The machine, question by question, grouped the way the game is: today, out, region, shop, account. Nothing here is a spoiler, because the game keeps no secrets about its own rules.
Two to five minutes a day, on one real day for every day in the world, and the world runs whether you are watching or not.
Open it, read what happened, start a session, get on with your life. Everything past that is there when you want it and ignorable when you don't.
One day in the world is one day out here, and all of it happens shut: a session runs its real length, routes finish, races settle, and the local field comes for what you hold. Drills are home inside the hour; the long run owns half the day.
One to start with, and a second once you're level 5. The afternoon slot is earned, not issued, and a demanding job can still eat it on a weekday.
No, but the runner notices. A session you don't start lapses at the day rollover and Confidence takes a small hit; stay away longer and fitness drifts, the first 1 day free, the sharp qualities first, and faster the fitter you are. Three months of nothing takes you back to the runner you started as and no further, so there is always a career to build again, and the hub names the day the next point comes off before it goes.
Standing orders, on the account screen: set a focus and a risk appetite and today's session starts itself, worse than turning up and choosing, better than nothing. It's free, your own call overrides it, and it can't set off into an injury, because it reads the load first. It isn't a way to leave, though: after 4 days of you not opening the game it stops setting out and the wages start going on things that are not training.
One at a time. Retiring frees the slot without deleting the history, the way real careers end.
Sessions build seven qualities; the sum of them is your level, and it goes down as well as up.
Climbing, descending, endurance, race IQ, a stomach that holds, heat tolerance, confidence. Sessions are a ladder: run-walks and easy thirties at the start, the tempo and the long run at level 4, the serious work at 9 and 14, and lower rungs never drop out.
Form of the day: half causal (yesterday's load, your stress, your condition, a streak, rust) and half the day being a day. It scales what a session banks, so the card shows the plan and the feed line shows what landed. The primary quality always moves at least a point, though: showing up beats absence.
It's what the region thinks of you now. Races pay it, so does taking a piece of ground or a mark, and so does finishing a route. It fades if you stop putting your name on things. A fortnight after your last result costs nothing; after that it comes off slowly, and faster the bigger it is, so a big name takes more keeping up than a small one. Training doesn't hold it up: results do. It stops at whatever your class started with, and it has never counted toward your level or your abilities. Reputation is what people think of you now; a badge is what you did.
It's the name between your first and your last, in quotes. Ines "Lights Out" Quilter. It opens at 25 Reputation, and until then there is nothing to type in. Races, ground and marks all pay Reputation, so the way to it is going out and putting your name on things.
Once you're over the line you pick your own, up to 18 characters, and you can change it once every 14 days. Everybody reads it, so it goes past a check first and appears a minute or two later rather than instantly. There is no charge for any of this, and there never will be.
Drop back under 25 and it comes off. It isn't deleted, though: it stays yours and it goes back on the moment you're back over the line, so a quiet month costs you the name and not the name you chose. Your account tells you how close to the edge you are before it happens.
The locals work the same way. Everybody out there has a nickname waiting, and the ones you see wearing theirs are the ones who have been racing.
Add up every attribute except Reputation, subtract the block your class started with, and what's left is what levels are counted in. Reputation is out because it's social standing, and a good result shouldn't make you fit.
Every level costs more than the one before it. Level 2 is 4 points, a couple of good sessions; level 10 is 79 banked all up, and level 20 is 281, most of everything a career can physically bank. Certain levels open something (a rung of your class ladder at 5, 10 and 15, a new tier of sessions, the second daily session); the rest are a number getting bigger. It goes the other way too, faster the higher you got, taking an unlocked ability quiet with the points: a rung is what you're fit enough to do now, not a badge you keep.
A level isn't awarded, it's worked out from your attributes every time they move. It can also move if the rule itself changes: when we re-cut what a level costs, every runner is re-levelled on the spot, attributes untouched. Only where the lines sit between them moves.
Injuries are earned. Load is the risk, condition is whether it already went, and every rung was warned about first.
Load is the training your body is still carrying, and it's the only number in the game that does three things. Past 35 it drags your form down, which slows every time you post and shrinks what a session banks. Past 45, the red zone marked on the bar, effort starts carrying real injury risk. And what you spend today buys back tonight's recovery. Condition is the other half: load is how likely an injury is, condition is whether it already happened.
