How adaptive targets and the ghost work

Your adaptive targets

A rally has one fixed overall goal: the full distance of the route. Your daily target is not a fixed number. It is worked out fresh each day so the goal stays in reach however your week goes. There are really two targets, and it is worth knowing both.

The rally target: smooth and forgiving

The first target simply spreads the whole rally across the time you have left:

Rally target = distance remaining ÷ days remaining in the rally

Because it divides by every day left, it moves gently. Have a quiet day and tomorrow's number ticks up a little; get ahead and it eases off. This is what lets you recover from a missed day without the finish line ever moving.

Worked example. A 100 km rally over 10 days starts at 10 km a day. Miss day one and 100 km is left over 9 days, so the target becomes about 11.1 km. Do a big 25 km on day two and 75 km is left over 8 days, so it drops to about 9.4 km. The finish line never moved.

The weekly target: tighter, and swings harder

Route Rally also sets a goal for the current week, and it is fixed the moment the week opens: the rally target on the week's first day, multiplied by the number of days that week holds. That goal then stays where it is until the next week begins, so the weekly total on the gauge does not move underneath you mid-week.

What does move is your daily target inside the week: whatever is left of the week's goal, divided by the days left in the week. Because a week is short, that number swings far more sharply than the rally target. Miss a day early in the week and the few days left have to absorb the shortfall, so the daily figure can jump; a new week then sets a fresh goal and hands you a clean slate. The weekly pair keeps you honest day to day, while the rally target keeps the whole thing achievable.

Two ways to see them

The same two targets appear in two places: a pair of gauges that show where you stand today and this week, and a timeline that plots them across the whole rally. They are the same numbers, shown differently.

Today and this week: the gauges. The widget shows two ring gauges, one for each target: a Rally pace gauge for the smooth rally target and a Week pace gauge for the tighter weekly one. Each ring is coloured to match its line on the timeline below, so you can read the two together. You read each ring the same way:

• The coloured arc is how far you have come towards that target. Rally pace is indigo, Week pace is teal, the same colours as the two lines on the chart.
• The faint track behind the arc is the distance still left to that target.
• The green tick on the Week pace ring marks where you should be today. Fall behind it and an amber arc fills the gap, so you can see how far back you are.

The number in the middle of each ring is the percentage of that gauge's target you have completed, and the chip beside the ring says the same thing as a distance: how far you still have to go, or how far behind today you are.

Tapping a gauge opens its pace detail sheet, which lists the exact numbers behind that ring: today's target, what you have covered, what is left, and how the same target moves for tomorrow, with the Week pace sheet adding next week's goal. Each change is a signed distance with an arrow beside it, pointing up for a target that rose and down for one that fell.

One detail catches people out. The colour of a target-change figure in the pace detail sheet follows your effort, not the size of the target. A daily or weekly target that went up shows red, because a higher target means you slipped a little behind. A target that came down shows green, because you got ahead. Red on the target-change figure never means "your target is high"; it means "you have some catching up to do".

Over time: the timeline. The timeline shows everything at once. The bars are the distance you logged each day, the solid line is your current weekly target, and the dashed line is the smoother rally target. Each logged day is tagged Rally and Week depending on which targets it met.

Are you ahead or behind? Meet the ghost

The ghost is a steady pacer. It shows where you would be right now if you had covered the same distance every single day from the start, with no quiet days and no big pushes. It is the straight, even line through the rally.

Comparing your real distance with the ghost is how Route Rally decides whether you are ahead or behind. The gap is simply your distance minus the ghost's distance.

• Ahead: you are in front of the ghost.
• On track: exactly level with the ghost.
• Behind: the ghost is in front of you.

The comparison is exact rather than approximate: on track means your total and the ghost's are the same to the metre, which is a moment you pass through rather than a state you sit in. In practice you will read as a little ahead or a little behind almost all the time, and the size of the gap matters far more than which side of the line it falls.

Reading the progress chart

The progress chart plots two lines over the rally. Your line is your cumulative distance, with a point on each day you logged an activity. The ghost line is that steady pacer, running straight from start to finish.

• The shaded area between the lines is green when you are ahead of the ghost and red when you are behind.
• A marker shows today, so you can see your position at a glance.
• Distances use your preferred units; everything is stored in metres and converted for display.

Common questions

Why did my daily target go up?

Because you covered less than the target on an earlier day, so the shortfall carried over. Your rally target is the distance you still have left divided by the days you still have left, and it is worked out fresh every day. Cover less than it asks and the remaining distance stays large while the days remaining drop by one, so the next day's number has to rise. The effect is small and self-correcting rather than punitive: on a 100 km rally over ten days, missing the first day entirely moves the target from 10 km to about 11.1 km, not to 20 km, and one big day pulls it straight back down. The overall goal, the full distance of the route, never changes whichever way the daily number moves.

Why does my weekly target swing more than the rally one?

Because of what each one divides by, and how many days it has to divide across. The rally target divides the distance you have left by every day left in the rally, so a shortfall is spread thinly across dozens of days and barely registers. The week works differently in two steps: its goal is set when the week opens and does not move again until the next one, and the figure you watch day to day is whatever is left of that goal divided by the days left in the week, of which there are at most seven. Miss a Monday and the shortfall has six days to hide in rather than sixty, so the daily figure inside the week can jump sharply while the rally number moves by a few hundred metres. A new week then sets a fresh goal and hands you a clean slate. Between them, the weekly pair keeps you honest day to day and the rally target keeps the whole thing achievable.

What does the ghost actually represent?

A perfectly even pace, and nothing else. The ghost shows where you would be if you had covered exactly the same distance every single day from the start of the rally, with no quiet days and no big pushes. It is not another rider, not the leader of your rally and not an average of other people: it is a straight line drawn through your own rally from its start to its finish. Route Rally compares your real cumulative distance against the ghost's to decide whether you are ahead, on track or behind, and the gap it reports is simply your distance minus the ghost's. On the progress chart the ghost is the straight line running start to finish, with your own line wandering above or below it.

What does "on track" mean?

That your total distance and the ghost's are exactly level. There is no tolerance band around it: Route Rally compares the two figures and calls you ahead if yours is larger, behind if it is smaller, and on track only when they match. That makes on track a moment you pass through rather than a state you settle into, because your distance arrives in whole rides and runs while the ghost creeps forward a little every day. Reading as slightly ahead or slightly behind is the normal case and not something to correct; what is worth watching is how big the gap is and which way it has been moving.

Do rest days hurt my rally?

No. A quiet day nudges the following targets up a touch and nothing more. Because the rally target is the distance you have left divided by the days you have left, a day off spreads its shortfall across every remaining day rather than landing all at once, so tomorrow's number rises by a small amount rather than doubling. The overall goal never changes: the finish line stays at the full distance of the route whatever your week looked like. What does cost you is a long run of quiet days near the end, when there are fewer days left to spread the remainder across. Rest as you need to early on, because the arithmetic is built to absorb it.

Why is a higher target shown in red?

Because the colour reports your progress, not the size of the number. Route Rally colours the target-change figure by what caused the change: a target that rose means you covered less than it asked and slipped behind, so it shows red, and a target that fell means you got ahead, so it shows green. Colouring it the other way round would mislead, because a big target is not in itself bad news and a small one is not in itself good news. Read red on that figure as "you have some catching up to do", and green as "you have banked a little".