What TrailGoat does
and how to use it

Start here — one course, the whole plan

TrailGoat is built around one idea: load a course, and the whole run plans itself on one screen. Open the Run Planner and either pick a race from the library (search by name, state or country) or drop your own GPX or GeoJSON file. Everything downstream — the map, the elevation profile, weather, pacing, fueling, gear and crew — builds from that course.

• No account, no fuss. Every planning tool works signed out. Signing in (free, Google) adds saving plans to your account and opening them on any device, plus the live crew sheet, offline plans and Capra.
• Your plan follows you. The active course and every input persist in your browser for a day, so a reload or an accidental tab-close never loses work. Clear course starts fresh.
• Units are yours. Miles/feet or km/metres, °F or °C — flip once in the settings gear and every table, chart and printout follows.
• Themes. Five palettes (Forest, Emerald, Alpenglow, Aurora, First Light) under the same settings gear.

Race courses

TrailGoat maintains a growing catalog of 500+ real race courses, more every day — imported from official GPX files, checked against published distances, and each with its own public page: map, elevation profile, surface mix, aid stations, effective oxygen at altitude, and the race's date.

• Race courses A–Z — the searchable index, with distance-band colours so the 100-milers jump out from the 50Ks.
• Discover — the same catalog on a map, for "what races are near me" browsing.
• Course pages (e.g. Leadville Trail 100) — shareable, indexable, and one click from "Plan this race" with everything pre-loaded.
• ✓ Verified by the race — when a race director has confirmed a course, it carries a verification badge everywhere it appears. Runners: there's a one-tap way to ask your RD on every course page.
• Multi-lap races are stitched to full distance, and out-and-backs label each pass of a repeated station — "Twin Lakes (outbound)" vs "(return)" — so nobody plans around the wrong visit.

Missing a race? The Course Creator (below) lets you build it — or email kris@trailgoat.run and we'll hunt the file.

The map & elevation profile

Every course renders on a real topographic map (USGS in the US, Esri Terrain elsewhere) beside a full elevation profile. The two are linked: hover either one and a marker traces the same spot on the other.

• 3D & flythrough. The 3D button tilts the terrain; the play button flies the route end-to-end at adjustable speed, or drag the playback puck anywhere on the course.
• Overlay pills under the profile toggle what you see — on the map and the chart together: Aid stations, Climbs, Descents, Night (the stretches you'll run in darkness, as bands on the profile and a dark casing on the route), Altitude (elevation zones with the effective-oxygen figure), Distance markers (numbered mile/km pins), and Surface (trail/gravel/paved, coloured onto the route and a ribbon under the profile).
• Night is computed, not guessed — from your start date, start time and goal duration against real sunrise/sunset at the course's location. Plan rows crossing darkness get a moon mark and the plan tells you where the headlamp comes out.
• Altitude, honestly framed. Courses topping 1,500 m show elevation zones and the effective-oxygen percentage — a fact about the air, not a prediction about you. The math is on the methodology page.
• Climbs and descents are detected automatically and listed with grade, length and vert in the Major climbs card — hover a row to light that stretch up on the map and profile.

Conditions & weather

Set a start date and time and the plan pulls an hourly forecast along the course (Open-Meteo) — not the weather at the start line all day, but the conditions where the plan expects you to be, hour by hour.

• The Conditions card shows the day's story — temps, precipitation, wind, and an hourly temperature chart.
• Each leg of the run plan carries the temperature you'll actually feel on it, and hot stretches tint their rows so they're visible at a glance.
• The fueling targets react: heat raises the fluid and sodium the plan tells you to carry.
• Race more than 16 days out? You'll get climatology until the real forecast window opens — and a Live Crew Sheet re-forecasts automatically as race day approaches.

Pacing, splits & cutoffs

Give the plan a goal time and it spreads your effort over the course the way a real race unfolds — grade-adjusted (climbing miles get more clock) with a fade fitted on real 100-mile checkpoint splits, so the back half slows the way back halves actually do. Full math with receipts on the methodology page.

• Splits your way. Per-mile/km splits, coarser chunks, or custom cut points — the pacing table, aid-station arrivals, crew sheet and printout all come from the same model, so they always agree.
• Official cutoffs, with your buffer. Set a cutoff on any aid station — or on the finish line itself — and the plan shows the margin between your planned arrival and the cutoff clock at every stop. Cutoff times are entered as clock times ("2:15 PM", "+1d" for the next day), the way races publish them.
• Altitude-adjusted pacing (beta) weights the spread for thin air on courses that go high — labelled beta in the product until it's validated with the same rigor as the fade.
• Surface-aware context — the plan knows how much of each leg is trail, gravel or pavement.