By earning it, and no. Push into the red often enough and the ladder starts: fresh, niggle, strained, injured. The exposure is always something you chose, only the severity is random, and bad gear and bad conditions raise exposure without ever manufacturing an injury on their own.
It does: what a race takes out of you is scaled by how you ran it. Win it and you emptied the tank, and the week afterwards knows. Blowing up costs nearly as much, because blowing up is emptying the tank without the result. A controlled mid-pack day is the cheapest way round a course.
Easy sessions, and that's the work: ground attempts and long routes are off the table until you've healed. The shop can't help, because a strain and a real injury are refused at any price, and so is the load that earned one. Once time has brought one down to a niggle, a physio session will clear it.
Book one and the fitness slide runs at half pace. It doesn't pause it, and it doesn't hold your division.
Book a holiday, on your account screen, free to call off until the morning it begins. You get 4 weeks of the rolling year, up to 3 at a time and at least 7 days; anything shorter is a rest day, which costs nothing anyway. It has to be booked ahead, for the same reason you can't enter a race after the gun.
The load and the stress go to nothing on the morning it starts. After that the fitness slide runs at half pace, the autopilot stands down, and a lapsed session costs no Confidence. What it doesn't do is stop the slide: real runners take an off-season and come back rested and a little slower, and so does yours.
No. The ladder is drawn when the season turns whether you're there or not, it ranks on fitness, and your fitness still moves while you're away, so a boundary inside the holiday can relegate you during it. The booking screen says so before you book.
No, and the two are different questions. The purse drains because nobody is there to decide anything, and booking a holiday isn't a promise to open the app. Look in now and then and nothing drains.
Real Wellington trails, held by the fastest recorded time, and going for one is that day's training rather than something extra.
A real Wellington trail, sent in by somebody who runs it, minutes rather than hours, held by whoever has posted the fastest recorded time on it. One with no time on it stands open, and the first name on it takes it. The rest of the region is simulated locals on the same clock as you: they train, peak, get hurt and take ground, including yours, while you're asleep, and it only ever changes hands to a faster time.
Yes, and so does an FKT route. The Tip Track trains climbing, Red Rocks trains endurance, a gut and the heat, and how much depends on the size of the effort and your form that day. Race day is the exception: a race pays Reputation and a result, and is the day it's on rather than a block of training.
Each takes one of the day's training slots, so with two open you can do both and with one you're choosing, and a session on the board stands down for free when you go out instead. Beyond that nothing stops you, and it gets worse every time: past about 14 points of work in a day your form falls away sharply. One outing at a time, though. They're one person.
You pick an approach before you set off, and that's the whole decision. Smart is controlled and safe. An even split holds one pace and rewards Endurance. A negative split sits on your hands early and spends the lot coming home, which needs Race IQ. Gunning it empties the tank from the start: the fastest way to take ground off somebody, and the surest way to a niggle. After that there's nothing to answer.
Your name on it until somebody faster comes along, worth +8 on your regional standing for as long as you hold it, plus +2 Reputation at most once every 14 days on the same line: ground is free and there are a lot of hills, so paying every take would come down to going round the same one all week. Every piece of ground, route and race has a page of its own off its row on the board, with the quickest times on it and every change of hands.
Whoever has been up a piece of ground most often in the last 90 days. Not the quickest. Turning up. It takes 3 outings before the title exists and it pays nothing, because the moment a consistency board pays a currency the cheapest way to the top of it is the same short hill twice a day for ever.
In Wellington, yes. Export the route from your watch, drag the two handles to the part you actually mean, name it, say what it's like, and send it in. The rest of your file never reaches us: it's read in your browser and only the part between the handles is sent, so the walk from your front door to the trailhead stays your business. Then a person reads it and says yes or no. You can't edit it once it's sent, and if it goes up it carries your runner's name and nothing else: ground you found is worth what anyone else's is.
It's the real Wellington forecast, and what it will cost you is on the board before you commit.
Yes. Each morning before dawn the game fetches the actual Wellington forecast, with the real sunrise and sunset for the date, which is why a June evening needs a head torch and a January one doesn't. What's on the board a week out can still change; the day you're living in never does.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0).
It didn't. Rain and darkness cost real time on technical or exposed ground, and every piece of ground and every route says what today's conditions will cost you before you commit. An unseen penalty would just be bad luck, so there isn't one.
