DNF or DNS: how to mark it and what happens

What Grepiac tracks

Every Race has a race_status field. After the race, it gets one of these values:

• Completed: finished the race.
• DNF Swim: did not finish, abandoned during the swim.
• DNF Bike: did not finish, abandoned during the bike.
• DNF Run: did not finish, abandoned during the run.
• DNS: did not start (registered but did not show up).
• DQ: disqualified.

• NC (Not Classified): started and may have finished, but the organiser did not assign an official result — e.g. a missed cut-off, a course cut short on the day, or a timing/eligibility issue. Use NC when "DNF" would be wrong (the athlete kept going) but there is no official classification to record.

• cancelled: the race did not happen at all — the organiser called it off. Distinct from DNS, where the race ran and the athlete did not start it.

When you can set each. completed, the DNFs, dq and nc are results: they only make sense once the race has been run, and the model rejects them on a future-dated race. cancelled and dns are the exceptions — both are known before race day, so both can be set ahead of the date. That is the whole point of them: until you can say "this one is off", the plan keeps tapering an athlete toward a day they are not racing.

Setting either one takes the race out of every forward-looking surface (upcoming lists, the coach race digest, the athlete's weather brief, the ATP builder's A-race picker, and TrainFed's deficit protection) while keeping it in the athlete's race history, labelled with its status.

How to mark a DNF

1. Open the race detail page after the race date.
2. Edit the race.
3. Set race_status to the appropriate value (dnf_swim, dnf_bike, dnf_run).
4. Save.

How to mark NC

Same flow, set status to nc. NC keeps the race in the athlete's history (and in field-comparison reports) without claiming a finish the organiser never recorded. A real example: a result officially changed from DNF to NC after the fact — set it to nc so the record matches the federation's.

How to mark a DNS

Same flow, set status to dns. Use DNS when the athlete registered but did not start: travel disruption, illness discovered race morning, schedule change. DNS is not a failure to log; it is a real outcome the macrocycle planner should know about so it stops anchoring the season to a race that did not happen.

What still gets logged

After a DNF or DNS:

• The race record stays. It is not deleted.
• The race recap form remains available; the athlete can still file a recap describing what happened and why. See Filing a race recap.
• Any race FIT file that was captured is still uploadable as an Activity (e.g. the swim and bike portions of a run-DNF race are valuable training data).
• The race recap "what went wrong" section is the place to capture the cause.

What does NOT happen automatically

• Grepiac does not auto-cascade a DNF into a macrocycle re-plan. You decide whether to push subsequent A races back, change priorities, or hold the plan steady.
• Grepiac does not auto-notify anyone. If the athlete wants the coach to see the recap urgently, they message separately.

Race week DNF risk markers

Common patterns that predict DNF risk:

• Heat over 30C for a 70.3 or 140.6 in an athlete who has not acclimated.
• Cumulative fatigue spike in wellness during taper week (see Logging daily wellness).
• Sub-30 percent confidence in the readiness checklist.

Grepiac does not auto-stop the race; the call belongs to the athlete and coach.

After a DNF or DNS

Plan the recovery the same way:

• 3 to 5 days easy regardless of the cause.
• Wellness logging back on if it lapsed in race week.
• Recap filed.
• Coach debrief on cause and adjustments for the next race.

See also: Filing a race recap, Race readiness checklist, Race planning workflow.