Until now, a trail saved in Chronos could be read from any MushMate account: its name, its map, and even the pace of an imported GPX file. Yet the loop your kennel runs every week says where your dogs live. From now on, a saved trail is private: only your kennel sees it, until you decide otherwise. And the loop you already run becomes a trail in a single gesture.
An outing becomes a trail
On the page of a GPS outing, of an outing imported from a GPX file or of a race, and on a detected trail's page in Traces, the owner taps "Save this trail" and picks a name, a discipline and a surface. MushMate copies the outing's line, its distance and its elevation gain. Not its date, not the dogs who ran it, not its pace: a trail is a path, not an outing. The phone does it too, from a trail's page and from an outing's review.
An outing that already matches one of your saved trails (same start within 2 km, same distance within 5%) doesn't offer the button: it says "Saved:" and the trail's name, and leads to it. In the Trails tab of Traces, a loop's outings sit under its saved trail: one loop, one line.
Who sees what
- Your kennel, whatever the role, sees your trails as before, map and pace included.
- Members of a club see the trails you share with that club: name, distance, elevation gain, surface and line, with your kennel's name. They find them in the club's "Trails" tab, and in the Trails tab of Traces, under "Trails shared in your clubs".
- All of MushMate sees a trail you make public: its name, distance, elevation gain and line, without your kennel's name.
- No one else. The reference trails that ship with MushMate stay readable by everyone.
- Pace never leaves your kennel. The split times of an imported GPX file stay with you, whether the trail is shared or public.
On a saved trail's page, the "Who sees it" card says in one sentence what the other side sees, and the owner chooses there: "Make public" or "Make private", "Share with" one of your clubs or "Remove from" that club. Offering one of your trails for a club outing also shares it with that club, and the line under the menu says so before you confirm.
What it doesn't do
- A shared or public trail doesn't pass on your pace. A club sees the path, not how you run it. That's deliberate, and it won't change.
- A session imported from Strava doesn't become a trail. Strava's agreement keeps its line for the person who imported it. Import your watch's GPX file instead: that one can be saved.
- Nor does an outing logged by hand: it has no line to copy.
- Leaving a club takes your trails with you, and coming back doesn't share them again. Sharing was a gesture: it is made again, knowingly.
- The Plan doesn't offer strangers' public trails. An objective is set on your trails, your clubs' and the reference ones, paths whose origin you know.
The choices made against the obvious
The line, but not the pace. The obvious move would have been to share everything or nothing. But an imported file's pace is that of a real outing: your stops, your rhythm, the day you ran it. To plan an outing together, the club needs the path, not your split times.
Copying the line rather than keeping a link to the outing. A trail could have pointed at the outing it came from. But an outing has a date and dogs, and deleting it would have taken the trail with it. The trail keeps the line, the distance and the elevation gain, and nothing else.
Public, without the kennel's name. In a club, people know each other: the kennel's name says who offers the loop. In public, that name would tell anyone where which kennel trains. A public trail therefore shows the path without saying whose it is.
Offering a trail shares it. We could have required going through "Share with" before you could offer it. But offering a trail for an outing already shows it to the club: the outing displays its name to every member. Rather than a refusal that sends you elsewhere, the form says it plainly, at the moment you choose.