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Handoff is where relay teams plan and run race day. Captains build the roster, assign legs, share logistics and see projected times. On race day, the Handoff app times every exchange and keeps both vans up to date.

No. Handoff doesn't register you with the race. Register your team on the race's official site as well.

Planning is free: the roster, invites, leg assignments, logistics, projected times and finding runners or a team.

The Race Pass turns on live timing in the race-day app. It is one payment per team, per race. See What does the Race Pass include?

A team splits one long course, often around 200 miles, into legs. Each runner runs one leg at a time and hands off to the next runner at an exchange. The team finishes when the last runner crosses the line, and that is the team's time.

The classic road relay has 12 runners and 36 legs, so everyone runs three legs spread over a day and a night, often one of them in the dark. Races vary: some have fewer runners who run more, and some are shorter. Your race's page shows its format.

A leg is one runner's stretch of the course. Legs are different lengths and difficulties, from a short flat mile or two to a long hilly one.

An exchange is where one leg ends and the next begins. The runner finishing arrives, and the next runner, already waiting, starts. Some exchanges are the major ones where the vans swap. How do the vans work?

Most 12-runner teams split into two vans of six. The vans leapfrog: while one van runs its six legs, runner after runner, the other van rests, eats, sleeps if it can and drives ahead to meet them.

1. Van 1 runs legs 1 to 6 while Van 2 rests.
2. At the major exchange the vans swap, and Van 2 runs legs 7 to 12.
3. Van 1 rests, then runs legs 13 to 18, and so on to the finish.

See Which van is mine? for how Handoff works out your van.

It is the clock time from the team's start to the last runner finishing, so it includes every runner's running and nothing else. Because runners hand off as soon as the previous one arrives, there is no pause to add. Teams start in waves, so the race gives your team a start time.

Before race day, Handoff projects it from each runner's pace. How are projected times worked out?

On the road the idea is the same: legs, exchanges and a team time. The differences are size. An ultra team has fewer runners, so each runs more. A sprint or partial relay covers less of the course.

Trail relays such as Ragnar Trail are laid out differently. The whole team lives at one base camp and runs a few named loops over and over, with no driving between runs. How does a trail or base-camp relay work?

Your race's page and its runner handbook are the authority on distances, rules and team sizes.

You will be in a van for a day or two, so pack for that as well as for running. Your race will publish its own required gear, so check its handbook.

1. Running kit for each of your legs, plus spares, since you will be sweaty and may get caught in the rain.
2. Layers for a cold night and something warm to wear between legs.
3. A headlamp, reflective vest and rear light if your race runs at night.
4. Food and drink you like, because you will be hungry at odd hours.
5. Something to sleep on and a phone charger.
6. Gallon zip-top bags to contain the stench of sweaty running clothes, plus body wipes and air freshener.

You are one runner on a team. Your captain decides which legs you run, and you run each of them once, then hand off to the next runner. Between your legs you ride in the van, cheer on your teammates and rest.

1. Join the team from the invite link. How do I join a team?
2. Add your 10K time to your profile so your projected legs are realistic.
3. Check the Legs tab to see which legs you run and which van is yours.
4. Answer any asks your captain sets.

Be at the exchange before the previous runner is due, warmed up and ready. They will arrive and hand off, often by slapping a slap bracelet or tagging you, which starts your leg. When you finish, you hand off to the next runner at the next exchange.

Your team can time the handoffs in the race-day app, and it alerts you before your leg. Does every runner need the app?

Nothing breaks. The projection is a plan, and on race day the times update from real splits. Your van just arrives a little earlier or later than expected. If your pace is wrong beforehand, change it on the Time model tab.

The captain builds the team, decides who runs which legs and keeps logistics in one place so everyone shows up knowing where to be. On race day the captain, or someone they pick, usually times the team.

