red read exactly like somebody who had just come off a rest day.

Every row now carries the load they are carrying, with the red zone marked on it the way it is marked on your own, and how their body is reading today: Flying down to Wrecked. If something has gone wrong, the row says so before it says anything else.

What they have been doing is still there, under lately, because a quiet week and a wrecked morning are two different facts and one of them clears overnight.

You still cannot read their attributes. That is the same line as ever: you can see the shape somebody is in, not what they are made of.

The doors are open

The game is open to anybody who wants a runner, so the bits of it that still said otherwise have gone.

The teaser used to end by offering to tell you when the real game opened. It was true when it was written and it is not now, so it points at the way in instead: play the ten minutes, then take on a runner of your own if you fancy it. There is still a list, and it is a list rather than a queue.

There is a contact form now, at the foot of every page. The FAQ has been promising that somebody would go and have a look since the site went up, and there was nowhere to say anything: no address, no form, nothing. Tell us what happened, what you expected, and roughly when, and we will.

The FAQ says what happens to the things you write, which it never did. Ground logs, hut books, the name you put on a teaser run, a piece of ground you send in: every one of them is read before it reaches anybody's board. The short version is that you can be as rude as you like about a hill, and none of it at another runner.

And it separates the two ways an account ends, because closing one and deleting one are not the same thing. Closing takes away the way in and nothing else: the runner, the record and everything you wrote are all still there, and it can be undone. Deleting erases the lot, straight away, and we cannot put it back. That one stays yours to do on your own account page rather than ours.

The way in is guarded, too. Get your password wrong five times and the login sits you down for five minutes, and the reset mail will only go to the same address a few times an hour. Neither is something you will meet by fumbling, and both exist so that nobody else can meet them on your behalf.

And a link to the game looks like the game. Paste one somewhere and you get a proper card: the terminal, the line about what this is, and the address underneath. It used to unfurl as a small square of the app icon, on the one link you would send if you wanted to show somebody.

None of this changes a thing about your runner.

The feed is somewhere to go now

"Tessa "Two Days" Faulding went up Skyline in 56:50. You're second there now." Two things worth looking at in one sentence, and neither of them went anywhere.

Names in the feed are links now. A hill goes to its record, so you can see the ten quickest on it and every time it has changed hands. A runner goes to their dossier, so you can see who has just turned up and taken something off you. It works everywhere a name is printed: ground and FKT routes, the runner who beat you into the finish, whoever else was out on the same line today, and every one of them on /game and in the full career log alike. Every line written before today has had its links put back, so the whole career log is a door and not just the part of it from here on.

A race name is a link too, and races have a record page of their own now: the course record, the ten quickest on it, and every running of it with your own result on the day. A race that has left the calendar keeps its page, so a medal from one still leads somewhere.

And a record says what has been run, not what is meant to be. The three record pages, one for a piece of ground, one for a route and one for a race, each printed a par: the time the hill is supposed to take, and how far off it you were. Both are gone. A record is what people have actually posted on that line, and what the ground is capable of is something you find out by going up it. What survives is the gap to a person, because that is a rival and not a bar.

Put it on your Home Screen

The game installs. It gets its own tile, drawn as your runner, and it opens without a browser around it. On an iPhone that is also the only way it can reach you at all: Safari will not let a website notify you until the thing is on your Home Screen, so until you have done it a session finishing or a piece of ground going waits in the feed until you next look.

Nothing ever said so, except one grey line in Account that only appeared to browsers that already could not do it.

Your first morning says it now, /game keeps one quiet line about it until you have got round to it, and Account carries it properly. On Android and on the desktop there is a button that does it in one tap. Once you are installed the same block turns into the switch that was the point of it: turn the pings on.

It has nothing to say once you are running from the tile with notifications on, and the line on /game has a "not now" that sticks.

Nobody wakes up while they are still out there

The S–K runs from one dawn to the next, and the morning it crossed used to arrive as though you had been asleep for it: a wake-up ping telling you what a good day it was for a run, and a fresh training session put on the board under a runner who was somewhere on the Dress Circle.

The day still turns over, because it is a new day. What no longer happens is the waking up.