Not an ordinary bad Wellington day: this city gusts ninety and a hundred on days people barely mention, and those are just wind. A storm is severe-weather-warning territory, gusts past 110 km/h or genuinely heavy rain, and the only condition heavy enough on its own to turn you round on the tops.
Three Tararua routes, free, hours rather than minutes, and played through the way race day is. People only.
Ground is minutes and anyone can hold a piece of it. Races are a date, a start list and an entry fee. Routes are hours, they're free, and you go whenever you like: broke but fit is a perfectly good reason to go and set a mark. What a route costs instead is the day, billed against the life clock.
No, you run it, the same way race day is run, and the calls you make out there are the time you post. Decisions unlock as the clock reaches them, so at 32 km of 74 the next call is hours away, and nothing expires while you wait. The estimate is a range rather than a number, because an honest estimate of a fourteen-hour day isn't one.
Reputation, on how the day went and on which route it was: the Tararua S–K pays up to +8 and never less than +4, the shorter routes less, paid for getting to the far end whether or not the mark moved. Turning back off the two alpine routes pays a point. The mark is worth +3 more and your name on the route, but no standing points: that board counts hills you hold. Beyond the numbers there's the day, the biggest bit of training in the game.
A route pays at most once every 3 days on Jumbo–Holdsworth and once every 14 on the S–K. Crossing the range again a fortnight later is worth something; crossing it tomorrow, on the legs yesterday left you, is not. Going back is still worth it for the mark, the split badges, the endings you haven't found, and the route knowledge it banks.
Only people. The boards start empty and the first human to run a route takes the mark: a simulated runner can't answer a decision at 3 am on a ridge.
You don't set off on it, you declare it: it goes at dawn tomorrow, at your own wake hour, so tomorrow's forecast is a decision rather than a surprise, stamped when you declare and what the attempt is judged by. Standing down before the alarm is free and leaves no trace. The game will never stop you walking into a bad window; it will only make sure you saw it.
A turn-back is the careful choice, costed as one: half the load, a point of Confidence, no time posted, and a non-risky day. On a route you're playing it's a call you make; on one you left running, conditions past the line make it for you, and the board names the point before you've spent an hour.
For the rest, you choose a policy before you set off: play it safe, push on, or wait for me. A call is only taken after a good while of silence, a policy may never end your day, and every auto-taken call costs a little time and is marked as one you weren't there for. You get one notification per standing call, quiet overnight.
Badges, in the History drawer on the hub and in the career log, and the one thing here that lasts: ground gets taken off you overnight and fitness leaves if you stop showing up, but going under twenty-four hours on the main range is a fact about a day that happened. Nothing that decides a time can see one, and there's nowhere a badge could be sold from.
It holds what you've won and nothing else. It'll tell you how many are still out there and it won't name them: each route says what it has on offer on its own board and on its record page, which is where you can do something about it, and the ones under "found" are endings, so naming those would list every way a route can go.
Real fixtures on real dates, played live, and your place comes off the same clock as everybody else's.
It goes on the calendar like an appointment and a named start list gathers. WUU2K is one morning at three distances, 21 km, 45 km and 65 km, all finishing at the velodrome. XTRAIL West Wind is 17 km on the wind farm at Mākara, and Te Ahumairangi is every Wednesday evening, 9.5 km and free. Enter as many as are open: the calendar only refuses two start lines on one morning.
Most of them, scaled by distance, out of the purse the day you commit. It doesn't come back if you miss the start line. It buys a number and a place on the line and nothing else: nobody has ever bought a faster split.
No, and the calendar says which. Most are local: entered when you like, played when you like. The Wednesday handicap is an event, so it's live, at a fixed gun whether you're watching or not, with the whole start line placed together at one cutoff. It's also the free one, and handicapped, which means it's placed on how far you beat your own expected time by: everyone finishes together if everyone runs to form, and a runner in their first month can win it. The big races are scratch, where the fastest runner wins.
On a local race, 12 hours from the gun, and nothing ticks away inside it: starting at lunchtime is scored exactly like starting at the gun, and missing it means the field runs it without you, which is a missed race rather than a jammed calendar. On a live race you're on the start line whether you're watching or not, so you get a notification at the gun, your gels come off the belt, and your plan runs it. Either way the training board is empty for the whole window, and ground and routes stand down with it.
Your plan takes it, after about 15 minutes of race time, roughly a minute of yours. You pick between Play it safe and Push on on the race card and can change your mind up until the gun, and every call it takes is marked in the transcript as one you weren't there for.