Creating a team in Handoff does not register you with the race. Register on the race's own site too. Details

1. Create the team from the race page. How?
2. Invite runners. How?
3. Assign legs, so each runner and van is set. How?
4. Add logistics: meet-up, lodging, vehicles and the team chat. Where?
5. Check the projected times and adjust any leg that looks off. How?

Short a runner? Post a request and find one. Finding runners

Planning on the web is free. The Race Pass, one payment per team per race, turns on live timing in the race-day app. What does it include?

Not everyone needs the app: one phone can time the whole team.

For a race with at least one van, we recommend a timer in each van. Have more than one person time, so the runner isn't running with the timer phone. Swiping at each exchange is easy to forget, and that's OK.

Get the app installed and signed in the night before, while you have signal. How do I get the app?

Every team lives at one base camp. Every lap starts and finishes there, and runners hand off at one transition area in camp. Ragnar Trail is the best known: a team of eight takes turns on a few short trail courses, day and night, and sleeps in tents between runs.

Handoff treats these as their own kind of race. Your race page lists its loops by name, your team page has a running order, and the app on race day is built around camp.

A loop is one named course, like the Green, Yellow or Red loop. Each has its own distance, difficulty and climb. A lap is one runner’s single trip around a loop.

The team runs a fixed order of laps: the first loop, then the second, then the third, then back to the first. With 8 runners and 3 loops that is 24 laps, and every runner runs each loop once. Your race page shows the loops and the order they repeat.

Captains: put the roster in a running order on your team page. Handoff fills in the laps from it, so runner 1 takes the first lap, runner 2 the second, and so on around the team. You can still swap a single lap afterwards.

A smaller team runs the same laps, so each runner takes more of them.

The Handoff app alerts you before your lap. Because runners are asleep, a base-camp race alerts you 60, 30 and 10 minutes ahead unless you choose your own times in Settings.

The app also shows how long you have until your next lap, so you know how much sleep you can expect.

Trail and other base-camp relays have the lower Race Pass price, whatever the team size. It is one payment per team, per race, and the sales window and refund rules are the same as for any race. See What does the Race Pass include?.

Go to Races. Search by name, or pick a place and a distance to see relays near you. You can filter by month and format, or show only races where teams need runners or runners need a team.

Switch to the map to browse an area.

Yes. Send us the race name and website through the contact form, with the subject "Missing race".

1. Open the race's page and choose Create team.
2. Name the team, and pick a division if the race has them.
3. Add your start time if you know it. You can add it later.
4. Tick "I'm also a runner" if you're running too.

You're the team's captain.

On your team page, choose Add runner and enter their name and email. Leave "Email them an invite" ticked and they get a link to join.

You can also share your invite code, shown on the team page. Tap to copy it.

Yes. Add them with Add runner. You can assign them legs and answer asks for them. If they sign up later with the same email, they're matched to their spot on the roster.

Open the team menu and choose Change captain. Only runners who've joined with a Handoff account can become captain.

You can't undo this yourself. Only the new captain can hand it back.

To remove a runner, edit them on the team page and choose Remove from team.

To delete the team, open the team menu and choose Delete team. If you've bought a Race Pass, you can delete the team once race day begins. Before then, contact us first. Refunds are only for technical problems, cancelled events and duplicate payments.

If you got an email invite, open the link and choose Join team.

If you have an invite code, go to Teams, choose Join with a code and enter it. Codes are case-sensitive.

Open your team page and choose Leave team. Your captain is told, and your legs open up for someone else.

You can rejoin later with the team's invite code. If you captain the team, hand it to another runner first.

Once you've joined with a Handoff account, your details come from your profile, so only you can change them. Update them in Settings, under Profile.

1. Open your team's Legs tab.
2. Pick a runner, then tap the legs they run.
3. Save the plan.

The captain can assign any leg. Runners can also claim open legs themselves; see "Can I pick my own legs?".

1. Open your team's Legs tab.
2. Tap a leg marked Claim to take it. Tap one of your own legs to give it back.

You can only claim a leg nobody has, and only release your own. If two runners tap the same leg, the first one gets it. The captain can still assign or change any leg.

