A couple of weeks ago, we at RaceSplitter were contacted by the organizers of the Carrera por Montaña Los Guájares — one of the four official 2012 Andalucian Cup trail races — asking whether we’d consider providing the timing service for the event, using RaceSplitter. We agreed, and this past weekend we headed to the Los Guájares town in Granada, to serve as the official timing service for this exciting race.

Planning

Two separate races were planned for the day:

• The main mountain trail race (27km, 270 participants)
• A shorter, mini version of the race (13km, 28 participants)

For each primary category — e.g. “H-VET” (men’s veteran), “M-SEN” (women’s senior), etc. — we would need to further differentiate between “Federated” and “Non-Federated” participants (since only Federated participants can receive prizes.) To achieve this, the race director defined the categories as follows:

• H-VET-F (men’s veteran federated)
• H-VET-NF (men’s veteran non-federated)
• M-SEN-F (women’s veteran federated)
• M-SNE-NF (women’s veteran non-federated)
• etc.

For the smaller race, only the finish time would be recorded. For the large race, however, the director wanted two times recorded:

• An intermediate time taken at the highest point on the course (La Giralda)
• The final time taken at the finish line

To execute on this, we decided to use *three iOS devices* — two iPhones and an iPad. Our plan was to have two people timing at the finish line (each with an iPhone, timing one of the two races), and one person at the mountain peak (La Giralda) recording intermediate times with the iPad.

The Setup

A few days before the event, the race organizer sent us an Excel spreadsheet containing the start list information:

• Name
• Bib number
• Category

We uploaded this data to RaceBuilder to create our races, and import them into RaceSplitter on the iPhones and iPad.

• Carrera por Montaña Los Guájares (The main race)
• Carrera por Montaña Los Guájares Mini Trail (The mini version)

In the final days leading up to the event, the race director emailed us some last-minute changes. We updated the races online, and reimported into RaceSplitter on our devices.

Timing the Race

On the morning of the race, the three of us waited in the start area for the race to start — at which point we started the timers in RaceSplitter, on the three devices.

At that point, Matt jumped into a Jeep, and headed up to La Giralda. About two hours later, the first racers began arriving to the mountain peak, at which point Matt started recording intermediate times with the iPad.

Meanwhile, back at the start area, the first participants of the mini race began to arrive, and their times were recorded by Carlotta, using one of the iPhones. Later, when the first participants of the main race began to arrive at the finish, Alex began recording their times with his iPhone.

When the last racer passed the intermediate point, Matt stopped his race on the iPad, and headed back down the mountain to the join the others at the finish line. And when the last racers of the mini and large races crossed the lines, Alex and Carlotta ended their races as well.

Publishing and printing the results

At that point, all three — Matt, Alex and Carlotta (all logged into the same account at RaceSplitter.com) — each pressed the “Publish to RaceSplitter.com” buttons in RaceSplitter, and a few minutes later, the results were available online — ready for browsing and printing.

• Results — Carrera por Montaña Los Guájares
• Results — Carrera por Montaña Los Guájares Mini Trail

There are some important things to note about the results:

• RaceSplitter.com results provide a custom print style-sheet, allowing the race director to print the results in a nice format for posting on the race tent after the event.
• RaceSplitter.com allows the results to be custom filtered. The race director used this feature to print the overall category results as well — for example, combining M-VET-F and M-VET-NF into a single results sets for the women’s veteran category.
• RaceSplitter.com automatically combined Matt and Alex’s data into a single results set that contained *both* the intermediate and finish times. You can see these intermediate times (and racer standings) by clicking on the names of any racer.

Awards and paella

After the results were published online and printed, a big paella was served (as is the tradition at races in Spain), and the awards were given — special artesan sculptures created by a local craftsman. All in all, it was a wonderful race, and another successful outing for RaceSplitter!