• No alarm while you are out. A line lands on the feed saying the date changed somewhere behind you, and that is all. It does not reach your phone.
• Nothing new on the board. The day's session waits until you are home, and it is the same one that was next.
• And no night's rest. Running through the night is not sleeping it, so the route no longer quietly recovers you part-way through itself. It all comes back the following morning, in a bed, off what the day actually cost.

A long day out now knows what time it is

Two things on the mountain routes, and the Tararua S–K in particular.

• The story tells you the actual hour. A beat that mentions the time of day now reads the clock you are running on rather than one somebody imagined. The S–K used to say you were a third of the way in and it was still morning, which was true for nobody: at the route's own par a third of the way in is half past twelve, and if you are still building toward a sub-twenty-four it is a good deal later than that. It says what it actually is now.
• And a beat waits until you get there. Answering the call at Arete used to print everything through to Nichols Hut, thirteen kilometres and several hours up the ridge, all at once. The ground between two calls now arrives as you cover it, so the water at Dracophyllum and the hut at Nichols are two separate arrivals in your day instead of one paragraph read hours early.

Nothing about the route, the time you post or what it costs you has changed.

Going on holiday

You can go away now. Book a holiday on your account screen: pick the day it starts and how long, and your runner goes with you instead of quietly falling apart while you are up a hill with no signal.

• Four weeks of the year, three at a time, seven days at least. Booked ahead, tomorrow at the earliest, and free to call off right up until the morning it begins. Call it off before it starts and there is no record of it at all.
• The first morning clears the load and the stress. Three weeks off the job really is three weeks off the job.
• The fitness still slides, at half pace. A holiday is a kinder fortnight, not a paused one. Real runners take an off-season and come back rested and a little slower, and so does yours.
• A session you never started costs you no Confidence, and the autopilot stands down. A holiday is a holiday.
• You can watch them take it. The hub draws your runner reclined on a towel with a drink for the whole of it, somewhere warmer than Wellington.
• It does not hold your division. The season turns whether you are there or not, and you can be relegated while you are away. The booking screen says so before you book: it names the day the season turns, tells you whether that falls inside the holiday you are about to take, and shows where the table currently has you.
• It costs nothing, and it does not stop the purse draining if you never look in. Those are two different things: one is a decision you made, the other is nobody being there to make any.

The season is the actual season

The competitive year is the real one. Summer, autumn, winter and spring, on the real New Zealand calendar: 1 December, 1 March, 1 June and 1 September. There is no second calendar to learn, and every screen that shows a division now says how many days are left.

• When the season turns, two things happen at once. The divisions settle, off the ability ranking you have been watching all season. And every piece of ground in the region stands open: whatever you were holding, you are not holding now, and neither is anybody else. One line in the feed tells you both.
• The first week of a season is the best week of the year to turn up. The board is empty, and the local field comes for it within days.
• Nothing you actually did is lost. Your times stay on that ground's new all-time board for good, your personal best is still your personal best, and every FKT mark, badge and Reputation point is untouched. What ends is the tenancy, which was only ever a statement about who is standing there now.
• The FKT marks do not reset, and never will. Ground is minutes from town that anybody can take off you overnight. A route is hours in the Tararuas.
• The races come round at different rates now. The Wednesday handicap is every week and costs nothing. XTRAIL West Wind is the first Sunday of every month. WUU2K is once a season, entries open eight weeks out, so a training block has somewhere to point. When a race is out of season the calendar says when its entries open next.
• The ground record shows both boards: this season, and all time.

The region is cut into four

Everybody in Wellington, you and the whole local field, is now ranked on ability and sorted into four divisions: Tops, Ridge, Bush and Valley. You are not asked to opt in and you cannot pick one.

• It goes on fitness, and nothing else. Every quality except Reputation, the same figure your level is counted in. Not your standing on the board, which is what you have been doing lately rather than what the body can do. Both readings are on the standings screen now, side by side.
• The groups are a fixed size, so there is always somebody directly above you to get past and somebody below trying to get past you. You go up by becoming faster than the runner holding the last place above you. You go down when somebody becomes faster than you.
• It settles when the season turns, and never in between. The board shows you where you would land if the season ended today, all season long, so a drop is something you watch coming rather than something you find out about.
• A fortnight's warning if you are in the bottom two of your group. Once, and a fortnight is enough training to answer it.
• Your runner sheet prices both directions: how many fitness points to the promotion, and how many you are clear of the drop by.
• A division pays nothing. No currency, no unlock, nothing for sale. It is a mirror held up to the region, and that is all it is.

