Why rucking needed its own platform

The gap

Running has had its platforms for fifteen years. Rucking has had forum threads. The tools that exist each hold one fragment — an app here, a monthly challenge there, a calculator somewhere else — and none of them join up. Strava has publicly declined to add rucking as an activity type. Garmin went the other way and shipped a native Rucking profile with a pack-weight field, which told us the demand was real and the record-keeping layer was simply missing.

haultrek is that layer: accounts, a log, crews, leaderboards and know-how, in one place.

The haul

Distance alone undersells a heavy walk. Weight alone ignores the ground you covered. So we measure in kg·km: pack weight multiplied by distance. Carry 16 kg over 10 km and you bank 160 kg·km. It is a unit, not a score — it works the same for everybody, and it makes a short walk under a heavy pack comparable with a long one under a light pack for the first time.

Imperial users see the same number as lb·mi. Everything is stored metric and converted on display, so a leaderboard never compares two different units by accident.

Honesty over volume

A logbook is only worth keeping if the numbers in it mean something. Three rules follow from that, and they are built into the database rather than into our good intentions:

• Device-verified and hand-entered are marked differently, everywhere. Typed-in rucks count — rucking is unusually friendly to manual entry — but they are never passed off as device records.
• Strava-imported walks are yours alone. Strava’s API terms permit showing their data only to the person it belongs to, so those activities power your private stats and never appear on a public board.
• Boards split by weight class, bodyweight and age. Absolute haul rewards being big. A 60 kg walker under 20% of bodyweight is working at least as hard as a 100 kg walker under the same absolute load, and the boards can say so.

What we are not

We are not a GPS recorder. Browsers suspend location access when the screen locks, so “press record and pocket the phone” is native-app territory and we would do it badly. Instead, activities arrive from a Garmin sync, a FIT or GPX upload, or by being typed in — and haultrek is where they become a record worth keeping.

Who is behind it

haultrek is built and run from Warsaw, Poland, by people who ruck. It is independent and self-funded — no investors, no advertising on your logbook.

The platform is English-language and worldwide from day one. What makes it usable everywhere is the unit toggle, not translations: a young community cannot afford to split its leaderboards across language silos before there are enough people on them.

Questions, bugs and event listings all go to admin@haultrek.com.