Why paper fails at 3 a.m.

Walk through the base camps at a Backyard Ultra and you will see the same tools everywhere: a notebook, a pen, a phone with an alarm, maybe a group chat, and a lot of things kept in someone's head. At the first bell that works fine. By the second night it usually does not.

This is not a complaint about crews. It is a description of the conditions they work in, and of why those conditions make a better tool worth building.

The mistakes are well known

Ask experienced Backyard runners about beginner mistakes and you get the same list every time:

1. Starting too fast and burning the buffer in the first hours.
2. Eating too late, until the deficit or the stomach catches up.
3. Underestimating sleep, and spiralling down in the second or third night.
4. Neglecting the feet until a small problem is a big one.
5. The mind quitting before the body.
6. A crew that was not briefed, and chaos in camp.
7. Acting on emotion instead of the plan.

What is striking about this list is that almost nothing on it is a lack of knowledge. Every runner knows they should eat early and look after their feet. The mistakes happen anyway, because knowing something and acting on it are different things at hour 30, in the dark, with a few minutes on the clock.

Most of the list is really about noticing in time. Loop times drifting upward. Sodium quietly falling behind. Socks not changed for ten loops. A plan that was clear at the briefing and is now in a notebook nobody has opened since.

The conditions in camp

Think about where the crew actually works:

• No power. Many camps have none. Phones and lamps run on power banks, and battery is scarce for days.
• No reliable signal. Courses run through forests and fields. Anything that needs a connection will fail at some point.
• Night. Headlamps, cold, gloves, fatigue. Writing neatly in a notebook with gloves on, by headlamp, in the rain, is harder than it sounds.
• A small space. Three by three metres, shared by up to three people. One device on the table is realistic; everyone on their own screen is not.
• A crew that rotates. People sleep in shifts, and knowledge has to pass from one tired person to another.

Paper handles some of this well: it needs no power and no signal. But it cannot answer the questions a crew asks most often.

The questions paper cannot answer

A crew does not need a record for its own sake. It needs quick answers:

• How far are we behind on carbs this hour? On paper that means adding up entries from the last few loops, by headlamp, in your head.
• What went in over the last three loops? Fine, if the handwriting is legible and the entries were made at all.
• When were socks last changed? Somewhere on a previous page, maybe.
• Is the runner slowly slipping? A single loop looks fine. The drift across twenty loops is invisible unless someone plots it.

That last one matters most. The problems that end a Backyard rarely arrive all at once. Fluid or sodium falls slightly short, loop after loop, for hours. Each entry looks acceptable. Only the trend shows the problem, and the trend is the one thing a notebook never shows.

And then there is the plan. The checklist advice is to execute the plan, don't act on emotion. That only works if the plan is in front of the crew at the moment the emotion arrives, not in a folder in the car.

What software has to get right

A phone app does not automatically solve any of this. Most apps are built for someone sitting on a sofa with good light, a full battery and a strong signal. Race-day software for a Backyard crew has to be built for the opposite:

• Fully offline. Everything works without a connection, always.
• Battery-friendly, because there is no socket in camp.
• Dark and high-contrast, readable by headlamp and kind to night vision.
• Large touch targets, usable with one hand and with gloves.
• Built for tired people. Little text, clear states, no hidden actions. The most important number is the first thing on the screen.
• Nothing is ever lost, not on a crash, a reload or a dead battery.
• Every tap is reversible, because a mis-tap at 3 a.m. has to cost nothing.
• Built for days, not hours. A race can run past 100 yards.

None of these is a nice-to-have. Each one comes directly from the camp.

What Betweenloops does

Betweenloops is race-day software for Backyard Ultra crews, built around exactly these conditions. It starts with the part of the break that is hardest to keep track of by hand: what the runner takes in.

• One tap, and undo. Quick-add books an item with a single tap. An undo is offered straight away, and removing the most recent entry is a single gesture.
• Five channels, per-round targets. Carbs, sodium, fluid, protein and caffeine, each with a target for the round. The current gap is what the screen shows first.
• Rounds are derived, never scheduled. The round number is computed from the event start and the round length, so there is no schedule to drift out of sync with the real race.
• The drift across hours. A second view plots every round against its targets, so a fluid or sodium line that is quietly slipping shows up long before the runner feels it.

Around that, it is built for the whole race day the crew runs between two bells: pacing, reminders, shoe changes, gear and lamps, sleep. One screen instead of a notebook, a group chat and someone's memory.

If you crew, run, or are planning your first Backyard, join the waitlist. You get one email when it is ready, and nothing else.