# Race At Your Pace

> Building and running a virtual-events platform, with one GraphQL API behind the website, the mobile app and the fulfilment operation.

- Role: CTO
- Sector: Sports & events
- Period: 2022 – present
- Engagement: Fractional, ongoing
- Worked with: GraphQL

Race At Your Pace runs virtual challenges. Pick a distance, complete it in your own time, wherever you are, and a medal arrives in the post. No start line, no race day, which means the product is the platform. Every entry, every mile logged, every payment and every parcel goes through software.

The remit was to own that software end to end. Not a website with a shop bolted on, but the operating system for the whole business: entries and payments, participants tracking progress against targets, corporate groups running challenges for their teams, and the merchandise, fulfilment and dispatch pipeline that turns a finished challenge into a medal in an envelope.

## What the work involved

The platform is one backend that runs the business, with everything exposed through a single GraphQL API. The public website and the mobile app are both consumers of that same interface: one source of truth for entries, progress, groups and orders, presented two ways.

That shape was a deliberate choice. Virtual events live and die on the moments around them. Signing up, logging miles, watching the progress bar move, the medal arriving. Keeping all of the logic in one place means the app and the website can never disagree about how far you've run, and new features land in both at once.

The unglamorous half matters just as much. Corporate work introduced group management, team targets and invoicing. Selling merchandise meant holding stock, shipping it, and running the logistics of posting thousands of medals a month, each one to a person who has earned it and will notice if it doesn't arrive. An AWS estate with automated deployment carries all of it, and we built the thing to be run by a very small team, which is how it is run today.

> A virtual race has no venue and no race day. The platform isn't supporting the event. It is the event.

## Where it stands

The platform has run the business since 2022 and keeps growing with it: thousands of participants a month, corporate programmes alongside the consumer challenges, and a mobile app and website served by the same API. The engagement continues as fractional CTO, steering the roadmap, shipping features, and keeping the infrastructure boring in the best possible way.

## Focus areas

- E-commerce & payments
- GraphQL API design
- Mobile app (iOS & Android)
- Corporate groups & challenges
- Merchandise & fulfilment
- AWS infrastructure & CI/CD

Canonical page: https://blizzard.consulting/work/race-at-your-pace/