You head out for 30 km. At km 12 a dog starts limping, so you take it off the line. The app did record that moment: it is the "dropped at km 12" you find at the end of the outing. Yet on its page, in Dogs and in Stats, that dog still totalled 30 km. A musher pointed it out to us: you drop a dog to spare it, and its numbers said the opposite.
What changes for you
A dropped dog counts the distance up to its drop. In the example, 12 km, not 30. A dog that finished the outing still counts the whole distance. In a stage race, that distance counts from the start of the race, not from the start of the stage.
It counts its own time too. The phone now records the clock when you change the team: moving time for an outing, race clock for a race. The dog's time stops there. Stops along the way, the nights between the stages of a stage race and the rests at checkpoints count neither for it nor for the dogs that finished: both are compared on the same basis.
Everywhere a number belongs to the dog: its season and all-time distance, its mileage medals, the Training tab (weekly load, list of outings, "Why this number?"), its Journal and the CSV export, the Summary view and "Positions on the line" in Dogs, the "Unbalanced load" warning on groups, the dashboard, and Stats filtered on a dog. On the phone: Dogs, the dog's page, and filtered Stats.
The numbers finally match the load. The load model already took the drop into account, so a dropped dog's distance overstated what its load said. The two now agree.
What does not move: the outing itself. Its distance, duration, elevation gain and speed stay those of the team, and the kennel total does not change.
Update the app. The phone is what records the clock at the drop. An older version keeps recording the kilometre, not the clock.
What your teammates see
The same numbers as you, on the dog's page, and nothing more: the moment of the drop is not shown as such, it shows in the dog's distance. Nothing leaves the kennel. Leaderboards still count each outing once, for the kennel. The race record shown on litter pages does not change.
What this does not do
These limits are deliberate.
- It does not guess a drop the app did not record. An outing entered by hand, imported, or with no recorded change of team gives its whole distance to every dog.
- It does not rewrite the elevation gain. A dog's elevation gain stays the outing's: the app does not know where, along the route, the climbs it skipped were.
- It does not touch the race record. A dog dropped at a checkpoint keeps its team's distance and placing in its race record. Changing that first means deciding what a race record is — does an abandoned race count? — and what of it may be shown outside the kennel. That is not a matter of arithmetic.
Two choices that may surprise you
For your past outings, the time is an estimate. Until now the app recorded the drop's kilometre, never the clock. We could have left those dogs with the whole outing's time, but that number was surely wrong. We prefer an estimate prorated by distance: a dog dropped halfway counts half the time. For every outing from now on, the time is the clock's.
Several dogs do not add up. In Stats filtered on several dogs, an outing counts once, with the distance and time of the dog that went furthest. Adding the dogs up would multiply the outing by the number of dogs.