Leg and van planner for relay races

The idea

Every 200-mile relay team has one person who maintains The Spreadsheet: 36 legs, 12 runners, two vans, and a wall of ETA formulas that break the moment someone edits a cell on their phone at 2am. When runner 7 blows up on a hill leg, the captain is doing mental arithmetic in a moving van to work out whether van 2 can sleep another hour. The spreadsheet is a beloved institution and a genuinely bad tool.

The wedge is productising exactly that spreadsheet, then doing the one thing it cannot: live recalculation mid-race. Enter actual leg times as they happen and every downstream exchange ETA, van window, and sleep gap updates for both vans instantly. Race templates for the five biggest events remove the data-entry chore that keeps people on their old sheet.

Who pays

The team captain. Hood to Coast alone fields over a thousand teams paying around USD 1,800 in entry fees, before vans, hotels, and matching outfits; USD 25 per team per event is a rounding error and splits to two dollars a head. It is an annual repeat purchase because these races are annual traditions. Distribution: race-specific Facebook groups and subreddits where captains openly beg for spreadsheet copies every spring, plus SEO on “hood to coast pace calculator”.

MVP scope

• Race templates with leg data for the five biggest US relays
• Runner roster with pace input and drag-and-drop leg assignment
• Full ETA timeline with van active/rest/sleep windows
• Live race mode: log actual leg times, regenerate all downstream ETAs
• Read-only no-login share page per van
• Skip for v1: GPS tracking, custom race builder, native apps, and messaging between vans

Build RelayPlan, a web app for long-distance relay race captains. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres + magic-link auth), Stripe.

Core flow: captain creates a team, picks a race template (ship with leg data for Hood to Coast, Ragnar Northwest Passage, Ragnar Wasatch Back, Ragnar Cape Cod, and Ragnar Trail generic: leg distances, elevation notes, exchange point names), enters 12 runners with estimated 10k pace, and drags runners onto legs. The app computes a full projected timeline: start time, ETA at every one of the 36 exchanges, van active/rest windows, and projected sleep gaps per van.

Pages: team dashboard, race setup wizard, leg assignment grid (drag and drop), live race view, and a read-only share page per van.

Implementation details: during the race, anyone with edit access taps "leg complete" with the actual finish time and every downstream ETA regenerates immediately; store actuals separately from projections so the plan is never destroyed. Apply a per-runner pace adjustment factor by leg difficulty rating (easy 1.0, moderate 1.05, hard 1.12, very hard 1.2) rather than raw pace. The read-only van link needs no login and polls for updates every 30 seconds.

Pricing: GBP 20 / USD 25 per team per event via Stripe Checkout; planning is free, the live race view and share links are paid. No accounts required for runners.