If you run a quad and you have no snow, you may have had an unpleasant time building your season plan. Here is what was happening, and what changes.

The wall

To create a season, MushMate asked for your discipline. The list had six: sled, canicross, bikejoring, scooter, skijoring, kart.

The quad was not on it. It existed — you could declare one, the app knows its weight, it can model its motor assist — but as an accessory to a sled objective. And a sled objective demands the date snow opens.

So you had two doors, and neither led where you were going:

The second was the nastier one, because it did not look like an error. The plan rendered, it was coherent, and it was wrong.

What changes

The quad is now a discipline, exactly like the kart. You pick it as your sport, your season has no snow leg, and your sessions say "Quad".

Two fixes ship with it:

Your gear is finally read on a kart objective. If you race a kart but train on a quad, the plan now prescribes the quad — and warns you that your training pulled weight is not your race-day weight. Before, it wrote "kart" everywhere without looking at what you had declared.

The season timeline cards stopped reciting a catalogue. They said "Harnessed on dry ground — kart, quad" to everyone, including people who own neither. They now name the rig you declared.

What it does not do

There is no "quad race" in MushMate. The quad sport describes your dryland training. If you are preparing for a race, you declare that race's own discipline.

No new physics was invented. The quad was already modelled — its weight, its assist, its drag. What was missing was the word, not the maths. Concretely: a quad plan and a kart plan share the same pace ladder and the same weekly ceiling, and differ only by pulled weight. That is deliberate, and it is the next point.

And if all you own is a kart, your plan gains volume. Until now MushMate cut weekly volume by 12% for anyone who did not declare a quad — including on a kart goal, where the kart is precisely the race rig. A kart driver who owned a kart was therefore paying a penalty for not owning the other discipline's vehicle. On the two wheeled disciplines the question is now "does anything roll?", not "is there a quad?". Concretely, on a 25 km kart goal the peak moves from 42 to 48 km per week.

What did not change: on a sled, a quad is still preferred to a kart, and a kart to running on foot. That is not an oversight — behind a sled those three rigs do not carry the same load, and the ordering is a decision, not a typo. Canicross, bikejoring and scooter also keep their current reduction: there it raises a volume question we would rather have a vet settle than an engineer.

Your existing plans do not move. Nothing already generated is rewritten. Nothing regenerates on its own.

One decision made against the obvious

The obvious said: a quad and a kart are two different disciplines, so they need two different sets of numbers — two volume ceilings, two pace ladders.

We did the opposite: the two profiles are identical, value for value.

The reason is that a quad and a kart already differ in the only way that matters to your dogs: what they pull. A loaded quad weighs 425 kg with its driver, a kart 175. The model bills that gap directly — the same session costs two and a half times more behind a quad. Layering "quad-specific" paces on top would count the difference twice, using numbers nobody has measured.

An invented setting looks like refinement. It rarely is — mostly it is one more figure nobody can ever disprove. The day a real quad corpus exists, it will have to come and contradict this paragraph. It is written to be contradicted.

And the rest?

The paces and ceiling for the dryland trio — kart, quad, scooter — remain estimates pending veterinary validation, like the rest of the model on these disciplines. They are tunable per kennel. If your experience says something different from the app, your experience is right, and the settings are what should move.