Being there is worth a plain number rather than a feeling: each call your plan takes adds about 0.5% to your time. That's a penalty you avoid by turning up, not a bonus for turning up, and thinking inside the window is free. Two things your plan can never do: step you off the course, and spend your level-10 one-shot.
On an FKT route there is, because nobody else is out there and the mountain can be asked to wait. In a race the field does not wait. That is what makes it a field. So a live race offers two plans, not three.
The clock, against everyone who turned up: your stats give you an ability over the course, how you ran decides how much of it you used, and the field is timed by the same model, so two players entering the same race don't both win it. As for the dice, they never choose and they may colour. Which branch opens to you is your stats, always; what varies is the magnitude of an outcome, never the kind of thing that happens and never anything catastrophic.
Yes, from the race card on the hub, the pool room in the History drawer, or the race's own page. It types the whole day out again at reading pace, which is the only way to see what your plan did on a morning you slept through.
The real New Zealand seasons. When one turns the ladder is drawn and every piece of ground stands open.
When the real one does: 1 December, 1 March, 1 June and 1 September, midnight Wellington time. No separate calendar to learn, and every screen that shows a division says how many days are left.
Two things, both once. The divisions resolve off the ability ranking you've been watching all season, and every piece of ground in the region stands open: whatever you were holding, you're not holding now, and neither is anybody else. The first week of a season is the best week of the year to turn up.
No. What ends is the tenancy, which was only ever a statement about who is standing on a hill right now. Your times stay on that ground's all-time board for good, and every FKT mark, badge and Reputation point is untouched. The routes don't reset at all: wiping hours in the Tararuas every three months would make the tier that asks the most the tier that keeps the least.
Because that's what makes them worth planning for: you can shrug off a weekly club night, and a training block that points at one morning a season has somewhere to point. Out of season the calendar says when entries open next, so a missing button is an answer rather than a dead end.
One region so far, Wellington. The region screen opens with the people, and watch puts what they do in your feed.
Everybody in the region is on the same hills. Most are simulated and will come for whatever you're holding; a few are people, and the region screen opens with those, marking a person everywhere a runner is listed. Press watch on a row, or on a dossier, and what they get up to turns up in your feed, with a block on the region screen showing everybody you watch and the last thing each of them did. It's one way and it's quiet: nothing to accept, they're never told, and none of it reaches your phone. A simulated runner can be watched on the same terms.
How you're going, never what you're made of. Your name, class, level and division, the ground you hold, your race record, and the state you're in today: load, condition and form. Somebody scouting you can tell you're wrecked, the same way they could at a start line. What they can't see is your stat sheet, so a dossier gives your strengths and weaknesses as words rather than numbers.
Tops, Ridge, Bush and Valley: everybody ranked on fitness and cut into four groups of fixed size. It pays nothing.
Everybody in the region, humans and the local field alike, ranked on ability and cut into four groups of fixed size. Tops is the sharp end; Valley is the valley floor, where most careers live and where a great many good ones stay. You can't pick: it's a reading of your runner, the way a level is. Ability means fitness, every quality except Reputation, and not your standing, which is what you have been doing lately rather than what the body can do. The fixed sizes are what make it a ladder: there's always somebody directly above you to get past and somebody below trying to get past you, and the hub prices both. The remainder goes to Valley, so Tops stays the same size as the region grows.
Once, when the season turns, and never in between, so where you'd land if it ended today is something you can watch for weeks rather than something that moves while you're at work. In the bottom 2 of your group 14 days out, you get told, once, and that's enough training to answer it.
Nothing at all. It isn't a currency, it unlocks nothing, and there's no way to buy one. It's a mirror held up to the region: this is how good you are, and here is who is immediately above and below you. The moment a division bought something, the ladder would become a thing to farm rather than a thing to climb.
Five classes, three rungs each, and the level 10 rung is a one-shot you pull mid-race.
Tussock climber, Scree hound, Road convert, Hut bagger and Rogainer. Each starts you somewhere different and owns one attribute outright. None is strictly better than another; that's held to by test, not by promise.
Three rungs per class. At level 5 a readout: something the game already computed for everybody, said precisely to you. At level 10 the headline, a one-shot ability at a moment you pick, once in any race and once on any route, playable only at a decision you've reached. At level 15 a world perk. Nothing on it is for sale, and the level 10 rung never touches your stats.