Fueling & the food pack

The fueling plan computes what to drink and eat from your body and conditions — weight, sweat rate and saltiness, heat acclimation, gut training, the day's forecast, and how long you'll be out. Carb targets are a range set by duration and how practised your gut is (an untrained gut tops out near 60 g/hr, a trained one reaches 90 and beyond), hydration is adequate rather than maximum, and the philosophy is spelled out on the methodology page.

• Per-hour and total targets for fluid, sodium, carbs and calories.
• Per-leg carries. The run plan table splits everything by aid-station leg — carry this much out of this stop — and the plan summary calls out the biggest carries to pack for.
• The food pack. Build the actual pack you'll carry from a food library (gels, chews, drink mixes, real food) and see live coverage — how much of your carb, sodium, calorie and caffeine needs the pack covers.
• Heat reacts. Hot legs raise fluid and sodium on exactly the legs the forecast says will cook.

Gear & drop bags

A race-kit checklist built for trail running: tap suggestions into your kit (packs, layers, lights, poles, first aid…), add your own items, and keep a separate drop-bag list per aid station.

• Drop bags attach to specific aid stations, and the run plan table marks the stops where a bag waits.
• Copy list exports a checkbox list for notes apps or the kitchen table print-out.
• Gear and drop bags ride along with saved plans and the crew sheet — your crew sees which bag is where.

Crew, pacers & the Live Crew Sheet

Add your people to the plan — who's crewing, who's pacing which section, who's driving between stops — and the run plan table marks every stop with who'll be there. Then one tap turns the whole thing into the Live Crew Sheet: a single link for your whole crew. No app, no accounts, works on any phone.

• It re-forecasts on race day. Anyone with the link taps a check-in when you leave an aid station, and every later arrival time re-computes from how the day is actually going — including each stop's live cutoff buffer ("projected Twin Lakes buffer: +41 min").
• One link, always current. The URL is stable — update the plan in the planner and the sheet updates; nobody re-shares anything.
• Everything a crew needs on one page: arrival windows, the course map and profile, per-stop crew and pacer hand-offs, drop-bag marks, weather, shared crew notes (live, visible to everyone with the link), and checklists.
• Works at trailheads. The sheet installs as an app and keeps working offline — check-ins sync when signal returns.
• Print wizard. A paper backup with the map, ETAs and crew plan, formatted to actually print well.
• See a live example on the Crew Sheet page.

The live layer is free like the rest of TrailGoat. Your crew opens the sheet from a link, with no account and no app to install.

To the watch, to paper

Plans are made on screens; races happen on wrists and in ziplock bags. These exports close the gap:

• Watch file. One button, then pick your watch — because the brands don't read the same format.
  • Garmin — .fit course. Your paced splits are baked in, so the watch's ahead/behind runs against your actual plan (grade-adjusted, fade and all), not a flat average. Every stop is a course point that alerts on approach and shows in Up Ahead with its distance: aid stations as aid stations, water-only stops as water, and the top of each named climb as a summit, so you know how much climb is left. Import in Garmin Connect (Training → Courses).
  • Refuel reminders (optional, Garmin). Tick the box in the watch picker and choose every 20, 30 or 45 minutes. The watch buzzes “Fuel” on your planned schedule and skips the minutes around each aid station, where you're eating anyway. The default interval comes from your fueling plan's carbs per hour. Off unless you turn it on.
  • COROS, Suunto and everything else — .gpx route. Their apps import routes as GPX only (they take .fit for finished activities, not for navigation), so this is the file that will actually load. It carries the full-resolution track, your aid stations and the climb tops as named waypoints (COROS shows them as checkpoints); pacing is not part of a GPX route. Import in the COROS app under Navigation → Routes, or Suunto under Maps → Routes.
• Course GPX (free). The GPX button next to the course name downloads the route itself — track and elevation — for any app. The stops, climbs and splits live in the watch file.
• Print / PDF. The plan formats itself for paper — the run plan table, pacing, fueling and crew — for the kitchen-table briefing and the just-in-case copy in the drop bag.

After the race: Plan vs actual

Upload your watch's activity file and see the overlay — where the plan held, where the wheels wobbled, and what to tell the pacing model next time. Find it in the planner once a plan exists.

Capra — the AI coach

Capra is TrailGoat's mountain-goat coach, and it is grounded in your actual plan — it reads your course, terrain, weather, pacing, fueling targets and the food pack you've built, and answers about your race, not racing in general. It is the one part of TrailGoat that uses a language model; every number on the plan is calculated, never generated, and stays the same with Capra switched off.