A bigger region, with a sharp end to it

The Wellington field has doubled, from fourteen runners to thirty-two, and it no longer stops where it used to.

• There are people out there you cannot beat yet. A handful of the new arrivals are national level, and one or two are quicker than that. They are not there on day one: they train into it over months, the same way you do.
• The rest of the field is exactly where it was. There are still runners you are already quicker than, and there always will be. Nothing at the slow end of the region moved.
• The standings say what body somebody has. A rival's card reads club runner, sharp end of the club, regional, national level or elite, and none of those is a level. It is what they are, not how long they have been here.
• More runners means more of them coming for your ground. Ground that had gone quiet should start changing hands again.

Standing still costs something now

Fitness has always drifted when you stop training. It used to slow down the longer you were gone, so the second half of a month away was nearly free. It does not slow down any more, and there is one free day rather than two.

• The further you pushed a quality, the faster it comes back down. A beginner sheds what they always shed. A season of climbing does not.
• Standing orders are not a way to leave. After four days without you opening the game the plan stops setting out, and fitness starts drifting on a second, gentler clock that answers to you rather than to the runner. Running on autopilot is still better than doing nothing. It is not the same as being here.
• The runner sheet says the day the next point comes off, and which qualities go first, so it is never something you find out afterwards.
• The rest of the region is on the same rules. Runners who used to hold their fitness through anything now lose it like everybody else.

Nothing falls below the runner you started as. Three months of nothing takes you all the way back to that block and no further, so there is always a career there to build again.

Regulars, and a best of your own

Two things for anybody who is not the fastest runner in the region, which on ground held for months is nearly everybody.

• Every piece of ground has a Regular. Whoever has been up it most often in the last ninety days. Not quickest. Turning up. It takes three outings before the title exists, and after that it is whoever goes there most, which is rarely the same person as the one holding the time. It is on the board, on each piece of ground's own page, and it pays nothing at all, which is what keeps it about going running.
• A personal best is news now. A day that beat your own time on a line somebody else holds used to be one grey feed line about how far off you were. It gets the block a take gets: what you ran, what you took off your own time, and how far the hill still is. It pays nothing either. It is your number and nobody can take it.

This page

Everything below was already true. Until now the only way to find out was to notice that something had moved.

It is linked from the footer of every page, including from inside the game, and it reaches back to the first thing anybody could play.

Reputation fades, and a long day out finally pays

Your name now moves in both directions.

• Reputation decays. It used to only ever go up, which meant the region was slowly ranking whoever had been playing longest. Stop racing and it drifts back down, fastest when it is highest, and never below the eight you started with. Your badges are untouched. Reputation is what people think of you now. A badge is what you did.
• Ground and marks pay every time, not once. The pay-once rule existed only because the number could never come down. Now it can, so taking a piece of ground pays again after a fortnight, and a mark after three weeks.
• A mountain day is worth what it costs. Finishing an FKT route pays on its own, whether or not the mark changes hands. The S–K pays most, the Southern Crossing next, Jumbo–Holdsworth least. Turning round still pays something on the two big ones, because turning round is the careful choice and always was.
• A finisher badge for each of the three routes, on the shelf beside the clock badges.
• Every route has a record page. Whose name is on the mark and since when, the ten quickest, and every time it has changed hands.

The day ends where the day ends

• Turning back gets you off the hill. Retreat at Dundas Ridge and you are home that afternoon, not the following night. The clock now runs to where you stopped, plus the walk out.
• You get your result. Finishing a route used to bounce you back to the board, which threw the ending away. The run now lands on the day it was: your time, the mark, the splits, what it built.
• The ending waits for the road end. Jumbo–Holdsworth asks its last question at 17 km of 24, and the story was narrating the descent while you still had an hour of it in front of you.
• The Jumbo–Holdsworth directions are named the way the maps name them. Valley first is anticlockwise. We had it the other way round.
• Nothing types into a window you are not looking at. Whether the tab is in the background or the window is simply sitting behind something else, the story waits. Come back and the beat you missed types in from the start.

Taking ground says what it won

Taking a piece of ground off somebody used to be a line in the feed and nothing else.

