The one principle
The mountains are public. The hands are hidden. Every team optimises the same known puzzle, four fixed mountains announced at launch, by making secret, simultaneous choices about who runs where. Close racing does not come from hiding the terrain. It comes from revealing the terrain and hiding the line-ups.
What is public at launch
- The full calendar. All four rounds, venues, dates and terrain character, published up front so captains can plan the season.
- The routes. GPX for each round. This is a self-supported series, so route knowledge is a safety requirement, not a secret.
- The invited teams. The twenty team names and their four rosters.
What stays hidden until the reveal
Who each team fields for a given round. This is the only secret in the series, and it is the engine of the whole thing.
The weekly rhythm
- Wednesday 18:00, declarations close. Each captain privately tells the organiser which one of their four runs this round. No declaration, no start, no points.
- Thursday morning, the grid drops. The full round line-up is published at once. Every team has already committed blind.
- Sunday, the round runs. Self-supported, own crew, own risk. Positions are scored that evening and the standings update.
Why this brings the competition close
Send your strongest runner now and you might waste them on the wrong mountain. Hold them for terrain that suits them and you might fall behind while you wait. Because declarations are simultaneous and blind, you are never simply reacting to what others did. You are reading the season.
Two structural rules sharpen it further. Each runner races exactly once across the four rounds, so by Round 3 the endgame partly plays itself. And only the top ten score, with a DNF worth zero, so a bold gamble on the wrong round is punished immediately, while a patient team that reads the terrain right can climb from behind.
The runners-remaining tracker
As the season runs, the organiser keeps a public tracker of which runners each team has already used. It reveals nobody’s next pick, but it lets everyone read the closing rounds. Scarcity, in the open, is part of the show.