Race At Your Pace

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 built as 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 less glamorous half of the work matters just as much. Corporate challenges brought group management, team targets and invoicing. Merchandise brought stock, dispatch and the realities of physical fulfilment at volume. And underneath it all sits AWS infrastructure with automated deployment — built to be run by a very small team, because it is.

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.