• It pays Reputation, and says so.
• A block on the board with your time, the margin over what it beat, and where it moved you in the region. It goes quiet on its own after a day.
• Every piece of ground has a record page: who holds it and since when, the ten quickest on it, every time it has changed hands, the line on the map, and its elevation profile.

The screen keeps up with the world

Leave the app open overnight and the world moved on without telling the page. The session resolved, the day rolled over, the wake ping landed, and the board in front of you still said Wednesday.

It refreshes itself now when something happens to your runner. It does not interrupt anything you are reading, and it does not touch a form you are typing into.

A world with other people in it

The largest single batch so far, aimed at a world that feels inhabited rather than a loop that asks for more of your day. Nothing here added a notification.

• Ground logs and hut books. Every piece of ground carries a log, every route a hut book, both read before you commit rather than after. Finish an outing and you can sign it. The field signs the ground log too, in their own words, and nobody signs the hut book, because the mountains are yours alone.
• Rivals. Tag anyone, a person or one of the field, and the standings narrow to the handful you actually care about. It is one-way. Nobody is told you are watching them, which is also what makes it work the same over a bot.
• Somebody else was out here today. A quiet line naming whoever ran the same line earlier.
• Absence stops paying. Ignore the game for a fortnight and your runner came back richer than the one who showed up, because wages banked and nothing spent them. They now get on with their life while you are gone, and it costs.
• The physio. A massage takes the stress down, a session clears a niggle. A strain or a real injury is refused at any price. Those heal on time and nothing else, which is the whole point of earning them.
• The Wednesday handicap can be lost. The field ran to form every week, so sixty places collapsed to about five and the handicap was decided entirely by which ending you reached. Everyone on the start line now has good days and bad ones.
• The wake line says what the morning is about. Heavy legs, stress, or too long off. It knew, and it never said.

The places, drawn

Every race and every route now shows you where you are.

Fifty-six new pictures, one per place on each course, drawn as terminal half blocks in the same phosphor the rest of the game is in. Khandallah Park in the dark at six, the Skyline in the wind, the turbine, the Tip Track, the velodrome. They arrive with the prose, a row at a time, so a place turns up as you reach it.

The wind farm, the kit, and the purse

• West Wind replaces Turbine 16. Turbine was invented. West Wind is a real race on Meridian's wind farm at Makara, 17 km and 761 m, and every landmark in it is read off the organiser's own pages. Turbine stays readable for anyone who ran it.
• The kit is yours to buy. You start with trail shoes and two gels, not a full cupboard. The mountain routes and the two long WUU2K distances each carry a compulsory list, read off the real ones. No gear, no race, checked at the start line rather than at entry, so you can enter a week out and buy the jacket in the meantime. You are warned four times before it costs you anything.
• The money is a purse, and it is marked ¤. Every figure in the economy is calibrated against real Wellington wages on purpose, and a $380 beside a Buy button read like a microtransaction on a game that will never sell you one. Same numbers, different sign.
• The teaser is a teaser, not a demo. A demo is a cut-down version of the product. This is a different product: one fixed Western States scenario with thirteen endings.

The hub answers one question

Opening the game gave you every fact and no answer.

• What can I do now? One headline, then the ways to spend the day: the session on the board, a piece of ground, a route, the S–K. The rest folds away.
• One body, one outing. You could start a training session and then walk to the ground board and start something else at the same instant. Two efforts in one day is a decision you get charged for. Two at once was never one.
• Race day stands down the other boards too. The session board has cleared on race morning since July. The ground and route boards had not learned, so you could still put the legs into a hill three hours before a gun you paid ¤380 for.
• The writing got read. A dash we had been reaching for in roughly every other sentence is gone, and the walls of explanation with it.

The board is real hills now

The biggest change to the game's shape since the world opened.

• You can add ground. Export a GPX from your watch, crop it in the browser to the span you mean, name it, send it in. Somebody approves it and it is on the board for everyone. The crop is the privacy mechanism: no file ever reaches us, and the ends of your run stay at your house.
• The eight hills the board launched with are retired. Every number on them was typed by hand before any of this existed, and not one had been checked against real topography. The board said the Tip Track was 2.4 km. A real recording of it says 3.46. The board runs on real uploads now.
• A hill is priced off a real time. Where somebody has actually run it, par is that time and a bit. Where nobody has, it is a model fitted against the ones that do, charging the climb, the descent and the footing.
• Crowns and segments are gone as words. Both were Strava's. You hold ground, somebody takes it off you, and there is no trophy noun. That is the joke rather than a gap.