¤ is the game's money and it is not dollars. The purse buys what money buys a runner in life, and never what only training buys.
The game's money. Your runner has a purse, a job that pays into it, and a shop and a race calendar that take out of it. Nothing in this game has ever cost real money and nothing ever will: no card field, no top-up, no premium anything. The mark is ¤ precisely so that a 380 entry fee can't be mistaken for one.
Money, time, stress and flexibility, and no job is good at all four: it pays a daily wage, sets your alarm, decides how much stress you carry, and decides whether a weekday afternoon session exists at all. A student trains flat out on very little; a nurse earns properly and has to manage it. The board is on your account screen. Once every 30 days, free, you can take a different life: the wait is the entire cost.
Because a wage is what the job pays, and living is what the life costs. Rent, power and a supermarket shop come off every morning before anything reaches the purse, so what you bank is the difference, and the board prints all three figures for every job. Two lives pay nothing: barely working and studying both mean living at home. If the wage won't cover the living there's no bankruptcy, no penalty and no debt: it stops at a floor of 115, enough to restock the three things that can stop you going out at all.
It eats into the recovery a night's sleep earns you, never the guaranteed floor, so a stressful job can make a night worse but can't erase it, and it isn't a second injury ladder: no rungs, no ping. How much you shed depends on how hard you trained that day, so a demanding job trained through every day climbs and the same job with a rest day worked in settles.
What money buys a runner in life: gear, gels, race entries, a look, and treatment. The shop is a shelf at a time and opens on whatever you're short of. On the physio shelf, a massage takes 20 points off the stress gauge, a physio session clears a niggle, and a recovery session takes up to 8 points off the load in your legs. One treatment a day.
What it never buys is what only training buys: fitness, a result, a start line somebody else earned, a name on the region board, or a mend for an injury you ran into with your eyes open. There is no path from the purse to a faster runner, and that's enforced in the code rather than promised in a FAQ.
No. It takes the tail off a heavy week, which a rest day would have taken off anyway, and it stops dead at the red zone: carrying 65 points of load it brings you back toward the line and no further, and already under it the shelf refuses you. Money can buy back the part that was always coming back, not a red zone you ran into.
A niggle, yes. A strain or a real injury, no, at any price. Those heal on time, and the load that earned one isn't buyable down while you're carrying it. Stress is the one thing you can clear whenever you can afford to, which is what makes a well-paid, demanding job a real choice rather than a slow defeat. It does buy a slightly better night, because stress is what shrinks recovery, but only a few points, once a day.
Kit is friction, never fitness. Some of it you have to own before a route or a race will let you start, and two items are purely a look.
No. The right gear means you get the run you earned; the wrong gear means you don't. Every mechanic is a penalty avoided, never a bonus granted, and that goes double for the colour you buy something in, which nothing that decides a time can even see.
Shoes accumulate kilometres and go lugless. Poles fatigue toward a snap. The head torch has a battery, and spare cells in the pack keep the light on when it goes. A shell ages in the weather it was needed in. Gels get eaten. Nothing fails without warning: everything gets one at 80% of its life, and a pole can't snap at all until it has warned you.
Because you haven't got the kit. You begin with trail shoes and a couple of gels; the mountain routes and the longer races each publish a compulsory list, the way real races do, and the board names what you're short of before the button, with a priced way to the counter. No compulsory gear, no race: a route refuses to let you set off, and a race checks at the start line, which is where a real race does it. On your own time it's the other way round, though: a daily session or a piece of town ground is never refused, and going without a light after dark or a shell in a storm only costs you time and a little wear. What you do to yourself is costed; what a race director would stop is stopped.
Yes, and that's the normal way round: you enter a week out and buy the jacket in the meantime. What you can't do is start without it. The card says what's on the list before it takes the fee, you get a warning while there's still time, and if the start line closes on you that's a missed race and the fee is gone. Turned away at the check, buy the thing and come back inside the window.
Barely, and only through kit. The runner is settled when you register, and the two things that ever change it afterwards are kit you earn and kit you buy: the shoes on their feet, and a singlet if you want one. Both come in a colourway, chosen at the counter, which costs what the tier costs and does nothing else at all. A singlet does nothing either, which is the whole item: no seconds saved, none lost, and nothing will ever ask for one.
