Two of you run the dogs. You weigh 90 kg, your handler weighs 60. Until today, MushMate computed the load of every outing on a single value, entered once for the whole kennel.
So it was wrong for one of you. The question is: by how much?
By how much, exactly
Load is linear in towed weight: what the dogs pull is the rig plus the person. Against a kennel value set to 75 kg, the error for a 90 kg musher and a 60 kg one works out as:
| Rig | Error |
|---|---|
| Quad | ± 3 % |
| Kart | ± 8 % |
| Sled | ± 9 % |
| Bike, scooter | ± 14 to 21 % |
| Canicross | up to ± 25 % |
That order is not arbitrary: the lighter the rig, the more the musher weighs in the total. A 350 kg quad absorbs a 30 kg difference without blinking; in canicross, where the dogs tow nothing but you, that same difference IS the calculation. Which means the error was largest exactly where you train most: on dirt, in autumn.
What changes
Everyone enters their own weight — Settings › My account › My weight. Once, for all your kennels.
At the start of an outing, the pre-start assistant asks who is driving? and offers the signed-in person. Change it when your handler takes the team out. Same on the web's manual entry, with the Who drove field.
The outing records that person's weight, and keeps it. That is the number the load model bills, tonight and in six months.
Three things it does NOT do
It does not repair the past. You enter your weight today: your outings from last October do not move by a gram. That is deliberate — a training load that recomputes itself under your feet at every weigh-in is no longer a history, it is a moving target. Your weight is frozen at recording time, and it stays there.
The plan is still computed on the kennel's reference weight. The plan projects the future, and the future does not yet know who will drive. The kennel value does not go away either: it becomes the fallback — used when nobody was designated, and when the designated person never entered a weight. Its label and its explanation, in the kennel settings, now say exactly that.
A driver without an account does not exist. The picker only offers members of your kennel. If someone runs your dogs without a MushMate account, the outing falls back to the reference weight — that is not "not yet", it is the shape we chose: an outing is attributed to someone the kennel knows, or to nobody.
What other people see
Your weight is visible to the other members of your kennel. It shows next to your name in the "who is driving" picker, in plain words — "Tom (handler) · 60 kg".
We decided this against the opposite instinct, and here is why. Without it the picker would be useless: when you record your handler's outing, your phone has to know their weight to bill the right load. Hiding it would have produced a menu that changes a name on screen and nothing in the calculation — that is, today's defect, plus a menu.
What other people do not see: anything else about your account. Weight is the only field this picker exposes, and it appears nowhere else. The field stays optional: leaving it empty simply falls your outings back to the kennel's reference weight.
One case where it changes nothing, and you should know
In ski-joring and pulka, your weight does not enter the calculation. You glide behind the towline; the rig does not carry you. Entering it will therefore change nothing for those outings, and that was already true before this release. For pulka, what matters is the weight of the loaded pulka — set it in the kennel's "Weights" card, with the rest of the gear.
Decided against the obvious
Two choices are worth naming, because they are counter-intuitive.
Weight lives on your account, not on your kennel membership. You weigh the same everywhere; two values for one fact always end up diverging. If you belong to two kennels, you enter your weight once.
An outing with no named weight freezes nothing. If the designated person never entered a weight, we do not write 75 kg into the outing: we write nothing. The outing uses the kennel's reference weight at calculation time — and the day you correct that reference, all of those outings correct with it. Freezing a 75 nobody ever declared would have made that correction impossible.