Read your race back

• A finished race or route can be replayed. It types the whole day out again at reading pace, with a way to skip to the end. It is the only way to see what your race plan did on a morning you slept through. Linked from everywhere the race is mentioned.
• The teaser can be shared. Play it to an ending and you get a card, a permanent link that unfurls when you paste it, a name to put on the run, and a public list of finished runs. The link never shows the transcript. The path you took is the spoiler.
• Shoes are sold in a colour, and the sprite wears the pair you bought.
• Four ways up a piece of ground, chosen before you set off, each leaning on a different part of the runner.
• A rival answers your move. Go early on the zigzag and the field comes with you.
• Everything the game says was read end to end. Every scenario, every screen and every public page, rewritten so the whole thing sounds like one person rather than eleven.

Numbers you could not read

• Ground trains you. A maximal effort on a real hill banked no fitness at all. It now builds whatever that ground is made of, which is also what decides who is fast there. Climb a lot of it and you get better at climbing.
• The day has one slot. Take the session or go and attack something. The one you leave stands down free.
• A second big day costs. Two routes in a day, or a race run hard, and the legs know.
• Load is on the front page, with the red zone marked, which was the one threshold in the game you could not see.
• Levels climb like an RPG's. Level 2 is cheap, level 20 is 281 points, and the top of the ladder has to be held rather than reached. Going up now says what it opened.
• An attempt takes the time it takes. Every piece of ground cost you an hour, whether it was two kilometres or thirteen.

Your runner on your home screen

• The app icon is your runner, side on, in the kit you dressed them in. Add to Home Screen and there they are.
• The look you make is the look you keep. The wardrobe had quietly become a free dresser, which made the runner you built on day one a suggestion. Only earned kit changes now.
• You are out there, and every screen says so. A strip at the top of the app while a race or a route is running, with a blinking cursor when something is waiting on you. The route sends a notification for a standing call.
• More than one race at a time. Entering Saturday's marathon used to refuse the free Wednesday club night. The only thing refused now is two start lines on one morning.
• All three WUU2K courses were corrected against the real race. The half was climbing a track it descends, past two things that are not on it. Every par is now calibrated against published finishing times.

Everyone on the same clock

Races come in two kinds now.

• Local races are the ones you already knew: play them when you like, any time in the twelve hours after the gun.
• An event race has a gun. The field sets off together, the calls unlock as the clock reaches their point on the course, and the whole start line is scored at once, minutes after the finish rather than half a day later. The first one is a free Wednesday handicap over Te Ahumairangi, about thirteen minutes end to end, and the one race on the calendar a beginner can win.
• What one runner does, another runner reads. Go early at a landmark and everyone near you sees it, and the gaps change because you moved.
• A race plan for the mornings you sleep through. Play it safe or push on. Any call you leave standing gets taken by it, at a cost on the clock. There is no wait-for-me, because a field does not wait. A race you sleep through entirely comes home with a real result instead of a missed entry.
• The level-10 one-shot comes out on the hill too, once per route attempt, at a call you have actually reached.

Race day owns the day

• The hub leads with the race. It knew nothing about races at all, and on race morning it offered you a training session, which is a good way to spoil a start line you paid for.
• The weather is real. Fetched off the forecast every morning, seven days ahead, so a six o'clock start in July is genuinely a headlamp start and the Skyline in a southerly is genuinely unpleasant. Storms are a fourth kind of weather and they cost.
• The prose knows what day it is. Turbine said eight a.m. Sunday against a nine o'clock gun on whatever day you entered. Races now say the hour they actually start.
• Race day types, the way the teaser always has, with the scene changing as the course does.

