A tricky passage, two dogs taken off the line, running alongside the team for two kilometres, then put back in their places. Until now the phone couldn't do it: a dog taken off stayed greyed out in the reserve, and "lost" everything it ran afterwards. That's fixed, on the phone.
What changes
- Taking a dog off asks where it is. In the live rig, sending a dog to the reserve opens the usual question (its name, the km), with three answers: Free (running alongside), Carried (in the bag or the sled), Dropped out (injury, fatigue). None is picked in advance.
- It comes back with one gesture. The reserve is now called "Off the line" and says where each dog is. One tap puts it back on the line, on a free place; you can also drag it to the place you want. As many times as needed.
- Its kilometres are counted stretch by stretch. Each dog adds up its pulling kilometres, its free kilometres, and its carried kilometres (which don't count: it didn't run). Two dogs taken off free from km 4 to km 6 of a 10 km run ran 10 km: 8 pulling and 2 free. Their running time counts the free stretch, not the carried one.
- The run's page details it, dog by dog: "8.0 km pulling · 2.0 km free · 0.0 km carried".
- Only "Dropped out" opens the injury review. It is the only case where the end-of-run review pre-fills "dropped at km X". A dog running free or carried, or put back on the line, is not marked there.
- The load follows. A free kilometre does not cost a pulling kilometre: in the dog's load it counts for 0.65. Our two dogs therefore carry 8 × 1 + 2 × 0.65 = 9.3 km of load instead of 10. The season "Km" ranking, in Trophies, counts the same way.
What others see
Nothing new leaves the kennel: each dog's kilometres are those of its profile, the Pack and the statistics, for the kennel's members. The profile, the Pack and the dashboard count the free stretch in full — it is what the dog ran; only the load and the "Km" ranking weigh it.
What it does not do
- Nothing changes in a race: a dog taken off is dropped out and does not come back. That is the rule of a race, and the phone keeps it.
- The website does not make the gesture: you take a dog off and put it back on the phone, during the run. The website counts the same kilometres, but does not yet show the "pulling · free · carried" detail of the run's page.
- Elevation is not prorated: a dog taken off keeps the run's elevation gain, as before.
- Older runs gain nothing made up. Before this version, the phone did not say where a dog taken off was. When an old trace shows a dog coming back, the time off the line counts 0 km: only the stretches on the line count. Those runs are recomputed once.
Three choices made against the obvious
Free running counts in full in its kilometres, but not in its load. A dog running alongside the team did run: its kilometres say so. But it pulls nothing, and the vet who validated the 0.65 coefficient for free running said so: it is not the same effort. This is the only time that coefficient touches the load; for every other session it stays display-only.
No default answer. Preselecting "Dropped out" would have been the safest for health, "Free" the most frequent. Both would end up lying the day you confirm too fast, with gloves on: the question waits for your answer.
An occupied place is refused. Putting a dog back on another dog's place would take that other dog off without saying where it is. The phone refuses and asks for a free place.