A plan written by a canicross or bikejoring coach almost never says "8 km at 14 km/h". It says "35 minutes at most, loose for ten minutes, then pulling if the pads are fine". Until now, MushMate required a distance and a pace for every session: that plan did not fit.
It does now.
What changes
In a session's window, one choice: the session is set in "Distance" or in "Duration".
- In duration, you enter a number of minutes, from 1 to 600. It is a ceiling: the session reads "35 min at most". It has neither distance nor pace.
- The instruction is a free-text field, 280 characters at most, on any session — in distance or in duration. It shows under the session, as you wrote it, line breaks included.
A session in duration is edited like the others: in "Edit" mode, its minutes change on its line.
You find it wherever the plan is read:
- On the site: in the plan's week, and on the home page, where "Next session" announces "35 min at most" and shows the instruction.
- On the phone: in the plan's week (Objective screen), on the card of today's session — minutes in place of kilometres, the instruction underneath — and at the top of the start line ("Plan: 35 min at most · zone 1").
- In the plan export: two more columns at the end of each line, the duration and the instruction. The first eleven do not move.
The phone writes these sessions too: "Edit the plan", the same window, the same choice.
What others see
The instruction is read by every member of your kennel, like the rest of the plan. Do not write anything in it you would not say in front of them. Only the kennel's owner writes it.
Nothing leaves the kennel.
What it does not do
- A session in duration does not count in your dogs' planned load. MushMate does not know how many kilometres your 35 minutes make: it does not make them up. The projected fitness ignores that session; the week's volume counts no kilometre for it. The run you actually do counts like any run, with its real distance. The session window says so at the moment you choose "Duration".
- MushMate does not read the instruction. "Pulling only if the pads are fine" stays a sentence for you: no box to tick before leaving, no alert.
- No session split into timed steps, and no guidance during the run. That is another piece of work.
- Nothing for the person who runs: no plan for them, no note of the day, no load. MushMate structures what concerns the dog.
- MushMate does not generate sessions in duration. The generator still writes kilometres; the duration is yours to set.
- An app that has not been updated yet reads these sessions without crashing, but shows "0 km" instead of the minutes, and no instruction. If you type kilometres on that session there, it becomes a session in distance again, everywhere.
Three choices made against the obvious
Duration is not converted into kilometres. We could have multiplied the minutes by a typical pace for the sport, to keep the projected fitness full. A typical pace is an assumption, and a load computed on an assumption reads like a measurement. We preferred a lower curve that is true.
Switching a session to duration removes its planned load. A generated session carries the load the engine computed for its kilometres. Keeping it after erasing the kilometres would have left in the projected fitness a load the session no longer prescribes. It does not come back if you switch back to distance.
The instruction is text, not a form. The coach plans we read are made of sentences, adjusted every week. Boxes ("loose", "pulling", "condition") would have frozen what changes all the time.