Mountains, bad days, and a beginner's week

• FKT routes are played, not timed. Three Tararua mountain days, written off the real routes, each one a run of decisions rather than a stopwatch. The calls unlock as you reach them, so at 32 km of 74 you are at Aokaparangi and the ladder is four hours away.
• Nobody starts holding a mark. FKTs are the human-only tier and the boards start empty. The field cannot answer a call at two in the morning, so a route is not theirs to hold.
• A night policy. Pick what happens to a call that lands at 3 a.m. before you go. Being awake is worth time, and it is a number rather than a feeling.
• Bad days exist. Form of the day is half what you have done to yourself and half the luck of the morning, it is settled once and shown with its reasons, and it decides what a session is worth.
• A beginner has a beginner's week. Nineteen sessions on a four-tier ladder, the second daily session earned rather than given, and par is now a time a developed runner posts rather than a day-one one.
• Badges. Inside the day on the S–K, the hour to Powell Hut, a long lunch on the Southern Crossing, and having been up all three. They cannot be bought and they cannot be taken back, and two of them unlock a hat in a colour that exists nowhere else in the game.
• The shop could never sell anything. It rendered a balance, two notes and nothing for sale, which made a promise about always being warned before your gels run out into a promise you could not act on.
• The phone got a stylesheet. The header was eating a quarter of the screen.

Money, mountains, and five classes

• A public site, so there is somewhere to send people.
• Jobs are a lever. Eighty-three of them across thirteen bands, each one a trade between money, weekday training time, stress and flexibility. Change once a month, free.
• WUU2K is one event at three distances. 21 km at nine, 45 at seven, 65 at six in the dark, all finishing at the velodrome. Entries cost money and are never refunded, which buys a number and a place on the start line and nothing else.
• FKT routes. Free, whenever you like, and hours long. The Tararua S–K is 74 km and 6,800 m, declared the day before, started at your own alarm, with tomorrow's forecast on the board and a free withdrawal right up until it goes off. A bad window is never blocked. It is only ever costed.
• Five classes and an ability ladder. Tussock climber, scree hound, road convert, hut bagger, rogainer. A readout at level 5, a one-shot you press mid-race at level 10, and a world perk at 15.

The world stops rewarding you for leaving

A fortnight of work that turned the daily loop into a life.

• Absence costs. A session you ignore lapses, fitness drifts back toward where your class started, and coming back from a month away is ground to make up rather than a runner to bury.
• The rivals became real runners. A whole field of them, each with a personality, training on their own schedule, peaking, getting injured, and coming for your ground while the app is shut.
• Weather, darkness and the season cost you time, and are on the board before you commit rather than after.
• Money, time and stress. Your job pays a wage, eats your afternoon session if it is a rigid one, and grinds you down if you never rest.
• Gear wears out. Shoes go lugless, poles fatigue, a torch goes flat, gels get eaten. Kit can cost you time and comfort. It can never make you faster.
• Standing orders, so a known absence does not have to cost you the week.
• The standings, so there is somewhere to see who is holding what, and a dossier behind every name.
• A career log, an orientation page on your first morning, and the runner on screen carrying the poles and the head torch you actually own.

The runner you can see

Your runner is drawn on screen, out of Unicode quadrant glyphs on a monospace grid, so the whole thing is still selectable text.

Build, skin, and six parts that each carry a shape and a colour. Around them a scene that comes off the world rather than off a menu: the route scrolling past, the weather, the light, the desk at work, the way they move when they are carrying an injury.

The world runs whether you open it or not

The change that made it a game you live with rather than a page you visit.

• One sim day per real day. Up to two sessions, then sleep, then a ping in the morning that your runner is awake.
• It ticks itself. The world advances with the app shut.
• Notifications. Web push first, email as a backstop, on an installable app. Per-kind mutes, an optional daily digest, and quiet hours from ten at night so the morning ping leads the day.

A world, and a runner in it

The first version anybody could sign up to and live in.

• Make a runner. Rolled stats, a background, a region, a job, and a kit dresser.
• Train. Sessions that resolve on a real clock rather than instantly.
• Ground worth holding. Wellington trails with a time on them, an opt-in attempt, and an injury chain where the exposure is earned even though the severity is not. You are warned first, every time.
• Race day. Enter a local race, and on the day play it through with the same engine the teaser runs on, seeded and gated by the stats you actually built. The two halves of the game meet.

The Western States teaser

The first thing anybody could play. One hundred miles of Western States as a branching scenario with thirteen endings, typed out a character at a time on a green phosphor terminal.

The stats that decide which way it goes are hidden, and no choice in it rolls a die. Everyone in the field is a parody of somebody you might recognise. It takes about ten minutes and it is the whole reason the rest of this exists.