Brevets is an app for your iPhone that will help to prevent you from adding “bonus miles” to your riding distance during a brevet. It will alert you whenever you need to take some action.
If all you want is an app to keep track of how far you have ridden, don’t buy this app. If you want an app to show a picture of your ride to post on the internet, don’t buy this app. This app is for riders who like to explore and push themselves into unknown areas on courses created by other cyclists.
Brevets is a very simple app. It notifies you when you reach a checkpoint. A checkpoint is any location that requires you to take an action during a ride. It may be a turn or a control. Sometimes, it may alert you to an attraction or a change in the name of a road. Individual courses may be set up and saved for others to use.
Brevets can be purchased in the App Store for $5.99. If you have Brevets on your iPhone and you show it to the RBA when you sign up for a brevet in the St. Louis region, you will receive a $5.00 one time credit towards the registration fee for the brevet for that date. This offer only applies for the St. Louis region and can be only used once per rider.
In 2009, I rode the Last Chance 1200k. My goal was to complete the course in less than 75 hours. This goal seemed to be within my reach when I reached the checkpoint at the 650 mile mark in 62 hours. 13 hours for a century – that should be a piece of cake. Unless I get lost.
Well, with less than 5 hours of sleep in three days, my navigational skills were less than astute. Luckily, I met another rider and we rode together for the last 75 miles and I completed the course in 72 hours.
I had driven the course before the ride and I thought I was prepared to navigate the final 100 miles of the ride. I had not anticipated that the course would look very different at night and that my mind would be foggy.
And the concept for Brevets was born. A very simple app with only one purpose: To keep you on course during long brevets. Think of it as an electronic cue sheet. The app had to be very efficient so that the iPhone battery would not be depleted rapidly by its use. In testing with an iPhone 7, Brevets lasted approximately 200k when used in background mode. Testing with an iPhone X produced even better results.
Courses can be created by the user, or predetermined courses can be downloaded from iCloud. I have been testing this app on the brevets in our region and it has been reliable and accurate.
You can access the app by clicking here: Brevets
I am in the process of writing a “Getting Started” guide. The work in process can be found here:
Official Site of the St. Louis Randonneurs 