Race-day tools for Backyard Ultra runners.

The clock is set once. Everything else follows.

Before the race starts, you enter one thing on the phone: your scheduled start time.

That's the entire setup. BackyardPace derives every countdown, lap start time, and recovery window from that single value. There's no ongoing configuration. No manual lap restarts. No timer you can accidentally pause.

The schedule is sent to your watch. Once that's done, the phone can go in a bag.

The watch runs the race. The phone assists.

Most running apps treat the Apple Watch as a companion to a phone. BackyardPace inverts this. The watch is the race engine. The phone is for setup, crew tent dashboard, and post-race review.

This matters because phones get left in tents, run out of battery, and drop connectivity. BackyardPace keeps the race running on the watch regardless of what happens to the phone.

Your crew can use the phone dashboard to track each lap, view lap time trends, and see how much buffer the runner has before the cut-off. Real data, at the tent, when it matters most.

What matters at yard 2 is rarely what matters at yard 20.

The two tiles on the watch race screen are yours to set. Choose from heart rate, estimated distance remaining, average yard pace, or estimated rest.

Change them mid-race straight from your wrist. Tap a tile, pick a metric, and you are back on the race screen before the next bend. Your phone can stay in the tent.

Estimated rest is the one to watch late on. It projects how long you will have off your feet before the next yard starts, based on how this yard is actually going. If you are running behind, it tells you by how much, so you know whether to lift the pace or start thinking about the yard after this one.

Ahead or behind, without reading a number.

At 3am you should not be doing sums. The band around the race screen fills with how far round the loop you are. A red mark shows where the clock is. Band past the mark and you are banking rest for the corral. Behind it and you are spending it.

The band follows the same colours as your yard time. Amber from 50 minutes, red from 55. If GPS drops out, the band falls back to the clock on its own and the mark steps aside, so it never shows you a number it cannot back up.

Every lap, tracked.

The watch displays the current lap time, elapsed time since the loop started, and time remaining in the current lap window. Simple. Always accurate. Always derived from the scheduled start, not a running timer.

When you finish a lap, tap Lap complete. BackyardPace records the time and transitions immediately to recovery mode.

Counted down, out loud.

The moment you tap Lap complete, recovery starts counting down to the next bell. Under it sits the yard you just ran, time and pace, so you can decide how to run the next one.

You do not need to look. The watch buzzes and says the time at three minutes, two and one, then again as the next yard starts. The screen floods orange, then red, as the start gets close.

The phone at base, useful without picking it up.

Your iPhone lock screen shows the race while it runs. During a yard it counts up, the same as your watch. During recovery it counts down to the next start. It ticks on its own, so it costs almost nothing in battery over thirty hours.

Built for the tent table. Your watch goes to the crew for a charge and the clock is still there.

See what your body is doing.

Heart rate is tracked continuously during every lap and displayed on the watch face. As the hours and laps stack up, understanding your effort level becomes more important, not less.

Heart rate data is also saved as part of the workout record to Apple Health, giving you a full picture of the race afterwards.

Every lap, on the map.

GPS is recorded directly from the Apple Watch throughout the race. The route is stored and visible in Apple Maps after the event: a full trace of every loop you completed.

No phone needed for GPS. The watch handles it independently.

Your race, on record.

When you stop the race, the full workout is saved automatically to Apple Health and Apple Fitness. This includes GPS, heart rate, duration, laps and distance.

Your Backyard Ultra appears in Apple Fitness alongside every other workout in your history, properly recorded, not a workaround.

Your race on Strava, with every yard as a lap.

Connect your Strava account once, then upload straight from the race summary when you finish. BackyardPace builds a standard TCX file with GPS, heart rate, and each yard recorded as its own lap.

That lap structure is the whole point. A Backyard Ultra viewed as one continuous blob tells you nothing. Yard by yard tells you the story of your race: where you were comfortable, where it started slipping, and what you had left at the end.

You can also tap Share TCX to save the file and upload it yourself, which works whether or not you have connected Strava.

Every yard you have run, in one place.

Your personal best sits at the top. Under it: races, total yards, total distance, time on your feet, average pace and average heart rate. Pace is total distance over total moving time, so a two-yard race does not count the same as a twenty.

Kilometres or miles. Your call.

BackyardPace lets you choose your preferred unit of measurement. Switch between kilometres and miles and every distance reading across the app and watch updates automatically.

Whether your race uses km markers or mile markers, BackyardPace speaks your language, and syncs the setting across phone and watch so there's no mismatch mid-race.

Are you gaining or losing time? Now you can see it.

BackyardPace works out your pace for the yard you are running and what it means for the cutoff. Two places show it. The pace ring puts it round the edge of the screen. The Est rest tile turns it into minutes: how long you will have off your feet if you hold this pace, or by how much you will miss if you do not.

Run a Garmin? Race with BackyardPace on your phone.

Every feature, lap timing, recovery countdowns, GPS tracking, heart rate and Strava upload, works on any Apple Watch running watchOS 10.6 or later.

A native Garmin version is the most-requested addition and is actively being scoped. A lot of Backyard runners race on Garmin, the Fenix series in particular, and the format demands exactly the same thing from a Garmin watch as it does from an Apple Watch.

If you run on Garmin, COROS, Suunto or another watch, you can use BackyardPace today. iPhone mode runs the entire race from your phone at base while your watch records the run. BackyardPace does not connect to or control your watch. The two simply run alongside each other: your watch records the run, BackyardPace runs the race.