A musher wrote to tell us the speed never showed up during his outing. We looked at his diagnostic report. The GPS receiver had worked perfectly: it reported between 2 and 16 km/h from start to finish.
What he had not seen was not a number. It was a screen. He had tapped Race, thinking he was heading out to train — and the race screen, at the time, did not show instantaneous speed. It showed times, checkpoints, stages. It is a screen built for competition, and it did that job well.
Nothing, anywhere, could have told him.
What changes
On the start screen, the two tiles each carried a single word: "Free run", and "Race". The choice happened there, in one tap, and was never restated: not during setup, not during the outing.
Each tile now carries a sentence:
Free run — A training run, with or without a plan.
Race — A race: start, checkpoints, stages.
That is all. Two sentences, readable before you touch anything.
What it does not do
It does not tell you where your outing ends up. We wrote that sentence, then removed it. A race and a training run are not counted in the same places throughout MushMate — some screens add both, others do not. Until that is consistent, writing it down would be handing you a wrong answer. The issue is open on our side, and it will be dealt with on its own terms.
It does not stop you from choosing wrong. There is no confirmation, no warning, no "are you sure?". The choice stays yours; we are only giving you what you need to make it knowingly.
It changes nothing about the race screen itself. These two sentences live on the start screen, and nowhere else.
Speed on the race screen is being handled separately — and we owe you the reason, because it is not the musher's request we ended up following. Looking into this, we found something worse: before every race, MushMate already asks you "how will you run this one?", Pocket or Handlebar. On a race, your answer was ignored. Asking a question and throwing the answer away is worse than not asking.
One decision against the obvious
The subtitle on the Race tile is written in the same ink as its title, not in a paler shade.
That runs against every layout instinct: a subtitle gets toned down. But that tile is painted in our brand orange, and on that orange our only legible ink is the one the title already uses. Toning the subtitle down would have made it harder to read outdoors, in daylight — exactly where this screen is used. So the hierarchy comes from size, not from colour.
We write it here because it is visible, and a visible difference with no stated reason looks like carelessness.
And what does not change
Your outing, race or training, stays yours. These two sentences publish nothing, share nothing, and change nothing about what other mushers see of you. They are shown on your phone only, before you leave.