Race-day tools for Backyard Ultra runners.

The clock is set once. Everything else follows.

Before the race starts, you enter two things on the phone: your scheduled start time, and your lap duration (typically 60 minutes for a standard Backyard Ultra).

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

The schedule is sent to your Apple 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, 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.

Every lap, tracked.

The watch displays the current lap time, elapsed time since the hour 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 Done. BackyardPace records the time and transitions immediately to recovery mode.

Know exactly how much time you have.

Finishing a lap and not knowing how long you have to recover is one of the small anxieties that adds up over a long race. BackyardPace removes it entirely.

As soon as you tap Lap Done, the watch shows your remaining recovery window — the exact number of minutes and seconds until the next lap begins. Eat, rest, sort your kit, and watch the number count down.

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.

Direct to Strava. No workarounds.

Getting a Backyard Ultra workout from Apple Watch to Strava used to require a third-party app. BackyardPace removes that dependency entirely — OAuth connection, TCX generation, and a single upload button.

Your race on Strava, properly formatted with GPS, HR and laps. No HealthFit. No RunGap. No parallel recording.

Are you gaining or losing time?

BackyardPace has a pacing engine that tracks your lap times and calculates your average pace across completed laps. The goal is to show you simply and clearly whether your current lap is ahead of, behind, or on pace with your recent average.

In the later hours of a Backyard Ultra, this becomes critical information. The pacing engine is built. Wiring it into the race screen is next.