Ride Along

Riding a route solo is great, but it's more motivating when you have someone to chase. Ride Along lets you race against another rider's recorded performance — or your own previous attempt — while you ride any route in Ride Cave. You see their position on the elevation chart, track the gap in real time, and know exactly how you stack up by the finish.

Pick a Companion

Open any route and you'll see two tabs: Leaderboard and Your Attempts. The leaderboard shows ranked riders who have completed the route, with their best time and avatar. Your Attempts shows your own past completions. Tap the ride-along button next to any entry to select that performance as your companion.

Once selected, a banner appears on the route modal showing who you're about to race against and their completion time. Hit start and the ride begins with your companion's pace data loaded alongside you.

Live Gap Tracking

During the ride, a gap metric shows how far ahead or behind your companion you are. The display updates every tick and shows the distance gap in meters along with whether you're ahead or behind. Green means you're leading. Red means you're chasing.

The companion's position also appears on the elevation chart as a dashed vertical line with their avatar pinned to it. As you both progress through the route, you can see the gap open or close on the profile. It's an intuitive way to feel the race without needing a full 3D world.

Race Yourself

The Your Attempts tab shows every past completion of the route that has recorded pace data. Select any previous ride as your companion and race against your own history. This is useful for tracking improvement on a route you ride regularly — you can see exactly where you gained or lost time compared to last week.

How It Works Under the Hood

When you select a companion, Ride Cave fetches their pace data: a lightweight series of time and distance samples recorded during their ride. During your ride, the companion tracker interpolates their position at each moment, calculating where they would be on the route given the elapsed time. The result is a smooth, accurate representation of their ride playing back alongside yours.

If you start partway through a route using the trim handles, the companion's timeline adjusts to match your starting position. And if you pause and resume a ride, the companion data reloads automatically so tracking picks up right where you left off.

Privacy

Ride-along data is only available from riders who appear on route leaderboards. Pace data is never shared for riders who are not on the leaderboard. Your own attempts are always visible to you regardless.

Getting Started

Open any route in the Routes tab, pick a companion from the leaderboard or your own past attempts, and start the ride. Your companion's position tracks alongside you on the elevation chart with a live gap readout. See if you can close the gap.