Six weeks out: confirm the route and the start
The first thing to lock down isn't a tracking platform — it's the GPX file. Live tracking is only as good as the route data you give it: the platform needs to know where the road is supposed to go so it can detect off-route riders, calculate route progress, position the finish-line geofence, and snap GPS pings to the line for clean polylines.
- Pin the final route at least four weeks before race day. Late route changes break rider device pre-downloads.
- Export a clean GPX from RideWithGPS, Komoot, or Strava — single track, no detours or scribbles.
- Confirm the start-line latitude/longitude (you'll use this for offline-start support) and the finish-line latitude/longitude + radius (typically 50 metres).
- Sanity-check cellular coverage along the route — a quick way is to look at a heat-map from your network provider, or pre-ride with a phone and note dead zones.
If the route has long dead-zone sections (more than 30 minutes of riding between cell coverage), brief riders in advance that their live position will pause during those sections and backfill on the other side. This pre-empts the inevitable "my friend's dot isn't moving" panic messages.
Four weeks out: create the event in the platform
Set up the event in whatever tracking platform you've chosen. On Aster the process takes about 15 minutes:
- Sign in as an organiser, create the event.
- Upload the GPX file. The platform will derive the route polyline, elevation profile, and bounding box automatically.
- Confirm the finish-line geofence — usually the platform suggests a 50 m radius at the GPX end point; widen if your finish line is a long arch.
- Set the off-route alert threshold — 100 m default works for road and gravel; widen to 200 m for technical mountain bike courses where riders may legitimately deviate.
- Set categories (Pro Men, Pro Women, Open, Masters) if you're running a categorised race.
- If the race has a hard cutoff, set the cutoff time and decide whether late riders are DNF or marked finished.
Three weeks out: rider communications
This is where most first-time tracked events stumble. Riders need to install the tracking app, sign in, and register for the event — and they need to do it before they get to the start line, ideally before they leave home. Last-minute install in the start village at 6 am while the wifi struggles is a recipe for missed riders.
What to send riders three weeks out:
- A short email (200 words max) explaining: that the race is live-tracked, the app to install, the link to register for this specific event, and a one-line note that "if you can't get signal at the start line, the app will still work — just hit Start and your ride will sync when you find signal".
- A QR code in the same email pointing to the event-registration deep link, so riders on a phone can scan rather than copy-paste.
- A one-line technical note that the app uses background GPS and they should keep the app installed and signed in through race day. They do not need to keep the app open.
Send a reminder email five days out, with the same QR code. Some riders will only act on the second email.
One week out: watcher-link communications
The watcher-link push is separate from the rider-app push and lands a different audience: friends, family, sponsors, partners, the cycling media. It's also the single highest-leverage thing you can do for the event's public profile — every share of a working watcher link generates dot-watching traffic, which is some of the most engaged audience time the cycling internet has.
What to push:
- A short post on your event's Instagram + Facebook + Twitter the week before, with the watch-link URL. Use a phrase that signals what the link is — "Follow the race live on race day" beats "live tracking link" for click-through.
- An email to your race's full mailing list (including past entrants, sponsors, suppliers) with the same link.
- If you have brand partners, send them the watch link with a note that they're welcome to repost — most brands will, because it's interesting content their audience hasn't seen from them.
- Brief your race-day media team (photographers, videographers, social) that the watch link exists — they'll often share it in real time during the race as part of the rolling coverage.
Race day morning: dry-run + final checks
About 90 minutes before the start, do a single end-to-end test. Open the organiser dashboard on a laptop, open the watch link on a phone, and have one staff member start tracking on their phone (as a registered test participant if your platform supports it, or just as a free-ride session if it doesn't).
Confirm that:
- The test rider appears on the dashboard with a recent ping.
- The watch link shows the test rider on the map.
- The leaderboard updates as the test rider moves.
- You can send a test SOS from the rider phone and see it on the organiser dashboard within 10 seconds.
If any of those four checks fails, you have time to escalate to the platform's support channel before riders start dropping in. If they all pass, you're ready.
During the race: who watches what
The organiser dashboard is the safety surface. Someone — race director, safety officer, or a dedicated dashboard watcher — should have the dashboard open with sound on for the entire race. SOS alerts and off-route alerts are the highest-priority signal; everything else is informational.
The watch link is the audience surface. It runs itself; you don't need to touch it. The only thing the organiser team needs to do during the race for the audience side is post the occasional update to the event feed ("Lead group through CP2, 35 km to go, gap is 4 minutes") — those feed posts show up to every watcher and turn the watch-link audience from passive dot-watchers into engaged readers.
After the race: the long tail
Live tracking generates a permanent record. Every rider has a polyline of their ride, a finish time, a moving time, an elevation profile, lap splits — the kind of post-race detail riders previously only got from their Garmin head unit.
The half-day after a race is when the audience is hottest: friends are still talking about it, sponsors are still pushing content, riders are still riding the post-finish high. Push the recap post within 24 hours — link the watch page, embed a rider quote or two, tag the brand partners. The same watch link that was live on race day becomes the durable destination for the event for the rest of the year.