Neither, and both for the same reason. Two badges unlock a hat, which appears in the wardrobe on the hub wearing one colour of its own that exists nowhere else in the game. The shop does sell a look now, in shoes and a singlet, but a hat isn't for sale at any price: one you could repaint into a colour everybody starts with wouldn't read as anything.
Push first, email as a backstop, quiet overnight, and you can mute any of it. The boards never notify.
Push first, email as a backstop. Add the game to your home screen, turn push on from the account screen, and losing a piece of ground finds you halfway through a stand-up like it's supposed to. The email only lands if you haven't opened the app within 30 minutes; without push, you just get the email.
It's built not to. Quiet hours hold everything from 22:00 to 06:00 so the morning wake leads the day, and the boards deliberately never notify: a ladder that pinged you when you dropped a place would be a nag, and so would anything about somebody you watch. Mute any kind, or swap the lot for one daily digest.
iOS only allows push for an installed app. Share → Add to Home Screen, then open it from there and the toggle will work. The game asks you once and then drops it.
The icon is your runner, previewed on the account screen before you add it, but a tile already on a home screen keeps the look it was added with. That's the phone's doing rather than ours: remove it and add it back to take a new one.
A visit counter on the public pages, ours, on our own server. It stops at the login.
There's a visit counter on the public pages: this one, the front page, the teaser. It's our own, on our own server, so nothing about your visit is handed to anybody else, and it sets no cookie and doesn't know who you are. It records the page you looked at, where you came from, your browser and operating system, whether you're on a phone, and your country. No advertising, no profile, no following you around other sites.
No. It stops at the login. Every page past it has your runner's name or a run of yours in the address, and those aren't ours to put in a counter.
An email address, a hashed password and what your runner did. Deleting is immediate and total, and it's yours to do.
An email address, a password you chose (stored hashed, so we can't read it), and everything your runner has done. If you've turned pings on, a subscription for the device you turned them on from. That's the lot: no real name, no age, no location and no payment method, because none of them is anything this game needs.
Both are on your account screen. Retire keeps the record and you register somebody new; Delete erases the career outright. Deleting the account takes the account, the runner, the log, the feed and the notification subscriptions with it, immediately and for good, which is why it asks for your password first. No grace period, and no way for us to put any of it back.
We can, and it isn't the same thing as deleting it. Closing takes away the way in: you can't log in, and you're told why. Nothing goes, it can be undone, and deleting is the one that erases the lot, which stays yours to do rather than ours.
The mailing list is separate, deliberately: an address and nothing else, never joined to an account, with a one-click way off in every footer and no way back on. For a copy of what we hold, ask us: there's no button, so it's a person doing it by hand.
Aim it at the hill. Aim it at a person and it goes, and doing it deliberately closes the account.
Whatever the next person would want to know before they set off: the state of the track, the wind on the tops, whether the stream was up. One per outing, which is the real hut book rule as well as ours.
Two things do. A word filter, and then a machine that reads the sentence and decides whether it's about the trail or about a person. Anything it can't answer for is held rather than published, so a note that doesn't appear straight away hasn't gone anywhere. After that a person reads what went up, and can take one down.
Aim it at the hill. Be as rude as you like about the weather, the climb, the mud or your own miserable performance. Aim it at somebody and it goes, and the same for anything sexual, threatening or hateful, and for adverts. The note comes off the board; it doesn't get edited or reworded into something you didn't write, because putting words in your mouth is worse than refusing them. Aiming something at a real person, or doing any of it deliberately, closes the account, and you're shown the reason somebody wrote. If we've got it wrong, say so.
Not on your own, no. A handle is a label on that one run rather than an account, which is what lets you play the teaser without signing up, so there's nothing of yours to log into. There's a short list of words it won't accept, and it's a list rather than a judgement, so it misses things. Ask us and we'll take one off. Ground you send in is read by a person first, and its name and note are held to the same line.
No selling fitness, no unwarned injury, no paid automation, no dice on anything that matters.
It won't sell you fitness, time or recovery. It won't hurt your runner without warning you first. It won't charge you for automation. It won't decide anything important with a dice roll. And it won't take a piece of ground, a mark or a placing off you except to somebody who was actually faster, or to a season ending on a date you could see coming.
No, and it's not pretending to be. One region, real races on a real calendar, mountain routes in the Tararuas, a board of ground anybody can add to, and two of us building it in the evenings. Things will move under you and something will break, and that'll be our doing rather than yours. Tell us and we'll go and have a look.