When the plan is settled, the captain can Freeze leg claims so runners can no longer claim or release legs. To change a leg after that, ask the captain.

This is separate from the Time model's Freeze, which only stops runners editing their leg paces. Freezing one does not freeze the other.

Your van follows the legs you run. On a 12-runner relay with two vans of six, runners 1 to 6 ride in Van 1 and runners 7 to 12 in Van 2. On a 36-leg relay, you ride in the van for the set of legs you run.

The vans swap at the major exchanges, and the van that is off rests until its next turn.

One-day relays with six runners have everyone in the same van.

The race guide's rating is the organizer's own. The Handoff rating is ours: we take the leg's measured climb and descent and work out how much the hills speed up or slow a runner compared with flat ground, then round that to the same six steps, from Easiest to Hardest.

It looks at the slope only. A long leg on gentle hills can rate Moderate here and still be a hard leg, because length, heat and where the leg falls in the course aren't included. That is why the race guide's rating is the one we show first, and why the two sometimes differ. Where the guide gives no rating, we show ours.

Race guides often count running at night as extra difficulty. We don't: in the timing data we have seen, running in the dark hasn't made much difference to paces, so a night leg isn't rated harder. The Time model still shows which legs run at night.

Only races with a measured course profile have a Handoff rating. A race without one shows the race guide rating alone.

We measure along the route the organizer publishes, against public terrain elevation data. We read the ground height every 0.05 mile and count a rise or drop only once the height has moved at least 2 meters from the last height we counted. Small wiggles that come and go aren’t counted, but a gradual slope is, so the total reflects real hills and not measurement noise. The elevation chart for a leg is drawn from readings every 0.1 mile.

Our totals often differ from the organizer’s, or from a route site’s, and neither is wrong. Every source has to decide how finely to measure, and that choice moves the total. A watch, a GPS track or a route site reads an altitude at every point and adds up each small rise, so the wiggles in the data count as climb. On a flat course that can show two or three times the climb a runner would feel. Organizers usually take their figure from a recorded track or a mapping tool, each with its own smoothing.

We chose a middle setting. Smooth too little and noise becomes hills; smooth too much and the small rolling hills a runner does feel disappear. We tried several settings against the climb figures organizers publish for 20 trail loops and kept the one that agreed best while still ignoring noise. It tends to land close to the organizer’s figure on hilly courses, and below a raw GPS total on flat ones.

How to use the numbers:

1. To compare legs in one race, use ours. Every leg is measured the same way, so the hilliest leg here really is the hilliest.
2. For an exact figure, trust the organizer’s race guide or your own watch, which counts what you actually ran.
3. Expect differences of a few percent to a few tens of percent. On a flat course, a small change in feet is a large change in percent.

The Handoff rating is built from these measured numbers.

Routes can shift slightly from year to year, and organizers don’t always update their maps. If a route looks wrong, tell us.

Captains: open the team menu and choose Edit logistics. There is room for vehicles, the race-day meet-up, lodging, snacks and anything else.

Add your team chat there too: a WhatsApp or Messenger group link, or a group text. For a group text, choose Text as the chat service and the Team chat card on the team page has a button to copy everyone's phone numbers.

Everyone on the team can see logistics. Only the captain can edit them.

Each leg's pace is the runner's 10K pace times a multiplier for how hard the organizer rates the leg: 0.8 for Easiest, 0.9 for Easy, 1.0 for Moderate, 1.1 for Hard, 1.2 for Very Hard and 1.3 for Hardest, Black or WTH. On a trail loop, a trail factor based on the loop's climb applies too. The time model shows that math under each leg. A runner with no 10K time gets the team's median 10K pace, or 10:00 per mile if nobody on the team has one, marked with a *. Add your 10K time to your profile to improve it.

