A position and an altitude, nothing else
That is all a race track records: no cadence, no heart rate. hikeflystats reads it second by second into hiking, flying, lifts and stops, and sets the result beside the official ranking.
What this is
A personal side project by Simon Steiner, who raced the first event it covers. It is not affiliated with the organisers or with burnair, and everything derived from the tracks is unofficial; points, ranks and goal times are the published ones.
What only one event can say (its format, the rules its tracks are read with, where its results come from, its 3D replays) is on that event's overview page, and every stats page defines its metrics underneath. This page holds what is true of them all.
- Red Bull X-Alps 2007Dachstein to Monaco, Alps, 23 athletes
- Red Bull X-Alps 2009Salzburg to Monaco, Alps, 30 athletes
- Red Bull X-Alps 2013Salzburg to Monaco, Alps, 31 athletes
- Red Bull X-Alps 2015Salzburg to Monaco, Alps, 32 athletes
- Red Bull X-Alps 2017Salzburg to Monaco, Alps, 31 athletes
- Red Bull X-Alps 2025Kitzbühel to Zell am See, Alps, 33 athletes
- Trail & Fly 2026Lenk / Adelboden, Switzerland, 73 athletes
Five activities
Every second of a track gets one label. Each leaves its own shape on the altitude line, drawn here in the colour it has across the site.
- Hiking
- Movement on foot, including the steep climbs where GPS speed drops to a crawl.
- Transition
- Near-stationary packing, unpacking and laying out the wing: up to 30 minutes next to a flight.
- Rest
- Every other stop: a break on the way, or a long wait at a launch beyond those 30 minutes.
- Lift
- Sustained ascent too fast to be on foot. Part of a category that allows lifts; a warning in one that does not.
Reading a track
A track runs through the same steps in the same order, whichever race it comes from. Each strip below is one day after one of them.
The track
A day of the Fun category at Trail & Fly 2026, where lifts were allowed, one fix a second as burnair published it. 3 fixes (red) sit 40 to 100 m above the ones beside them.
Cleaned
Those are dropped, runs of them too: a second device whose fixes take turns with the athlete's. Stretches without a fix of up to 10 minutes are filled at one fix a second along a straight line, so a glide a power-saving tracker recorded in a handful of fixes still reads as a glide. This track had none worth filling.
The race and the ground
burnair clips each track to the race. The athlete came to rest at 14:11, so the last 2 h 49 are cut.
Read
5 lift rides and the flights down from them, in a category with lifts allowed, and one hop.
The day
Time per activity inside the day: what every page starts from.
- Hiking 1 h 16
- Lift 1 h 20
- Transition 25 min
- in all 4 h 41
Every second
Speed, climb and height above the ground label each second. Anything more than 150 m above the ground for half a minute is airborne, so a wing thermalling into a strong headwind, slower than a hike for minutes, stays a flight. Lifts ride within about 25 m of the ground and GPS altitude can be off by 120 m on steep slopes, so the bar sits well clear of both.
Below, the same day from 11:02 to 11:45: off a lift, two short flights with a stop between, the hike to the next lift, the ride up and the next launch. The reads flicker between hiking and standing; the passes make the stop between the flights a transition and the run to the launch part of the flight.
- Hiking
- Lift
- Transition
Then the passes over the segments. A flying stretch of at least 30 s that covers 200 m and peaks above 25 km/h stays its own segment, a hop, instead of melting into the hike around it. A landing that turns straight back into a launch is a touch & go, with a confidence level: on a track a ground contact is only a dip below flying speed, and a running touchdown looks much the same. A flight in the hours the rules forbid flying becomes ground, in a category without lifts a lift becomes the hike or flight around it, and a multi-day race's nights at a bivouac are cut out.
Points, ranks and goal times are never part of the reading: they come as burnair or the organiser published them.
How accurate it is
| Raw GPS altitude | 7 to 11 % high |
|---|---|
| As read here | within 1 % |
Everything outside the official results comes from consumer GPS, and altitude from GPS is noisier than a barometer. On foot it is taken as a median, then averaged over 90 s, after excursions of more than 50 m off the median (a tracker reading 250 m high for a minute) are removed. Treat the metre totals as indicative rather than exact.
The thresholds were calibrated against a Garmin FIT track, which does record speed and cadence, for both race days, and validated against it. Other tracks can still produce boundary cases, and outliers are worth a second look. Ground elevation is sampled every 5 s along the track; where no terrain is available the reading falls back to speed and altitude alone.
Where the data comes from
- Tracks and official results
- As each race published them, on burnair or the organiser's own site. Each event's overview page names its sources.
- Turnpoints and deadlines
- Each race's XCTrack task or route files.
- 3D replays
- This site's own, drawn with MapLibre GL JS and deck.gl over the terrain below; and Ogoy, from the same tracks with the pseudonyms of this site.
- Ground elevation and relief
- Mapterhorn, open terrain data stitched from each country's best model (attribution).In the Alps: swissALTI3D © swisstopo; ALS-DGM © BEV, Austria (CC-BY 4.0); DGM1 © Bayerische Vermessungsverwaltung (CC-BY 4.0); RGE ALTI and MNT LiDAR HD © IGN, France (Licence Ouverte 2.0); the regional terrain models of South Tyrol, Trentino, Lombardy, Piedmont and the Aosta Valley; Copernicus GLO-30 © DLR e.V. and Airbus Defence and Space beyond.
- Maps
- OpenStreetMap; the contour maps of OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA) and, for Swiss routes, swisstopo.
- Headline type
- Archivo by Omnibus-Type (SIL Open Font License 1.1).
- Country flags
- Twemoji (CC-BY 4.0), via the Twemoji Country Flags font of country-flag-emoji-polyfill.