• Ask it anything from the planner's AI coach card: "review my food pack", "how should I handle the Hope Pass double", "what would you change about my first 50K?"
• Its fueling advice follows the same philosophy as the calculator (real-world carb ranges, adequate hydration, deficits are normal), so the chat never contradicts the plan.
• In Training, Capra writes the week-by-week workouts for your plan.
• It will tell you what it is: general guidance, not medical advice.
• Capra is free. Sign in to ask it about your plan.

Training plans

Training builds a week-by-week block from today to your start line — shaped by your race's real distance and vert, the terrain you can actually reach, and the week you actually have.

• The wizard asks what matters: your race (or just a goal), your recent running, which days you can run, your biggest local climb, how you like effort described.
• Shape first, then workouts. A deterministic periodization engine shows the plan's shape — phases, volume curve, cutback weeks, long-run progression — before Capra writes a single workout, so you approve the skeleton before spending a generation.
• Start from your watch. Drop a Garmin/Coros/Strava export and the fitness analyzer reads your real training history into the wizard — no guessing your weekly mileage.
• Check off workouts from any device; plans live on your (free) account. One plan at a time, on purpose.
• From any race's course page, "Train for this race" opens the wizard pre-filled.

Currently in closed beta

Plan building is paused for everyone while we finish watch-platform sync — the part that makes a training plan worth using. The deal for beta testers: feedback on a plan for your race, in exchange for the plan itself. Join the list.

Course Creator

The course workshop. Draw a new route that snaps to real trails, or open any library course and edit it — aid stations, direction, start time, name — then save it back to the library for everyone.

• Click-to-route along actual trail networks; drag to adjust.
• Add aid stations by clicking the map or typing a distance; they flow to every planner feature automatically.
• Courses without elevation get it filled in from terrain data.
• Bulk GPX upload for multiple courses at once.

Install the app & use it offline

TrailGoat installs to your home screen and opens full screen, straight to the Run Planner — no address bar, no tabs. Nothing is downloaded from a store; it is the same site, kept on your phone.

• iPhone. Open TrailGoat in Safari, tap the Share button in the toolbar, then Add to Home Screen. (Safari only — Chrome on iOS cannot install it.)
• Android. Chrome offers an Install banner on the Dashboard and under a loaded course; tap it once. If you dismissed it, Settings → App → Install the app brings it back.

Getting around inside the app

A tab bar sits at the bottom — Plan, Courses, Dashboard and More. Deep pages like a course page show a back arrow at the top left. There is no browser reload button, so More → Reload is where that lives. Links to other sites open in your normal browser, so the app stays where you left it.

What works with no signal

The app itself always opens: the planner, the dashboard and the course list load from your phone. Any other page — a course page, the docs, this one — shows a plain offline page with a Retry button until you have signal again.

• Always. The app opens — planner, dashboard and course list.
• Plans you save for offline. Sign in, save a plan for offline, and it travels with you — course, splits, fueling, gear, crew, the last forecast (stamped with its age), and the topo map along the route. Every page you haven't saved needs a connection.

Saving a plan

On the Dashboard, or in the planner under a saved plan, hit Offline. The map downloads with a progress bar — about 50 MB for a 100-miler, and it picks up where it left off if you close the app half way. Off the route the map is blank; the route, aid stations and your splits still draw.

Storage

Settings → Storage shows how many plans you are carrying and what they cost, with Remove all to clear them — your plans stay in your account either way. There is a 400 MB ceiling across all plans; past it, TrailGoat says which to remove first. On iPhone, iOS may clear offline data if the phone runs short of space, and the Storage line says so when it does.

The crew sheet installs separately

Each live crew sheet is its own home-screen app named after that race, with its own offline copy — so a crew member installs the sheet without installing TrailGoat, and it keeps working at an aid station with no bars.

Accounts & saved plans

Planning works signed out. A free account (Google sign-in, one tap) adds the cross-device layer:

• Saved plans — save a race plan on your laptop, open it on your phone at the trailhead; gear, food pack and crew ride along.
• Your athlete profile (weight, sweat profile, experience) syncs, so every device computes the same plan.
• My dashboard — your run & race plans and training plans in one place, under your name in the top bar.
• Training plans live on the account (see above).
• Deleting your account is self-serve on the privacy page, and takes your data with it.

For race directors

Two things, both free:

• The embed. Your course's full interactive map — 3D flythrough, elevation profile, aid stations, surface mix, live weather — on your own race website with one iframe tag. Build yours on the race directors page.
• Verification. A look from your side is worth more than any import gate: confirm (or correct) your course's data and it carries a ✓ verified by the race badge everywhere it appears — course page, planner, crew sheets, embed.

Start at trailgoat.run/for-race-directors or email kris@trailgoat.run.