The Time model tab shows the projected finish, when each leg starts, which legs run at night, and each van's shifts and rest.

On the Time model tab, edit a leg and enter a pace or a time.

Runners can edit their own legs. Captains can edit any leg.

When the plan is settled, the captain can Freeze it so runners can no longer make changes.

Asks are questions for the team and jobs someone needs to take. Your captain posts them on the Asks tab. There are two kinds:

1. Everyone answers, like an emergency contact.
2. Someone claims it, like bringing the water. The first person to tap "I've got it" takes it.

Captains: choose Nudge on the ask to email everyone who hasn't answered. You can nudge once a day.

Captains can also answer for runners who haven't joined yet.

1. Open the race's page and choose I need a team.
2. Say a bit about yourself: your pace, where you live and the kind of team you want.
3. Choose whether to share your profile with captains, then post.

Captains can message you or invite you to their team, and you'll get an email.

You can also reply to teams listed under "Teams looking for runners" on the race page.

On your team page, choose Find a runner. Say how many runners you need and what they should know about your team. Your post shows on the race page, and replies come to you by email.

You can also message or invite runners listed under "Runners looking for a team" on the race page.

Requests show on the race page to anyone who visits. A captain only sees your profile if you choose to share it.

The Race Pass turns on race day in the Handoff app for everyone on your team:

1. Live timing at every exchange, synced across your vans
2. Projections that update from real splits
3. A countdown to the next exchange, and alerts before your leg
4. Works offline, and syncs when you have signal again
5. A live page for family and friends to follow your team
6. A post-race recap with every leg time, ready to share as an image
7. Find your other van at an exchange: a direction and distance to it, and a way to ask it to light up (van relays only)
8. The weather for your next leg, timed to your live ETA and kept when the signal drops

Without it, the app shows your plan only.

Captains buy it from the team page. It is one payment per team, per race. The price depends on the length of the relay, and it has an early-bird price until 60 days before the race.

A Race Pass isn't refundable once it's bought, except in these cases:

If the event is cancelled, we automatically refund the pass in full.

If a technical problem with Handoff kept your team from using the app as intended, contact us and tell us what you saw. Screenshots help. If you can show the problem, we'll refund the pass in full, before or after the race.

If you were charged twice for the same team, we will issue a refund for the extra payment.

Live timing in the app turns off once a pass is refunded.

Once your last exchange is recorded, the Handoff app turns the board into a recap: your total time and every leg against your plan.

1. Open the Handoff app after the finish
2. Tap Share recap
3. Pick where to share it, or save the image

The same recap is on your team page on the website, with a link to download the image. The recap needs times recorded in the app, so if nobody swiped the last exchange there is nothing to show yet.

The Handoff app is coming soon to the App Store and Google Play.

Until then, your roster, legs, logistics and projected times all work on the website. Sign in with your Handoff account when the app arrives.

No. One phone can time the whole team, and it can hand timing to another phone with a code, even without signal. Everyone who has joined the team can use the app to follow along and get an alert before their leg.

For a race with at least one van, we recommend a timer in each van. Have more than one person time, so the runner isn't running with the timer phone. Swiping at each exchange is easy to forget, and that's OK.

Go to Settings, then Notifications, to choose which emails you get as a runner and as a captain.

To change your email, open the account menu, choose Manage account, then Add email address. Enter the code we send to the new address, then choose Set as primary. Your roster entries and team emails then follow the new address. If that address already belongs to another account or roster entry, we keep your old one, so contact us and we’ll sort it out.

Open the account menu, choose Manage account, then Delete account. You confirm by typing DELETE, and it can’t be undone.

It removes your profile, login, team memberships, messages and answers to team asks, and your email and phone on any roster. You come off the roster of any race that hasn’t started, and that team’s captain is told. Race Passes and payment records, and the rosters and timing history of races that have started, are kept.

If you captain a team whose race hasn’t finished, make another runner captain first. Stuck? Contact us.

Use the contact form.