The plan knew which days you go out. It did not know how much time you have on those days. A musher with one free hour on Tuesdays would sometimes find the long run sitting there, and moving it by hand only lasted until the next regeneration.
You can now say it once, in the objective.
What changes
In "My conditions" (or "My season" on an objective's page), under "Days I cannot go out", there is a new block: Maximum distance per outing. Everything in it is optional.
- On dryland, per outing. The distance a training outing does not exceed, off snow.
- On snow, per outing. The same, once on snow.
- Long-run days. The days you can go further. As soon as you tick one, two more fields appear: the limit for those days, on dryland and on snow. The first two fields are then labelled "on other days".
An example: 10 km on dryland, long-run days Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 25 km on those days. Monday to Thursday, no dryland outing exceeds 10 km. Friday to Sunday, the limit is 25 km.
The plan then does three things:
- It puts your long runs on your long-run days. If an outing is missing on those days, it moves one, and only one: the rest of the week keeps its days. This applies even if you tick long-run days without entering any limit.
- It shortens each outing to its limit. The limit depends on the day (ordinary or long) and on the week's surface.
- It says so. Before you save, the form's summary reads your limits back. Then the week shows what it lost ("−12 km: 2 outings shortened to your limit"), and "Why this plan?" restates your limits in sentences.
The same block is on the phone, in the "Add an objective" and "Edit objective" forms.
If your objective never goes on snow
For a kart, quad, canicross, bikejoring or scooter objective, no snow field appears. And if you change an objective's sport to one of those, the snow limits it carried are cleared when you save.
What others see
Nothing new. The limits are a setting of the objective: the members of your kennel who see the plan see a shorter plan on some days, and the sentence that explains why. None of this leaves the kennel, and a club leaderboard only reads kilometres actually run.
What it does not do
- The removed kilometres are not moved to another day. The week's volume drops by that much. This is deliberate: see below.
- A race or a milestone is never shortened, nor are the other outings of the week that carries it.
- Block weeks are not moved. Before a stage race, the plan chains consecutive days followed by rest. Those days are shortened to your limit if they exceed it, but the block stays where it is.
- It is not a per-dog limit. Young-dog limits stay in "Model settings", and they still apply. An outing is as long as the smallest of all the limits that concern it.
- It does not touch your actual outings. You can go further than your limit; the plan just will not ask you to.
- On a long-distance objective, days without a limit may get longer. When a plan falls short of the volume a long distance needs, MushMate raises it. Your limits still hold, but outings on days, or on the surface, where you set none may grow accordingly.
Three choices made against the obvious
Shorten, without moving. The natural thing would have been to spread the removed kilometres over the other days. But a limit says "on that day, I have no more time"; it does not say "add it elsewhere". Moving would have loaded days you asked nothing about. The consequence is worth knowing: the progression of the following weeks restarts from the volume actually planned. If you limit the dryland phase heavily, the snow phase starts lower, even with no snow limit. We measured it on a 120 km sled objective with four outings a week: with 10 km on dryland and nothing else, the first snow week goes from 59 to 34 km, and the biggest week before the race from 116 to 67 km. With 10 km on weekdays and 25 km Friday to Sunday, they come to 55 and 107 km.
A long-run day with no limit has none. We could have applied the other days' limit to it. But it is precisely the day you go further: an empty field means "no limit", everywhere.
"Dryland" means everything that is not snow. On foot behind a dog walker, in canicross or hitched to a quad, the dryland limit applies. A limit is about your time, not about the rig.
One thing to know before using it
If you limit all your outings heavily, the objective can become hard to reach: the plan follows your limits and does not hide it, but it does not work around them either. Look at the volume of the peak weeks after saving, and loosen the long-run-day limit if they look too low.