How to time your first race with just a phone

Most organisers who reach for a phone instead of a stopwatch are solving the same problem: the race is coming up, there's no budget for a professional timing company, and a spreadsheet with stopwatch times sooner or later costs someone their result. The good news is that setting up your own timing for a single race takes less time than it seems.

The first step is creating the event — name, date, location, and above all the start type. If participants set off one by one (e.g. a time trial), choose individual start. If everyone sets off together, choose mass start. If you have categories starting at different times (e.g. kids first, then adults), choose start by waves. This choice determines how each participant's final time gets calculated later, so it's worth thinking through in advance — though you can still change it later in settings.

Next you add participants — either by hand in the app, or by letting registration run through the event's public page, where they sign themselves up. Everyone gets a bib number. If you plan to record passings by manual tap or QR code, there's nothing else to set up. With NFC chips or an RFID reader, you assign a specific chip to a specific participant in advance, ideally when they collect their bib.

On race day, you pick the checkpoint (finish, or a split) and the app is ready to record. In manual and QR mode, you just tap the name or scan the code as the participant passes. The app also works without internet — records are stored on the phone and sent once the signal comes back, so a dropped connection mid-race doesn't mean lost data.

The app recalculates results according to the chosen start type live, during the race itself — you're not waiting for a cutoff. Spectators and participants follow along on the event's public page from their phone, no account needed, and once the race is over you mark the results final with one tap. You can add a live YouTube or Facebook stream to that same page, so viewers see the course and the live times in one place.